Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

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This is something those of us who grew up with the Internet don’t want to face.

Whether by nature, nurture, or some other force - user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage.

In every category, agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards.

Every product I’ve loved, every founder I’ve believed in, was about human possibility & creativity.

But the ones lucky enough to scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption.

Perhaps I’ve arrived at a poor conclusion, but I’ve simply decided to accept that I am a fairly unusual person for wanting to craft, make choices, and discover the weird, wonderful, or just discover what I didn’t know there was to discover.

I’ve weened myself off of consumption over the years. Here’s to making all my future decisions in tech about putting my attention, energy, and thought into “what do I want to create? learn?”

I don’t think the product universe I live in will ever be dominant. But I do believe it can exist if we accept that we can either build it or trade it, but we cannot do both.

I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being addons. Many of us owed our careers to the path that view source opened, and we wanted to pay it forward.

I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.

A brilliant idea that would never make it through the legal department.

Somebody I worked with at TomTom had the brilliant idea of gamifying the driving experience with internet connected TomTom PNDs, by publishing a real-time Leaderboard on every single road on the map, so you could see the top ten speeds, and compete with other drivers for the high score! No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!

My TomTomagotchi idea didn't go over well with TomTom legal either: they didn't want their PNDs getting depressed and dying if you didn't give them food, attention, and drive them around everywhere they wanted. But I was sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.

Unrelated but you are a great writer! "user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage" "agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards" "scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption"

You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.

Quite a Nietzschean insight. Both in therms of its direction and the quality of its expression in language. I am bowing to you, Sir.

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