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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

Lots of important info get posted in HN everyday without the fancy design that takes a lot of clicks and waiting times, so how could you assume it won’t make it to the front page?

This is why people need to stop using the “false dichotomy” card in every discussion. It’s so devoid of rigor in thinking and is always used lazily to frame another person’s comment in a paradigm that it wasn’t intended to be framed.

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Have you considered that the design is more important than the data in this context? I mean, I sure don't care worth a damn whether there are 100, 1000, or 10000 orders being placed per second. It's a meaningless figure to me.

Your first sentence is exactly what it means to think in terms of form over function. There is exactly nothing unique about the 80s pixellated design but there is about the data being presented, which is actually valuable to many possible parties:

* competitors

* creditors

* investors

* employees

* academics

* journalists

* policymakers in financial services

The design is not valuable to anyone, even to those who have no serious business with the data but who somehow feel the need to defend the design in the comments section, because regardless of the design they would visit the link anyway for the information it contains and because of the clickbaity title, not because of the design.

The design is to make it appeasing/fun to look at. Pure functional design leads to a dull, boring world nobody wants to live in.

All of this may be true, but Stripe's intention with building this is obvious: It's marketing; it's an advertisement showing how much volume Stripe handles during a busy shopping period. A big hint that it's an ad is that the Stripe API Uptime is not only on the first page of the stats, but is the only thing colored green. It's showing that Stripe is easily handling this crazy load, and it's only 13% (right now) of their "current capacity"!

Stripe is not building this to make sure that competitors, creditors, investors, employees, academics, journalists or policy makers have access to important data, that's just not the function of this dashboard.

Those unsure that Stripe will be reliably there for them might be swayed by seeing this during their holiday break. At least that's the marketing theory.

Aesthetics are absolutely a factor on the efficacy of marketing activities, and making it "fun" or "pretty" or "flashy" is part of that.

Not always. Fun and flashy makes sense if you’re selling consumer goods, but not if you’re selling your capability to provide a service and especially a critical one at that.

Who do you think are the customers of Stripe’s API? Are those people going to make business decisions on the basis of theatrics, or does pragmatism, performance, and stability matter more?

Upper funnel/lower funnel, depending. And don't forget the future employees that take notice of a culture that would allow for such an exercise. To me, it communicates good product management, roadmaps, and healthy financials to allow the room to breathe.

> it’s all about making things look cool instead of just no-bullshit functional

It's your dichotomy, "reframe the paradigm" if you'd like. The typical regurgitation of this talking point is "prioritizes form over function."

That’s not a dichotomy. In virtually all of design function is a prerequisite to prioritizing form, otherwise what you’re building might not even be possible and so you might not even be creating design but just art.

> it's all about...instead of

>> That’s not a dichotomy

Oops, yes it is.

> prioritizing form

Thanks for taking my suggestion and changing what you said (from "all about" to "prioritizing"). Doesn't add much to the so-often regurgitated complaint I'm afraid.

Eh, your argument doesn’t really involve thinking and banks purely on semantics, which you are making arbitrarily strict and according to your personal preference. In practice, “just no-bullshit functional” as in my first comment doesn’t mean absolute neglect of form.

I’m sorry but you’re not as clever as you think, and your reasoning signals that you’re not known as a good communicator or collaborator in your organization.

My feelings! Notice how quickly personal attacks come out once an argument has been lost?

Where’s the part where it was lost? Lol

When your only option was to repeat yourself, then change the subject.

Winning arguments stand on their own.

Will this analysis of yours go on my permanent record? What's my MBTI personality type?

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