A taxonomy of unethical technology design patterns

That’s a tumblr thing. Or, in this case, a Medium.com thing. It can be turned off on Tumblr. Not sure about Medium since I haven’t made an account on it.

Welcome to the market world, where EVERYTHING is just applied marketing… :wink:

But yes, I often feel like I’m made to feel insecure as a parent (especially as a mother) in order for someone to sell me a book or get me to read articles, so that I can feel more “empowered” as a parent-consumer. The truth is, parenting is never easy, we all get things wrong and we all do things right, and at best, we are all just muddling through, just like our parents did and their parents did, etc.

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$ apropos vim evim(1) - easy Vim, edit a file with Vim and setup for modeless editing vim(1) - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor vimdiff(1) - edit two, three or four versions of a file with Vim and show differences vimtutor(1) - the Vim tutor

$ man vim

[code]VIM(1) VIM(1)

NAME
vim - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor

SYNOPSIS
vim [options] [file …]
vim [options] -
vim [options] -t tag
vim [options] -q [errorfile]

   ex
   view
   gvim gview evim eview
   rvim rview rgvim rgview

DESCRIPTION
---------------------------------->8 8<----------------------------------

[/code]

There’s a vim tutor? Up until I posted this I had no idea there was a vim tutor.

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Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

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I find myself not caring too much about not reciprocating on the social obligations, especially those on structured social media. I chalk it up to my Aspergerian traits. It’s rather freeing, to realize that an unsolicited offer to exchange I-don’t-know-what can be ignored.

I haven’t lost all my friends yet.

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vi (and its clones) are impenetrable, but not undocumented. There’s a big difference. :slight_smile:

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Yes, fuck LinkedIn with the fire of a thousand suns. I have an account on it mostly because it’s generally expected as a tech professional to have a presence there, but I hate it. So much.

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Reading this point …

“We are vulnerable to needing to reciprocate others’ gestures.”

A vulnerability is to commercial exploitation of our relationships. The freedom to associate and form relationships or not (“social reciprocity”) is otherwise a positive, isn’t it?

I have never found a good reason for it to exist, at least for me. I have an account that got me a total of one connection to an old friend. I would occasionally get an email telling me about a complete stranger who is not in a compatible field. Then I found how to disable those emails. Now it’s pleasantly invisible.

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I don’t even have a LinkedIn and they were still bothering me because people who had my email address(es) tried to add me. Going to the Unsubscribe page once per email address wasn’t sufficient because the first time around for each left some obscure checkmark checked which I hadn’t noticed.

It didn’t even take that many people trying to add me. If I didn’t do it exactly right the first time, I’d get a reminder email the next week and for however long I was too busy at that moment to deal with it.

They may have gotten better since then but I wouldn’t know because I did finally get the settings just right. In a just world, all that bothering and time spent would have to be mirrored to Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. Taken across all the people who were likely bothered, he should have some free time in roughly 100 years.

Now if only people would stop trying to add work distribution lists to LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have to care at all beyond the time I’ve already wasted. :laughing:

Summary: A thing I didn’t want at all cost me hours (and still costs me time today) because LinkedIn made it trivial to pester the hell out of me and then put the burden of stopping it on me.

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Depends. I already had the freedom to associate and form relationships before social media. There is a wide gap between the richness of an actual relationship versus the compulsions of “likes” and “hearts” on social media.

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Whether personal contact is better than digital contact is a different question than whether digital communication (e.g. exchanging photos of loved ones) should be used to sell ads.

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I must admit I don’t get the LinkedIn hate. The only botheration I ever get is the occasional email suggesting that I congratulate [former coworker] on a new position. Enough employers and clients and landlords use it as a sort of credit report – Does this guy have a verifiable work history? Do people say good things about him? – that it’s worthwhile to keep my résumé up to date there. I get far more hassle from Facebook, where I don’t even have a real account, and which if I did probably wouldn’t be of much use to me or anyone else.

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He controlled it to give his audience a better experience. Not himself.

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btw, I want a “Good Post” prize for this post.

Come on, “Good Post!” Come on, “Good Post!”

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Considering I don’t want it and don’t have it, every moment I spend dealing with it is a moment I’m not doing something more worthwhile. :laughing: That’s good enough reason even ignoring the total amount of time I’ve spent dealing with it. :sweat:

But Tristan Harris isn’t talking specifically about LinkedIn. :octopus: He’s talking about all technology which manipulates users into more engagement by using hard-to-ignore social cues and hooks. :fishing_pole_and_fish: He even gives email clients a hard time for not actively suggesting settings that would limit the frequency people check their email.

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Ooh! Ooh! Where’s “Buy our courseware today and save 97%!” ?

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Only 3?

I guess that’s what they muct mean by ‘intermittent reward’
:frowning:

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I hearted this post so that you will have to click through to see which of your posts in this topic got the “like” (assuming you have notifications enabled). :grinning:

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