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Comment by mathnode | Hacker News Reader

It feels so inhuman. Like everything google, there are no names, no faces, no citations. Just walls of information and puzzles. Khanacademy has gone a similar direction; they have removed the human element from learning and are not hiding that fact. Even scam emails at least try to pretend they are genuinely sent from humans.

My favourites are still coursera and MIT OCW. They may not be the most perfect web technologies, but the landing pages right now contain people, faces, names, places and history.

I think this is the dystopian model of learning. We are faceless droids to them completing emotionless tasks. And to what end? So that one day a future generation might be able to qualify for a job that the AI is not capable of doing? If my grandchildren solve enough puzzles in the VR-web-o-sphere they will qualify to be blessed by, The Google. THE Google!

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I prefer this to marketing faces.

Marketing faces are random actors and models, not having anything to do with the product, so it's a dishonest relationship from the start. It's designed to manipulate you into thinking the product is more genuine and is used by people you can look up to, and thats why you miss it now. You miss being manipulated.

A colleague of mine is bashing open source a lot because it sometimes has humor, like 'ooops a funny thing happened' or 'taking the poison pill' instead of 'We apologize for this error, please contact customer support bla bla'.

The windows attitude is also 'sit back, we are taking care of you' while the Linux experience is more genuine, less polished.

The lack of a human touch on this site is simply a function of our priorities. This site was developed by volunteers, in the proverbial Google 20% style, and we've put very little effort into marketing. Admittedly, it could stand a bit more warmth, but, for better or worse, we've always put our focus on the content -- giving developers a fast track to building something fun.

Take a look at the open source projects parent mentions. Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content? OSS sites are made by real volunteers. While this project is neat and is a side project, all the contributors are paid by Google, right? So it’s perhaps possible to get 21% time. Or convince someone with some empathy to volunteer as well. The problem has been solved by many community driven projects.

Apache has amazing content as well as a “human” touch.

This site demonstrates that someone put some effort into the design, so perhaps the easy solution is to spend even more time on marketing and skip the design-o-tron.

> Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content?

I never said, nor meant to imply, judgements about any other projects. I was simply sharing the choices we've made based on our priorities and resources.

Personally I'm comfortable with those choices because they've resulted in literally hundreds (>650 at my last count) of nice looking and fun to use coding tutorials. I'm also quite proud of the authoring flow we built: these codelabs are generated directly from Google Docs (you don't have to write a line of code to produce them) and we've open sourced the tools for others to use (https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools).

I can't stand marketing faces. I don't need a pretty actor reading the copy, like the Socratica stuff.

I'd rather have the expert, with all their eccentricities, presenting their own stuff, like Walter Lewin or Leslie Lamport or any of the Numberphile stuff.

Those codelabs and the website were originally designed for on-site experience where you can sit down and try something new without the need to bring your own laptop or another piece of hardware and set up the environment.

In fact, I'm sure anyone who's been to I/O event in person noticed quite a few friendly faces and field experts to talk to in the codelabs room. Often, they are the same people who wrote the actual codelabs.

Then we thought, why not make these codelabs public for people to also be able to try it at home. So, there it is, inhuman codelabs.

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