What Vim lacks isn’t documentation, it’s discovery. Menu-driven interfaces make it very easy to browse around and discover new features. Command line interfaces (and related things like Vim) give you a whole lot of power once you’ve learned to use them, but learning to use them is like pounding your head against a wall. You can’t just explore; you have to conceive of a need, figure out how to phrase it in a search, and hunt it down (assuming it exists).
It doesn’t help that the official documentation for command-line programs is often extremely dense and incomprehensible.
Some very thoughtful conversations here in the comments section. The technology is getting extremely sophisticated. And I don’t think we have even scratched the surface yet. Zuckbook is going to have all your medical records at some point and also be the guys that you have insurance with. The kids that only know the digital age are going to be the guinea pigs for the new economy. Heck probably we all are even if we see it. Basically we are all Zucked.
On Saturday my wife was about to leave for an important meeting when she announced that the computer was updating itself to Windows 10. She had clicked “No” on a dialog box.
As far as I can make out the dialog box read something like “Ready to update to Windows 10. Do you wish to delay update until later.” The really big button read “No”. Which of course causes immediate update. Fortunately the update was successful; even so I am unsure whether W10 is compliant with the DPA, though I have turned off all the reporting I can.
I have been seeing this antipattern more and more with Amazon and Microsoft, where the option to do what they do not want is obfuscated. It works in the short term but may be storing up long term resentment. Or, in my wife’s case, extreme annoyance.
[edit - I now have the accurate story which is slightly different; closing the dialog box caused the update to start. Which is totally unethical. I would suggest that a suitable punishment would be for Microsoft’s phone division to collapse into a black hole, but they seem to have managed that without any external intervention.]
But here’s the icky part: The redesigned GWX pop-up now treats exiting the window as consent for the Windows 10 upgrade.
So after more than half a year of teaching people that the only way to say “no thanks” to Windows 10 is to exit the GWX application—and refusing to allow users to disable the pop-up in any obvious manner, so they had to press that X over and over again during those six months to the point that most people probably just click it without reading now—Microsoft just made it so that very behavior accepts the Windows 10 upgrade instead, rather than canceling it.
Cereal and toy sellers have certainly taken this approach- they’ve put themselves in competition with the parent with Nag Factor Marketing, as if their version of parenting is just as good as ours.
And when parents decide to up their game (preferably by adapting a market strategy sold to them in a bookstore) they’ve accepted the challenge, and accepted the choice to go head to head with their competitors.
Their anti-screen stuff can be a little draconian, but they’re tireless in reminding people that bombarding children with marketing isn’t the natural state of the world, it’s just the status quo.
All these are refinements on the attention tax we’ve accepted as a cost of watching television. It’s such an obvious business model we’ve mostly forgotten that there are other ways to pay for things.
Accepting short advertisments in the middle of our media stream is less simple for the digital glass teat, than it was for the analog glass teat, so the attention tax must by necessity metastasize into all these other perverse patterns.
The author seems to think that these various forms of attention tax can be mitigated by a thoughtful approach to service. I think he’s pretty deeply mistaken. The basic choice that needs to be reconsidered, is how to pay for all this stuff. BB has pointed this out before: if the user isn’t paying the bills, then they aren’t the actual customer.
Myself, I’m in favor of the electric co op model used to electrify rural areas. If I could share actual ownership of the grid with other users, we’d all have a say in what went onto the wire. Landlords don’t like this option, so it hasn’t been placed on the menu.
I’ve been a podcast listener for a while now, and the emergence of podcasts networks has been an interesting development to be able to witness from the early days. Maximum Fun is a “viewers like you” supported network that does pledge drives, though they also do midroll ads. Earwolf, on the other hand, has gone the other direction to some degree with their Howl app, putting their archives behind a paywall, using ad time to push people toward premium shows, and trying to push people to use their app, rather than itunes/podcatchers to listen. Though I love a lot of Earwolf podcasts, Maximum Fun leaves a better taste in my mouth, and frankly I’d be more likely to contribute.
I still don’t understand why a user-donation funded social network + unobtrusive, socially responsible ad network hasn’t risen to the level of being successful, even moderately. Networks like Diaspora seem to add an unnecessarily esoteric layer to them that makes joining weird and unfamiliar. A middle ground between those and commercial ones seems to be a gaping niche waiting to be filled with a PBS-like social space.
The kind of thing you’re talking about has been on my wish list for a very long time. Basically I want to pay to join a fan club, that gives me a lot of different options, and alots my sup scripting fee according to what I consume. If my total usage is small, I pay a smaller total fee. If I’m a heavy user, my fee goes up. Almost like a more democratic version of ASCAP.
In my mind, the biggest obstical to something like this taking off, is that it needs a critical mass of subscribers and content providers. And that size threshold has yet to be reached.
This may well be because you have incompatible hardware.
Unfortunately in the early days Microsoft didn’t worry about this too much. Fortunately I always keep a system image backup. I changed my test boiler machine (a Lenovo business computer) over to W10: DVD stopped working. I found that not a single DVD drive - including USB - would work; it was an unfixable motherboard issue. Since then, the Microsoft updater has improved and no longer tries to update this machine.
So you may in fact be lucky - the incompatibility has been found.
Incompatibilities are really strange. I discovered one quite recent Acer laptop model in the middle of a series that is incompatible.
I’m going to amplify a little here. When I responded to the original post about parents marketing to children, I wasn’t thinking of advertising. I was thinking of the way that parents constantly try to get children to follow what they see as desirable behaviour patterns, though these can be just as bad - or worse than - advertising of commercial products.
At the extreme end you have religious brainwashing. But parents, to a degree inevitably, constantly represent to their children the desirability of their way of life, and often encourage conformity even when they will tell the children’s teachers that they encourage their children to be independent and think for themselves.
This kind of marketing to children is ancient, but it is at the root of a lot of the trouble in the world. Obesity is bad, obviously, but constantly telling children that our way of life is best, and that people who disagree with us are inferior, has done a lot more harm over the centuries. This isn’t an either or. We should fix obesity, but we should also ensure that parents don’t get the exclusive rights to market a way of life to their children. To that extent, banning them from television or the Internet isn’t good.
(There’s an excellent if disturbing Greek film about this, Kynodontas, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. I guess many BB readers will have seen it already.)
Thinking outside the box: suppose facebook announced – instead of having a lock-everyone-in website – that they’re creating an open-source platform that anyone can run servers for and create clients for. Of course facebook won’t do this, because they’d have to come up with different, more speculative revenue models, so for the moment they’re happy to lock everyone in. But that’s an administrative choice; and – pointedly with reference to my interpretation of the question you raise – not a violation of logic or coherence itself.
This is just to chime in and second this emphasis on the super interesting question(s) you and @anon47741163 are discussing. I’m not sure what it is about Diaspora though I’ve presumed it’s partly a technical barrier.
A social networking site of any kind requires some technical skills. It seems that a local group (e.g. a farmers market, an after school group for kids, an arts festival, etc.) could use the most low-tech digital sharing models as @grimloki suggested.
Ah, it’s probably just as you say, in most cases. That said, I’m a big fan of Discourse and the boingboing bbs. I do enjoy getting notifications of activity here.
The point of Discourse, as I understand it, is to encourage a vibrant social structure using rules embedded into the program. @codinghorror used to be a little more evangelistic about this aspect, but some users think that this is creepy. Many are satisfied that the rules make spam difficult.
In both cases (marketing to adults and teaching values to children) it’s pretty obvious when the target audience is being addressed with respect, and when they’re not. After the upbringing I recieved, I’m very careful when talking to kids, to take them seriously. (Especially when clowning and rough housing). Kids are much more transparent than adults when you talk down to them, but much of what school is designed to do, is teach them the advantages of masking their disgust.
Something pretty clear about this election cycle, is how both Trump supporters and Sanders supporters are voicing their disgust. And they’re being likened to children for doing so.
