7 ms·

I mourn whenever a consumer technology becomes streamlined, homogenized, and commoditized. There's a pattern - it happened with smartphones too - where a new t

by _bxg1 8y ago

I mourn whenever a consumer technology becomes streamlined, homogenized, and commoditized. There's a pattern - it happened with smartphones too - where a new technology appears, and at the beginning people engage with it directly. They use it, they do things with it. And in that type of relationship there's the opportunity to have fun with it. But then as the new medium grows - as it becomes more economically lucrative and scales to an exponentially bigger audience - it's made to be more efficient instead. Eventually users no longer use, they consume. Think about how weird and wonderful the first iPhone apps were, with their kitschy skeuomorphism and novel uses of sensors. The accelerometer-based lightsaber. The sound boards. The odd and interesting domain-specific utility apps. Even Instagram had personality back in 2010. And then people would jailbreak their iPhones, so they could add widgets and toolbars and ridiculous neon color themes. The smartphone started out as a magical anything-object that people looked at as its own entity, just as web pages started out as magical worldwide bulletin-boards that people would put together and decorate for their own sake. These days the smartphone is boring. It intentionally falls to the background, serving as little more than a stylish content-pipe feeding your every craving. It is minimalist and inoffensive and ever-present. Even apps are supposedly on their way out. The very action of opening an app and doing something is seen as a piece of friction, keeping people from consuming content as effortlessly. Google Assistant and Siri would rather predict what you want and serve it to you before you even ask for it. Play is how the human brain stays alive, and it can't happen without back-and-forth interaction and tactility, and user agency.

_bxg1 8y ago
Interestingly, something of a reverse effect is happening in the game development space. I think the driver of the above pattern is mainly economic; as a technology becomes more and more commercialized, it gets less personal and more streamlined. This is aided by the technology itself improving to allow it to be more efficient. With games, though, the barrier to entry was always (since the 90s, at least) so high that only corporations could participate. So in recent years, the technological strides that have been made have actually allowed the space to become less commercialized, and therefore more personal and diversified.
- sarcasmic 8y ago
  Consequently, game development these days is more limited by art assets than by programming or game systems design. The difficulty and complexity of producing good-looking, stylistically consistent, original 3D assets has led to sprite-based games, mock pixel art "8-bit" games, and games where form follows function. However, game engines companies now offer asset stores. To OP's point, it's not hard to see a future where some successful indie games are made by stitching together assets and mechanics sourced entirely from others. Would it cheapen the result, despite the talent and effort put into those components none the less grand? Perhaps. Technology and popularity move the goalposts. It increases the amount and/or changes the nature of effort required to attain acclaim.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    I agree that art is becoming the bottleneck, but I feel the need to point out that pixel-art as a style is not chosen because it's easy. Quite the opposite; it takes more artistic talent to create something abstract that's still expressive than to create something detailed. Asset stores are definitely used to fill gaps in artistic talent/man-hours, though. In fact there's a term for games made out of nothing but hastily slapped-together assets: "asset flips".
  - earenndil 8y ago
    To a point. I think, however, as the technology increases and gets better, the trend towards realism will overpower. Consider: as assets get more and more complex, the uniqueness of an individual asset will actually decrease. I can easily point out the difference between a tree in the witness and mario 64, because they're both low poly games that do their own thing _instead_ of emulating the real world. If, instead, you ask me to differentiate between a tree in skyrim and one in the last of us, well, they both just look like trees. At this stage, what matters is the visual aesthetic that you're able to create with lighting, with combination of different assets. Whether you happened to make an individual asset yourself will matter increasingly less as time goes on.
    - _bxg1 8y ago
_bxg1 8y ago
I'd also like to plug this project: https://mavo.io/ https://mavo.io/ Its goal is to bring back the idea of hacking together HTML pages by hand, but with the benefits of modern dynamic content. It's cool and inspiring.
gradys 8y ago
I'd say this is better explained by a shift in the distribution of users than by anything changing intrinsically about the device. It seems quite possible to me that the number of people jailbreaking their iPhones and developing weird apps is actually greater than in the early days, it's just that everyone has a smart phone now, so the percentage of people doing that has shot way down.
agumonkey 8y ago
Have you seen the article about the birth of radio ?
- _bxg1 8y ago
  No, but I have heard anecdotes about ham-radio operators having a similar experience with that technology
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    It was linked not long ago on HN. It tells how radio caught wildly as an unregulated hobby. People just used the new discovery for fun to talk to each other randomly. Only later when the army saw use it became what we know today. Allocated frequencies, business mostly. I had no idea people enjoyed radio first.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      > I had no idea people enjoyed radio first. Even disregarding what you're referring to, do you remember walkie-talkies?
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        I've very rarely seen them outside of job purposes. I remember a fad as a kid but I wouldn't compare making your own radio in early 1900s with buying a plastic toy in the 80s.
b_b 8y ago
> These days the smartphone is boring. I'd like to respectfully disagree, as I think that there are many people out there, a notable example being the XDA forums[1] for many people intensely modifying and changing their android devices. Smartphones and their apps have gotten so much more complex and capable since their inception, someone could pretty much manage all the basics of their online life on one. > It intentionally falls to the background...It is minimalist and inoffensive and ever-present. I wish :) There is a real problem of smartphone addiction, where the phone and its apps try its best to entice you into spending as MUCH time as possible, definitely not in the background or minimalist. > Even apps are supposedly on their way out. Given the ever-growing user base and size of the Apple and Google app stores, I don't think that's true, people just may just be looking to launch or access their functionality a tad-bit faster (if at all in truth). Also, the general user adoption sounds a lot like you're describing the general trend mentioned here: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths, although smartphones aren't necessarily a subculture (more specifically, android and iphone rooting/modding communities might qualify however.) [1] = https://www.xda-developers.com/ https://www.xda-developers.com/
- batteryhorse 8y ago
  There's something that was magical about jailbreaking iOS, because of the way Objective-C allowed you to modify the system by swizzling methods. This can't really be compared to people modifying their Android devices, it's just not the same because it's such a pain to compile Android and flash it everytime you want to change something. Jailbreaking is dead, and Swift does not allow swizzling. I agree, smartphones are boring, it's too locked down. Not many people had the skill to write quality apps in Objective-C, so now we're stuck with apps written using React Native. This makes smartphones more complex, but the quality is worse.
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    > it's just not the same because it's such a pain to compile Android and flash it everytime you want to change something. One does not have to recompile and flash Android just to change something. Bytecode can be redirected at class load time and native binaries can be individually "replaced" by mounting over them. This is how Xposed and Magisk work, respectively, BTW.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
It's the circle of life. You could try and manufacture all those tasty molecules yourself, or you could outsource the job to mitochondria, and meanwhile you could go off in pursuit of loftier goals, such as how to figure out multicellular life, and so on. Same with everything else, including personal websites.
digi_owl 8y ago
Honestly i see the iphone as the start of the "scale" moment. There had been smartphones before iphone, for a long time. Damn it, the iphone was not even launched as a smartphone. It was launched as basically a ipod that could make calls.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
qplex 8y ago
I think everybody likes to play with new things, but it's quite natural for the novelty to wear off after a while.

by _bxg1 8y ago

_bxg1 8y ago

Interestingly, something of a reverse effect is happening in the game development space. I think the driver of the above pattern is mainly economic; as a technology becomes more and more commercialized, it gets less personal and more streamlined. This is aided by the technology itself improving to allow it to be more efficient. With games, though, the barrier to entry was always (since the 90s, at least) so high that only corporations could participate. So in recent years, the technological strides that have been made have actually allowed the space to become less commercialized, and therefore more personal and diversified.

sarcasmic 8y ago
Consequently, game development these days is more limited by art assets than by programming or game systems design. The difficulty and complexity of producing good-looking, stylistically consistent, original 3D assets has led to sprite-based games, mock pixel art "8-bit" games, and games where form follows function. However, game engines companies now offer asset stores. To OP's point, it's not hard to see a future where some successful indie games are made by stitching together assets and mechanics sourced entirely from others. Would it cheapen the result, despite the talent and effort put into those components none the less grand? Perhaps. Technology and popularity move the goalposts. It increases the amount and/or changes the nature of effort required to attain acclaim.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I agree that art is becoming the bottleneck, but I feel the need to point out that pixel-art as a style is not chosen because it's easy. Quite the opposite; it takes more artistic talent to create something abstract that's still expressive than to create something detailed. Asset stores are definitely used to fill gaps in artistic talent/man-hours, though. In fact there's a term for games made out of nothing but hastily slapped-together assets: "asset flips".
- earenndil 8y ago
  To a point. I think, however, as the technology increases and gets better, the trend towards realism will overpower. Consider: as assets get more and more complex, the uniqueness of an individual asset will actually decrease. I can easily point out the difference between a tree in the witness and mario 64, because they're both low poly games that do their own thing _instead_ of emulating the real world. If, instead, you ask me to differentiate between a tree in skyrim and one in the last of us, well, they both just look like trees. At this stage, what matters is the visual aesthetic that you're able to create with lighting, with combination of different assets. Whether you happened to make an individual asset yourself will matter increasingly less as time goes on.
  - _bxg1 8y ago

_bxg1 8y ago

I'd also like to plug this project: https://mavo.io/ https://mavo.io/ Its goal is to bring back the idea of hacking together HTML pages by hand, but with the benefits of modern dynamic content. It's cool and inspiring.

gradys 8y ago

I'd say this is better explained by a shift in the distribution of users than by anything changing intrinsically about the device. It seems quite possible to me that the number of people jailbreaking their iPhones and developing weird apps is actually greater than in the early days, it's just that everyone has a smart phone now, so the percentage of people doing that has shot way down.

agumonkey 8y ago

Have you seen the article about the birth of radio ?

_bxg1 8y ago
No, but I have heard anecdotes about ham-radio operators having a similar experience with that technology
- agumonkey 8y ago
  It was linked not long ago on HN. It tells how radio caught wildly as an unregulated hobby. People just used the new discovery for fun to talk to each other randomly. Only later when the army saw use it became what we know today. Allocated frequencies, business mostly. I had no idea people enjoyed radio first.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    > I had no idea people enjoyed radio first. Even disregarding what you're referring to, do you remember walkie-talkies?
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I've very rarely seen them outside of job purposes. I remember a fad as a kid but I wouldn't compare making your own radio in early 1900s with buying a plastic toy in the 80s.

b_b 8y ago

> These days the smartphone is boring. I'd like to respectfully disagree, as I think that there are many people out there, a notable example being the XDA forums[1] for many people intensely modifying and changing their android devices. Smartphones and their apps have gotten so much more complex and capable since their inception, someone could pretty much manage all the basics of their online life on one. > It intentionally falls to the background...It is minimalist and inoffensive and ever-present. I wish :) There is a real problem of smartphone addiction, where the phone and its apps try its best to entice you into spending as MUCH time as possible, definitely not in the background or minimalist. > Even apps are supposedly on their way out. Given the ever-growing user base and size of the Apple and Google app stores, I don't think that's true, people just may just be looking to launch or access their functionality a tad-bit faster (if at all in truth). Also, the general user adoption sounds a lot like you're describing the general trend mentioned here: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths, although smartphones aren't necessarily a subculture (more specifically, android and iphone rooting/modding communities might qualify however.) [1] = https://www.xda-developers.com/ https://www.xda-developers.com/

batteryhorse 8y ago
There's something that was magical about jailbreaking iOS, because of the way Objective-C allowed you to modify the system by swizzling methods. This can't really be compared to people modifying their Android devices, it's just not the same because it's such a pain to compile Android and flash it everytime you want to change something. Jailbreaking is dead, and Swift does not allow swizzling. I agree, smartphones are boring, it's too locked down. Not many people had the skill to write quality apps in Objective-C, so now we're stuck with apps written using React Native. This makes smartphones more complex, but the quality is worse.
- pritambaral 8y ago
  > it's just not the same because it's such a pain to compile Android and flash it everytime you want to change something. One does not have to recompile and flash Android just to change something. Bytecode can be redirected at class load time and native binaries can be individually "replaced" by mounting over them. This is how Xposed and Magisk work, respectively, BTW.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

It's the circle of life. You could try and manufacture all those tasty molecules yourself, or you could outsource the job to mitochondria, and meanwhile you could go off in pursuit of loftier goals, such as how to figure out multicellular life, and so on. Same with everything else, including personal websites.

digi_owl 8y ago

Honestly i see the iphone as the start of the "scale" moment. There had been smartphones before iphone, for a long time. Damn it, the iphone was not even launched as a smartphone. It was launched as basically a ipod that could make calls.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

qplex 8y ago

I think everybody likes to play with new things, but it's quite natural for the novelty to wear off after a while.