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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

If you develop an app, and everybody using your app always ends up deleting their data by clicking on the wrong button, and then people complain that your app loses data...

...in the end, the users are wrong in the moment, but the real problem is that your app allows a behavior that has negative outcomes, and the proper fix isn't to educate people, but to make it impossible for people to click that delete button so easily, or maybe make the deletion recoverable.

Maybe the users of coca-cola bottles are the problem, but maybe coca-cola should be made to not make products that have a propensity to be misused.

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Your design example doesn't apply because the end user in this case isn't directly effected by their negligence.

There is clear evidence that littering is societal. See how clean Japanese cities are despite almost everything being wrapped in plastic.

You won't even see many cigarette butts in Japan, because smokers carry a pocket ashtray.

Smoking culture in Japan appears to discourage smoking outside. In many places smoking outside is illegal. However some trains, many shopping centers and most restaurants have designated smoking areas.

As such you’re somewhat less likely to see cigarette butts on the street in Japan in any case.

Yup. Also, when smoking outside, people do have a strong incentive to dump the butt ASAP, whether there's a trash can in sight or not - cigarette butts are dirty, smell really bad (even for smokers' standards), and can foil clothing.

You know those little smoking enclosures that some airports have?

Yeah, those are all over Japan outside (albeit not air-tight ones). You only see people smoking in them or in buildings where smoking is allowed, commonly bars.

It's a pretty great way of controlling cigarette butt litter, actually.

Agree. I think you need to assume that people will litter. I think changing the material to something that can decompose would be a better approach. Maybe if the government gave some sort of subsidy to make the private companies do this?

Japanese cities and streets may look clean, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that Japan still contributes a big chunk to the world's plastic pollution through "leaks" in the system.

How much street cleaning staff do Japanese employ?

Anyway, the example still works. Even if littering was purely societal, on the timescale of years society is fixed. It doesn't change. You can't suddenly convince people to pretty please change social norms. Your options are either a) get a law in place that directly addresses undesired behavior, which is not free and works only to the degree you'll enforce it, or b) stop playing off the obvious failure mode of your society for your personal gains.

I'm leaving Japan right now after having spent a week here and I definitely saw a noticeable number of people cleaning up litter.

The best was an old man pulling a map out of the mouth of a Nara deer that was eating it, then scolding the deer like it was a dog. So yeah, even the deer are taking care of litter, even if they shouldn't be. I also saw a bunch of them eating the paper ribbons that the deer crackers come packaged in.

On the otherhand I have tons of first hand experience with bottles, and its a very simple task to take care of your own trash. Its just a matter of doing it.

What do you mean by "take care of"? Carrying it to the trash can? What happens to it after that? Oh, I guess it's not your problem anymore...

Went with cowerkers hiking once, we had more than enough to drink with us. What we didn't plan on was a convenient way to carry the bottles, so around half way to our target we had to rest and decide what to do with them. Either leave them there and collect them on the way back or accept that they will be a pain to carry around for the rest of the day. We later found a place where we could drop them off, but getting there was far from just "doing it".

Lesson learned: plan ahead and get something convenient to carry.

I think the bottle deposit is an interesting optimization.

That said, I remember being in mexico and when you buy a coke "to go", they don't want to bottle to walk away. So they helpfully pour it in a plastic bag, stick a straw in it and seal the plastic bag to the straw with a rubber band.

So now instead of a single bottle, you have a plastic bag, a straw, and a rubber band as litter all the while destroying any guarantees of not getting food borne illnesses.

I'm old enough to clearly remember when Coca Cola was distributed in glass bottles. There was no plastic of any kind, except for maybe a gasket inside the metal cap. Individual serving size bottles had bottle caps and larger size had metal screw caps with metal safety-seal thingies that broke off when you opened it for the first time. All of them had deposits that were refunded when you turn them in.

I don't know about the economics or logistical feasibility of returning to the same setup, but to suggest it's not possible (while still ensuring product safety) is inaccurate.

We do it for beer, so I don't see why not. At least in Ontario, I've seen people walking into the LCBO with cases of empty bottles (I don't drink alcohol myself, so can't confirm how prevalent this is).

But glass bottles are heavy, and I'm sure that makes shipping more expensive and increases CO2 emissions.

For what it's worth, beer seems to be transitioning back to cans now on the high end. Cans are much lighter, still just as recyclable, and crucially, they keep the product fresher (which matters more for nice beer than for soda).

I'm old enough to remember when all drinks came in standard 0.5 and 0.3L bottles, which were returned for a sizable deposit, shipped back to the factory, steam-cleaned, and reused...

>in the end, the users are wrong in the moment, but the real problem is that your app allows a behavior that has negative outcomes, and the proper fix isn't to educate people, but to make it impossible for people to click that delete button so easily, or maybe make the deletion recoverable.

this is the kind of thinking that kills apps for power-users, and leads to dark patterns.

You're not wrong, but I don't really like to think about how those kind of practices could be applied to social problems and government.

"We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.

The GP isn't saying don't have the feature. They're saying don't have the delete button next to the save button, labelled ambiguously, and without a confirmation step.

> this is the kind of thinking that kills apps for power-users, and leads to dark patterns.

Not necessarily. Well-applied, this thinking is what gave you --no-preserve-root in rm command. You still can delete your entire drive, you just won't do it by accident anymore.

I agree with your anxiety here though, some people do take this idea and turn it into "this feature is too dangerous; let's remove it for your own good", and nerf an otherwise useful tool.

> "We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.

That this work is at this point a Nobel-winning insight (the "nudge"), so it's a matter of who's doing it and for what. It turns out that "free will" is a concept with little meaning at scale - large populations behave predictably.

>If you develop an app, and everybody using your app always ends up deleting their data by clicking on the wrong button, and then people complain that your app loses data...

Throwing trash on the ground is not comparable to clicking the wrong button.

There is no confusion going on here, only laziness.

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