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0 pointsRandallBrown5y ago0 comments

No it isn't...

I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.

2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.

3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.

Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.

0 comments

AngrySkillzz5y ago

The medium is the message. We've been talking about this for decades - the structure of the thing you are interacting with determines how you interact with it. Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter. Infinite scroll and auto-play video eliminates the "decision points" where people would otherwise reconsider if they want to continue, so people spend more time on those sites than they would otherwise. Maybe the attributes of these mediums aren't "inherently bad," but they absolutely do influence the way that they are used and it is up to us to make the judgement of whether that has good or bad outcomes. And a lot of us think the results of infinite scroll is a bad outcome.

ryandrake5y ago

Also, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You judge a system by its outcome, not by the intentions of the people who built it.

pseudalopex5y ago

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

tppiotrowski5y ago

My understanding is that Hacker News currently paginates comments but they’re working hard to put them all on one page.

Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.

Sohcahtoa825y ago

> Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter.

When it comes to politics, Twitter is the absolute worst. When you have only 140 characters, there's no room for nuance or actual discussion, so arguments get boiled down to short 1-sentence zingers that are often nothing more than really bad straw men.

aspaceman5y ago

> I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

Evil is committed in actions - not intent. That's part of the whole banality of evil.

deeeeplearning5y ago

>I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

The Nazis made essentially this same argument at Nuremberg. Didn't work out too well for them.

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