Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (2019)
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That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions.
When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests)
2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom.
3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software.
4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim.
Two examples of bad customisation requests:
A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard.
B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.
Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century.
It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
For example, we have standardized schooling/exams, because that's the proven scalable way we can have for children - essentially a factory spitting out different grade levels/seniority.
But LLMs can break this standardization by being able to tailor student needs in a scalable manner.
However this takes a huge amount of action, and that's going to be the pain point in the near future as we humans tend towards the easy/greedy paths.
Cultural richness - LLMs are also very bad in this regard due to the bias towards majority viewpoints. This reminds me of a recent HN thread [0] discussing how AI is hindering the adoption of new technologies. In some ways, this happens because AI tends to favor mainstream perspectives, making it biased against "new" or "fringe" viewpoints.
People talk about the glory of Rome, but it was utterly vile. They either enslaved or exterminated whoever they conquered. If they had an LLM, they might keep you alive and brainwash you with it. Maybe.
Per gpt:
"In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort."
This was done to thwart desertion.
This is similar to:
- PIP.
- Email me what you did last week or your fired.
- Blanket 10% layoffs in high profit environments
- Blanket 10% cuts in general
I'm less scared about AI than the culture of dominance utilizing it. We are not the only people that ever lived on planet fucking earth, everything has been done already in some other form of matter. The wicked animals you see now days in power have lived many times over in past histories, we've seen these exact people many times. We simply get hoodwinked when they seduce us with casual talk about space, science, and the world. Decent people begin to think they are just like us. Nope, they are not like us.
Sometimes you just have to connect the dots and accept it. History precedes us and owns us.
Not disagreeing with your overall point but this isn't correct. Medieval peasants worked about 150 days a year, and while they were obviously very busy during planting and harvesting times, they had lighter workloads at other points in the year.
Laborer wages were 2p/day in the 14th century. https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a...
In that first link it says 2 dozen eggs is 1 pence (1d, denarius meaning pence). That works out to half a pence per dozen, not 6.
If it actually cost 3 days wages for a dozen eggs it seems pretty clear everyone would have starved to death.
Eggs, like all meat, was a luxury. They didn't starve, they lived on gruel.
The relevant part of the legend at the top says:
1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s)
...
1 shilling = 12 pence (d)
Meaning:
pound = livre = liber = L
shilling = sou = solidus = s
pence = denier = denarius = d
Reference: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-...
My own personal take is that, first off, I'm not at all trying to make peasant life as some sort of panacea - far from it. If anything, life before the Industrial Revolution was certainly much more precarious: obviously tons of childhood deaths (not to mention deaths from things like smallpox and the plague), and all it took was a bad harvest to cause major famine. War was much more commonplace. But the lack of a lot of tools that the Industrial Revolution provided meant that, in many ways, there was simply less possible time to do productive work. When the lights went out, it's hard to do a lot by candlelight/torches. The work really did ebb and flow with the seasons. Yes, there was ton to do during the offseason, but I think the analogy with the modern world is that is like the time after a tough deadline and big release - lots of "OK, let clean up some of this code now that we have time".
Plus, a lot of the tasks that your reference mentioned would have been clearly divided by the sexes. There is a paragraph from your link that states:
> We might also point to the amount of household labour that had to be performed. Yarn had to be spun, cloth to be weaved. Cooking was over open fires: and that firewood had to be collected. Bread baked and so on and on. There was a recent report (rather exagerrated but still) which claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of human labour a week to run a household. Today it takes 3. Things were worse back in medieval days.
And nearly all of that work would have been done by women while men worked the fields. There was certainly much more total work to be done to run a household, but the division of labor was more clear cut.
So again, I think the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Life was certainly "harder" back then, but from everything I've read there was undeniably more "downtime", even if there wasn't a ton to do during that downtime. The "having to work 12 hours a day just to keep food on the table" that I was responding to clearly seems to be false from just about every source I've read.
Which just makes the whole thing of looking at the life of peasants and talking about how much free time they had compared to us all the sillier. The point about what else you need to do to live (cook, mend clothes, etc.) is important, but makes it even more difficult to compare to our modern lives, even variation aside.
Before your ancestors would have kept a large herd of mammals and lived nomadically moving to fresh pastures when the grass and vegetation was eaten
It's rare but there are some modern nomadic people who live like this camels and goats in the desert
Old diets were primarily carnivore and plants were struggle foods
That's why Europeans killed all the buffalo and why the Japanese on average are shorter because they had long periods where meat was restricted for religious reasons
Don't compare yourself to a people under exploitation, independence was taken by force
I’m not going to try to compare it to pre-neolithic nomadic tribes because nobody knows for sure why the neolithic revolution occurred, but my guess would be that climate shocks were more likely to wipe out small nomadic tribes over the long run.
Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening.
There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).
I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.
This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience.
But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.
Every volunteer counts.
"Featuring". Yes Wired that is a technically accurate description.
They could have tried Steam, but I don't think it works as well. Although they did start with the pure freeform one and switched to a managed one the next day.
Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone (or every community) has the same need to organize information, and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so.
Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and frequently there is another distribution network involved.
Was a bit late for IRC's heyday but am I right in thinking it wasn't guaranteed that all users would have access to the chat history? That would create an impetus to log the information elsewhere.
Private trackers such as what.cd tended to attract people with strong archivist streaks which I think largely resolved the issue there. Oink could go down and you'd know that a huge chunk of its catalogue would appear on Waffles within a few months.
Online marketing feels like a field that would _need_ a private place to talk tbh; anything public would be a beacon for self-promotion efforts by people who are quite good (or at least relentless) at doing so.
People are going to discord for that because it is convenient as a platform for a variety of reasons, not because they want to hide it from the public imho.
Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably unnecessary, but to each their own.
IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on that item is very minimal. The current version is what you sell and that is it. The previous versions are just historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the margin.
But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3.
What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what they find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal. I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.
Or rather, the people who do care aren't the ones making the decisions.
Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend on organisation having done exactly that in advance.
There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.
I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire consultants and bring in outside help and products to get back on track because they honestly don't know how their own business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're missing the middle part so they not actually doing their best.
Also, most business owners do not have a clue of what they're doing. They inherited the business, or caught a ride on low interests etc. That's why there's still fierce competition and newcomers eating their lunch.
I agree with you that it is completely backwards!
what.cd was another example of this.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-inter...
People who build things because they care about them and want to maximize the utility they provide actually design systems that allow users to effectively and efficiently access information or complete tasks, "Tech" on the other hand designs systems full of anti-user dark patterns solely intended to force users to view as many ads as possible or buy whatever service "Tech" is selling.
> AO3 (AO3, to its friends)
What was that supposed to be? Is that a typo?
Meanwhile, you've got fanwork sites like this one which have better quality and organisation standards than any large company site, simply because someone gives a toss about whether things are easy to find and of high quality.
> Another of the Tag Wrangling Chairs, Qem, also thinks that machine tag wrangling is unlikely, pointing to machine translation as a cautionary tale. “There are terms in fandom which, while commonly understood in context among fans, would not be when you take it out of the fandom context," Qem says. For example, seemingly innocuous words like "slash" and "lemon" do not refer to a punctuation mark or a citrus fruit in fannish contexts, and tag wranglers are already well aware that machine translation can only manage the literal, not the subcultural meanings
AI sucks at this. It will alias incorrectly, it will alias when it shouldn't, it will create a new tag when it should be aliased, etc.
There are several cases where the human reviewer needs the context of the story (or image, in case of boorus) to make the correct call on whether to create a new tag, alias a tag, recognize a misspelling of an existing tag, etc. AI is not a good fit (yet, at least).