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Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

zachholman.com

1–10 of 117 posts

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#3
post #2

Still, it would be nice to be able to create groups to watch and filter repositories and users on GitHub.

That's a good answer to Zach. I'm having problem of too much noise when I follow a lot of projects and people on GitHub.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#4
Or at least make it fun (game).

Or make it more valuable. If being on specific Twitter lists drove more followers or was perceived to be important then getting people to put you on specific lists would be important.

But it isn't. Now.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#5
Is organizing your bookshelf in iBooks shit work? After reading the article, I'm sure the author would classify it as such. But Apple is smart enough to figure this stuff out. In fact, they're experts at it. What's Apple's reasoning?

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#6
Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list.

I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#7
The problem is that, anecdotally, no one seems to use Lists

That anecdote is not really worth much. Especially because those lists are probably very important for those who do use them.

Most people won't care about filtering their social relationships, until they do care. At that point, you want them to have the option.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#8

Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list. I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#9
post #3
post #2

Still, it would be nice to be able to create groups to watch and filter repositories and users on GitHub.

That's a good answer to Zach. I'm having problem of too much noise when I follow a lot of projects and people on GitHub.

What are you trying to accomplish by following projects on github? Maybe they can make activity on projects more meaningful, like show you more activity if you're a committer or only big commits if the project is very active but you don't often click on activity items.

Re: Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

#10
He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work.

As I see it there are three modes of sharing:

The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes in public.

The second is where my post is pretty irrelevant to most of my friends, and is really only directed at a portion of them. So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up. On the other hand, I rarely care enough to only post to a group instead of public.

The third situation is the opposite of the second: there is a very specific group of people that I don't want to see what I'm about to post. Planning a surprise party or uploading party photos from the night before fall here. In that circumstance I only choose to post to a specific group of close friends. Again, something that Facebook can't deduce from my profile.

You can't get around #3 without doing shit work, except by not posting it to begin with. As a developer you can't avoid this: sometimes manual labor really is the only solution to a problem. Until we invent mind-reading, of course.

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