11 ms·

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole

by lqet 6y ago

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

chrisandchips 6y ago
TBF, I don't think the author is saying that Github needs to be fun, but rather that it used to be and now isn't. It's lost a nice quality that it had.
- blondin 6y ago
  having a hard time understanding what the author is saying. i never considered github to be a place to have fun at. and i am surprised by this article and curious how other people see or use github... by the way, the trending page is not everything about github! i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib https://github.com/richgel999/triglib i don't believe github has lost its quality either! they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)
  - chrisandchips 6y ago
    I don't use trending often enough to know that I'm correct in saying this, but I get the impression that the author is describing a shift from "most star-ed projects each day" to some new algorithm which seems to resemble "most interesting projects as of late", with the later being less dynamic. I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool. I agree that a lot of the recent changes to GH have been really cool. This article sort of makes me wish that features like the trending page were more configurable.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      > I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool. Any karma system (in this case GitHub stars) can be gamed, exploited, and used to generate hype. I would be very glad if GitHub started moving away from that (although I have no clue what would replace it, if anything at all).
- tclancy 6y ago
  Agreed, but I think us old farts are complaining the author thinks GitHub has changed while they have not and isn't considering that maybe their perspective shifted during the time as well.
- uchman 6y ago
  I think the headline differs (perhaps for traffic). The post seems to discuss concerns about the discovery/trending feature - how developers "discover" new code.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  no doubt GH wanted to develop their social site aspects to increase engagement and "stickiness" but I don't think they ever succeeded much, so while it's obviosuly different for the author, it's not much of a loss for everyone else.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I think ultimately Sourceforge fell from grace because it wasn't "fun", whatever that may mean; it was lacking the social features, poor UX, etc. Many things that make it boring or "not fun". I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important. I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.
- JoBrad 6y ago
  I thought it was because they started bundling adware with software without telling the creators of that software.
  - kbr2000 6y ago
    Yep [0], after been bought by Dice (they also drained off the Freshmeat and Slashdot communities around that time, then froze the former "as a result of low traffic levels"). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies
- the_af 6y ago
  I think Sourceforge fell from grace because of underhanded tactics like hijacking projects and bundling adware no-one wanted with their downloads, then lying about it. I never once thought "Sourceforge is boring". I thought they became villains.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    To be fair though, they declined in popularity and mindshare and had a change of ownership a few times before it came to that. The sourceforge that served up malware in 2013 bore little resemblance to the one from the 90s. I feel like it was more like: their offerings were no longer unique, the original team probably moved on, they couldn't make money, and they turned to desperation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lolsal 6y ago
Why do you think this is specifically a 'western society' thing? Browse Japanese sites and online tools and there is just as much gamification and 'thrilling' graphics and animation - if not more. Github looks like a technical white-paper in comparison.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  Do you not consider Japanese to be Western? I mean, America literally rebuilt the moral, ethical, and political environment after dropping the bomb.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted. Is what I am saying incorrect?
    - wodenokoto 6y ago
      Yes.
    - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      Yes. Japan is generally considered part of the "Eastern World." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world
      - mthoms 6y ago
        Culturally yes, but it depends on context. As mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world , during the Cold War and after, "Western World" was roughly analogous with "First world". That is to say, (again, roughly) - "modern, stable, (primarily) capitalist, democracies aligned with Western Europe/USA". So, in the context of geopolitics and political ideologies many people still consider it to include Japan and South Korea. Yours truly included. Not that I care as much about the "aligned with" part anymore, but certainly the "modern, stable, democracy" part.
indymike 6y ago
Fun may not be the right word for it. Github certainly never has deserved a description reserved for a world-class roller coaster... I don't think I've ever been "thrilled" by Github, but I've been very satisfied, contented, and sometimes amused by the experience. A positive experience really is useful as it makes getting other developers to comply with the process - something that was really lacking in source control prior to Github (and to a degree git itself).
thanatropism 6y ago
(I) There's still a relative scarcity of developers at any skill (even if there's no shortage of class-N developers taking their shot at class-(N+1) work). (II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger). (III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
> expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? Among other things, these emotions are addictive and are tracked indirectly via engagement metrics.
nogabebop23 6y ago
I think it's a consequence of gamifying absolutely everything. If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience. Maybe I'm just a little too old, but I've always rolled my eyes at those kinds of features and then ignored them. I find it impossible to imagine anyone actually caring about their badges or XP score on some company intranet wiki.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    That's what makes those systems so great. It has a positive effect on the people that DO care, and essentially no negative effect on anyone else. It's a free win.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      They are a distraction -- and many websites utilise dark patterns to make those UI elements hard to ignore. Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    GitHub stars are called out by name in my company’s promotion criteria for evaluating the impact and influence of an engineer’s open source releases. There’s a certain kind of manager that loves anything they can measure, however silly it is.
baryphonic 6y ago
I think the prominence of consumption industries like entertainment, media and social media have hooked us on the idea of happiness/meaning as perpetual bliss. I suspect these industries learned it from advertising, an industry which they created and evolved. The schools and religious organizations have tried to follow suit, with only mixed success. "Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.
- elboru 6y ago
  As a Catholic I can confirm. So many priests and lay people are trying to make Mass “fun”, it’s sad and most of the time cringy.
  - war1025 6y ago
    As a Lutheran, I feel this any time someone breaks out a guitar or a praise song. Church doesn't need to be "hip".
pdimitar 6y ago
> Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).
julianeon 6y ago
I guess I would come from the opposite direction and say: If you can make something important and useful - but generally seen as boring - “fun” there are big wins all around. The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective. And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all. But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this. Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any. Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits. In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually. I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.
decebalus1 6y ago
My guess is that it started as a differentiator in the market. This is 'fun', other things are not. Then it leaked into other places, such as the workplace which became increasingly infantilized at ultimately the detriment of the worker (benefits include: shitty health insurance, ping pong tables and foosball leagues!!). This further led to the internalization of natural negative or neutral feelings: you feel down? What's wrong with you? Everyone else is having fun! This is fun! Your job is fun! You must be broken, therefore you need to fix yourself.
kirse 6y ago
what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling" A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear. Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106
- atulatul 6y ago
  >increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear "The problem is not that we want to be happy; it is that we want to be happier." Not my own observation. But I like it.
  - philipov 6y ago
    Maybe that's because our sensory systems can't really feel states, only differences between states. Hot only exists in comparison to our memory of cold. Without that comparison, there is simply numbness. If that's a general principle, it implies that happiness can only be felt as an improvement over the past. That would also explain why sadness is necessary for us to be able to feel happiness, and why we're attracted to tragic art. Someone who is the same level of happy all the time will become numb to it, but constantly becoming happier is unsustainable in the same way as a drug addiction.
- _def 6y ago
  Your comment reminds me of a great quote: "The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience." from "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Mason
  - 6y ago
wallacoloo 6y ago
I think you could benefit from laying out a few examples, because on my own I’m struggling to put your claim into more concrete terms that I can relate to.
jayd16 6y ago
Pretty sure everything has been marketed this way since the advertising boom or sooner. Go look at soap ads from 100 years ago.
notriddle 6y ago
It's the same reason for buying ads. If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
I hold a diametrically opposite viewpoint and would like to present it. I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits. There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in? I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.
- alfalfasprout 6y ago
  Thank you. I 100% agree. We've for some reason decided that "professional" and "enterprise grade" means dull colors, ugly interfaces, and zero room for "hacking" and "experimentation". That code needs to be "work". That the poster of the comment would claim that this is akin to the thinking of a six year old is in itself curious. It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.
- Tiltowait-- 6y ago
  It's different personality types. Some people consider childishness childish and think of childish people as capricious and silly. While the people who like fun and colorful things see the other group as deplorable. The two sides should come to a compromise, but as sites like Git are run by the second crowd, they don't feel any need to change things to please the deplorables.
jstarfish 6y ago
We need new and shiny things to challenge us, maintain established neural pathways and develop new ones. It's a physiological need for healthy brain functioning. Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.

by lqet 6y ago

chrisandchips 6y ago

TBF, I don't think the author is saying that Github needs to be fun, but rather that it used to be and now isn't. It's lost a nice quality that it had.

blondin 6y ago
having a hard time understanding what the author is saying. i never considered github to be a place to have fun at. and i am surprised by this article and curious how other people see or use github... by the way, the trending page is not everything about github! i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib https://github.com/richgel999/triglib i don't believe github has lost its quality either! they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)
- chrisandchips 6y ago
  I don't use trending often enough to know that I'm correct in saying this, but I get the impression that the author is describing a shift from "most star-ed projects each day" to some new algorithm which seems to resemble "most interesting projects as of late", with the later being less dynamic. I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool. I agree that a lot of the recent changes to GH have been really cool. This article sort of makes me wish that features like the trending page were more configurable.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool. Any karma system (in this case GitHub stars) can be gamed, exploited, and used to generate hype. I would be very glad if GitHub started moving away from that (although I have no clue what would replace it, if anything at all).
tclancy 6y ago
Agreed, but I think us old farts are complaining the author thinks GitHub has changed while they have not and isn't considering that maybe their perspective shifted during the time as well.
uchman 6y ago
I think the headline differs (perhaps for traffic). The post seems to discuss concerns about the discovery/trending feature - how developers "discover" new code.
nogabebop23 6y ago
no doubt GH wanted to develop their social site aspects to increase engagement and "stickiness" but I don't think they ever succeeded much, so while it's obviosuly different for the author, it's not much of a loss for everyone else.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I think ultimately Sourceforge fell from grace because it wasn't "fun", whatever that may mean; it was lacking the social features, poor UX, etc. Many things that make it boring or "not fun". I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important. I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.

JoBrad 6y ago
I thought it was because they started bundling adware with software without telling the creators of that software.
- kbr2000 6y ago
  Yep [0], after been bought by Dice (they also drained off the Freshmeat and Slashdot communities around that time, then froze the former "as a result of low traffic levels"). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies
the_af 6y ago
I think Sourceforge fell from grace because of underhanded tactics like hijacking projects and bundling adware no-one wanted with their downloads, then lying about it. I never once thought "Sourceforge is boring". I thought they became villains.
- asveikau 6y ago
  To be fair though, they declined in popularity and mindshare and had a change of ownership a few times before it came to that. The sourceforge that served up malware in 2013 bore little resemblance to the one from the 90s. I feel like it was more like: their offerings were no longer unique, the original team probably moved on, they couldn't make money, and they turned to desperation.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lolsal 6y ago

Why do you think this is specifically a 'western society' thing? Browse Japanese sites and online tools and there is just as much gamification and 'thrilling' graphics and animation - if not more. Github looks like a technical white-paper in comparison.

bluntfang 6y ago
Do you not consider Japanese to be Western? I mean, America literally rebuilt the moral, ethical, and political environment after dropping the bomb.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted. Is what I am saying incorrect?
  - wodenokoto 6y ago
    Yes.
  - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    Yes. Japan is generally considered part of the "Eastern World." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world
    - mthoms 6y ago
      Culturally yes, but it depends on context. As mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world , during the Cold War and after, "Western World" was roughly analogous with "First world". That is to say, (again, roughly) - "modern, stable, (primarily) capitalist, democracies aligned with Western Europe/USA". So, in the context of geopolitics and political ideologies many people still consider it to include Japan and South Korea. Yours truly included. Not that I care as much about the "aligned with" part anymore, but certainly the "modern, stable, democracy" part.

indymike 6y ago

Fun may not be the right word for it. Github certainly never has deserved a description reserved for a world-class roller coaster... I don't think I've ever been "thrilled" by Github, but I've been very satisfied, contented, and sometimes amused by the experience. A positive experience really is useful as it makes getting other developers to comply with the process - something that was really lacking in source control prior to Github (and to a degree git itself).

thanatropism 6y ago

(I) There's still a relative scarcity of developers at any skill (even if there's no shortage of class-N developers taking their shot at class-(N+1) work). (II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger). (III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

> expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? Among other things, these emotions are addictive and are tracked indirectly via engagement metrics.

nogabebop23 6y ago

I think it's a consequence of gamifying absolutely everything. If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience.

ardy42 6y ago
> If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience. Maybe I'm just a little too old, but I've always rolled my eyes at those kinds of features and then ignored them. I find it impossible to imagine anyone actually caring about their badges or XP score on some company intranet wiki.
- joncrane 6y ago
  That's what makes those systems so great. It has a positive effect on the people that DO care, and essentially no negative effect on anyone else. It's a free win.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    They are a distraction -- and many websites utilise dark patterns to make those UI elements hard to ignore. Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.
- closeparen 6y ago
  GitHub stars are called out by name in my company’s promotion criteria for evaluating the impact and influence of an engineer’s open source releases. There’s a certain kind of manager that loves anything they can measure, however silly it is.

baryphonic 6y ago

I think the prominence of consumption industries like entertainment, media and social media have hooked us on the idea of happiness/meaning as perpetual bliss. I suspect these industries learned it from advertising, an industry which they created and evolved. The schools and religious organizations have tried to follow suit, with only mixed success. "Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.

elboru 6y ago
As a Catholic I can confirm. So many priests and lay people are trying to make Mass “fun”, it’s sad and most of the time cringy.
- war1025 6y ago
  As a Lutheran, I feel this any time someone breaks out a guitar or a praise song. Church doesn't need to be "hip".

pdimitar 6y ago

> Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).

julianeon 6y ago

I guess I would come from the opposite direction and say: If you can make something important and useful - but generally seen as boring - “fun” there are big wins all around. The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective. And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all. But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this. Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any. Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits. In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually. I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.

decebalus1 6y ago

My guess is that it started as a differentiator in the market. This is 'fun', other things are not. Then it leaked into other places, such as the workplace which became increasingly infantilized at ultimately the detriment of the worker (benefits include: shitty health insurance, ping pong tables and foosball leagues!!). This further led to the internalization of natural negative or neutral feelings: you feel down? What's wrong with you? Everyone else is having fun! This is fun! Your job is fun! You must be broken, therefore you need to fix yourself.

kirse 6y ago

what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling" A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear. Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106

atulatul 6y ago
>increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear "The problem is not that we want to be happy; it is that we want to be happier." Not my own observation. But I like it.
- philipov 6y ago
  Maybe that's because our sensory systems can't really feel states, only differences between states. Hot only exists in comparison to our memory of cold. Without that comparison, there is simply numbness. If that's a general principle, it implies that happiness can only be felt as an improvement over the past. That would also explain why sadness is necessary for us to be able to feel happiness, and why we're attracted to tragic art. Someone who is the same level of happy all the time will become numb to it, but constantly becoming happier is unsustainable in the same way as a drug addiction.
_def 6y ago
Your comment reminds me of a great quote: "The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience." from "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Mason
- 6y ago

wallacoloo 6y ago

I think you could benefit from laying out a few examples, because on my own I’m struggling to put your claim into more concrete terms that I can relate to.

jayd16 6y ago

Pretty sure everything has been marketed this way since the advertising boom or sooner. Go look at soap ads from 100 years ago.

notriddle 6y ago

It's the same reason for buying ads. If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

I hold a diametrically opposite viewpoint and would like to present it. I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits. There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in? I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.

alfalfasprout 6y ago
Thank you. I 100% agree. We've for some reason decided that "professional" and "enterprise grade" means dull colors, ugly interfaces, and zero room for "hacking" and "experimentation". That code needs to be "work". That the poster of the comment would claim that this is akin to the thinking of a six year old is in itself curious. It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.
Tiltowait-- 6y ago
It's different personality types. Some people consider childishness childish and think of childish people as capricious and silly. While the people who like fun and colorful things see the other group as deplorable. The two sides should come to a compromise, but as sites like Git are run by the second crowd, they don't feel any need to change things to please the deplorables.

jstarfish 6y ago

We need new and shiny things to challenge us, maintain established neural pathways and develop new ones. It's a physiological need for healthy brain functioning. Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.