3 ms·
We've left the "social" era and have entered the era of interruptions. All the innovation this decade is in interruptions no longer human-interconnections. My
by VLM 9y ago
We've left the "social" era and have entered the era of interruptions. All the innovation this decade is in interruptions no longer human-interconnections.
My smart watch for example post dates the social era so it has only minimal social features, but its deep in the interruption zone and spams me mercilessly until I block apps and if I block enough apps I may as well have a cheap dumb watch.
Another way to look at it is we no longer have 100 people shallowly liking us, we now focus on 100 apps shallowly claiming our attention is vital because we are important and we must be interrupted now.
Some of this is probably cultural backlash against automation and bureaucracy and general economic decline. If more people than ever are in fact not useful or important at all, then a communication style focused primarily around telling people they're important, is going to be very popular.
Under that analysis Slack is a post-social communications media, and it constantly rewarding you with endless micro doses of "your attention is valuable" is not a bug, its the whole philosophy of its existence as an app. You can see why curmudgeons see Slack as something negative, like the intrusion of participation trophy culture, because thats pretty much what it is.
The purpose of Slack is to constantly interrupt you with a narrative that you're important. There are incidental side effects that make it semi-useful. Companies spend a lot of money on "make employees feel special" and Slack is merely a modern example of the genre.
This philosophical analysis of Slack is probably extendible past Slack into startups. Don't try to market something as interconnectedness, not in 2017. Try to sell something that symbolically, or whatever, tells people they're important.
- SyneRyder 9y ago> My smart watch ... spams me mercilessly until I block apps and if I block enough apps I may as well have a cheap dumb watch. Definitely block the spammy apps. It makes a huge different to the smartwatch experience if it's only buzzing for things that really are urgent. Once you tune the notifications, it's actually calming - not only because you're not being interrupted as often, but also because you're not constantly thinking "is there something that needs my attention". If there is, the watch will let you know.
- icebraining 9y agoTo me, that doesn't make much sense; the whole point of a smartwatch seems to be making the reading of notifications more efficient and unobtrusive. If you disable all except the rare urgent ones, what's the point of the smartwatch?
- hackmiester 9y agoWell, personally, I use it to let me know there is an urgent notification. I've never felt the point was for all my notifications to show up.
- Jtsummers 9y agoNotifications are inherently intrusive. You have to pare it down to the set of notifications you care about most so that you aren't constantly interrupted. I made the mistake, recently, of letting the News app on iOS notify me, no sound but near constant visual noise when some big news item comes up. All I care about is: chats and calls from girlfriend, family, friends (in that order), a couple chess games, calendar/todo notifications to keep me on schedule (particularly on busy days). Everything else, I can check at my leisure. If I had a smartwatch, it'd be convenient to have those on my wrist. But I certainly wouldn't want all those news notifications there, though I may still want them on my iPhone or iPad.
- XorNot 9y agoThis is a problem even with email at the moment. I spent about 2 hours today trying to get my email filters to a state where my Inbox would only contain email that was (1) generated by a human and (2) specifically addressed to me. Github Enterprise is so far the worst offender - I can't find a non-heuristic way to filter user merge messages (which contain the user name) from actual user comments.
- majewsky 9y agoAren't these sent from noreply@github.enterprise.tld? In our team, some mails are not delivered because Outlook sometimes accidentally autocompletes `John Doe <noreply@github.enterprise.tld>` instead of `John Doe <john.doe@megacorp.tld>`.