Google, users "doing it wrong" is a signal to get it right | Hacker News Reader

Google, users "doing it wrong" is a signal to get it right

michael.terretta.com

13 pointsTerretta9 comments

Google's engineers were likely delighted when Buzz automagically preconfigured their Follow networks.

Blaming this on engineers makes no sense. Engineers include some of the most timid, paranoid, self-conscious, and socially self-protective people I know. The people who saw no problem with the auto-follow feature are the people who thrive on living public lives: the masters of social media whose natural belief in self-promotion as the most essential human attribute and the driver of all progress parallels the engineer's faith in human reason. Just as the engineer is so bemused by unreason as to feel justified in excluding irrational people from all consideration, classifying them as atavistic troglodytes, so the bloggers and twits find it natural to brush aside the shy and the retiring as relics of a benighted age in which human beings' natural inborn desire to expose a carefully groomed self to the gaze of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people was tragically stunted by the primitive state of society.

The people who approved this auto-follow functionality knew it would piss some people off, and they knew exactly what kind of people it would piss off. They just thought those people could safely be ignored. They thought "everybody" would embrace this new brave new world where all the accidental and unnecessary barriers to extroversion were being thankfully overthrown by technology. Boy, were they wrong :-D and I'm very glad they were; I'm glad I'm not a freak for wanting a little bit of privacy.

[EDIT, hopefully before somebody complains: I know I'm generalizing. I'm perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left them out for readability. EDIT again: Apparently I wasn't fast enough.]

"I'm perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left them out for readability."

If enough people are distracted by their annoyance at un-disclaimed overgeneralizations, you haven't actually increased readability.

Reading should be a process of getting as much out of something as you can, which usually means giving the writer a little bit of credit and preferring stronger readings over weaker ones. There are always readers who want nothing more than an excuse to take offense, but there's no point in writing for people like that. I only added the disclaimer to frustrate them a little bit.

When most sites get something 99.99% right that's doing really good. Even your hosting company won't assure you 100% uptime. And how often has Twitter been down? Or how many times has Facebook turned on a feature that everyone hated? Remember Beacon? It's easy to call foul on Google's mistake (and it clearly was a mistake), but it's easy to forget that we rely on Google's super-stable infrastructure and that infrastructure has fewer bugs and higher uptime than almost any other service. Picking out the Facebook login bug is funny, sure -- Google-bombing is always kind of funny. But saying that you know better than hundreds of the world's best engineers who've studied these problems for many years... well, that feels like hubris.

Google today admitted to the BBC that "hundreds of the world's best engineers" were indeed out of touch:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8517613.stm

"The customer is always right" gets re-written for the digital age: "The user decides what the correct behavior should be."

The designers of programming languages should pay attention.

"If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago."

HA don't hold your breath.

making Google work for them and get them where they're trying to go, instead of trying to retrain them to adapt to Google.

In other words, make products for the way people actually do things. Apple often gets this right. When they don't, it's often because they are there too early. (The iPad may be another Edsel.)

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