3 ms·

People were likely angling for a discount.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Nope. The actual answer is: people don't like reading. We are here on Hacker News volunteering to read a giant comments section that consists entirely of words, that we're expected to read only after the article which itself consists of lots of words, so we're really weird self-selected people. Of course we find this baffling. There was an article a while back that said something like most books sell less than 300 copies. I think the real numbers turned out to be higher, but still really low. Reading is not a popular activity. Watching video is popular. Talking to people is popular. These are skills that children acquire naturally without effort. Reading: difficult, slow, isolating. Given a choice between talking to someone or reading, people will go through a lot of pain for the opportunity to talk. This was one of the hardest lessons to learn in my software career. I still suck at it. It's one of the lowest hanging fruits for me to improve as a developer. Just today I was shortening a popup message that my company's software sometimes puts on the screen [1] at the suggestion of a customer who had to deal with support requests from people who weren't reading it. Kicking myself! Another popup this software rarely has to generate says "Install failed. The following error has been copied to your clipboard .... <stuff>". 100% of error reports, and I do mean 100% without exception for over two years now, come in the form of screenshots. Exactly zero people have ever read the second sentence and used paste. Kicking myself again! Why did I even think that would work?! The hardest thing is developer docs. I still don't know how to strike the right balance there. We should make more videos. [1] Well actually Sparkle.framework, but Conveyor incorporates it. It makes distributing desktop apps super easy, check out bio, it's cool.
- cess11 2y ago
  There's also another, similar group: people that make phone calls when traveling or being busy with something else. Could be an electrician or something, driving the car from one customer to the next it's easy to wait in a phone queue and then ask someone for the information. Relative to sitting down and being useless for a while, thumbing away at some badly structured corporate FAQ, that can seem quite attractive. When you're on your break, you're on your break, you want to savour the cinnamon bun and coffee, and would rather not sully it with some boring web page.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Good point, yeah. Multi-tasking is a lot easier with voice interfaces.

Nope. The actual answer is: people don't like reading. We are here on Hacker News volunteering to read a giant comments section that consists entirely of words, that we're expected to read only after the article which itself consists of lots of words, so we're really weird self-selected people. Of course we find this baffling. There was an article a while back that said something like most books sell less than 300 copies. I think the real numbers turned out to be higher, but still really low. Reading is not a popular activity. Watching video is popular. Talking to people is popular. These are skills that children acquire naturally without effort. Reading: difficult, slow, isolating. Given a choice between talking to someone or reading, people will go through a lot of pain for the opportunity to talk. This was one of the hardest lessons to learn in my software career. I still suck at it. It's one of the lowest hanging fruits for me to improve as a developer. Just today I was shortening a popup message that my company's software sometimes puts on the screen [1] at the suggestion of a customer who had to deal with support requests from people who weren't reading it. Kicking myself! Another popup this software rarely has to generate says "Install failed. The following error has been copied to your clipboard .... <stuff>". 100% of error reports, and I do mean 100% without exception for over two years now, come in the form of screenshots. Exactly zero people have ever read the second sentence and used paste. Kicking myself again! Why did I even think that would work?! The hardest thing is developer docs. I still don't know how to strike the right balance there. We should make more videos. [1] Well actually Sparkle.framework, but Conveyor incorporates it. It makes distributing desktop apps super easy, check out bio, it's cool.

cess11 2y ago
There's also another, similar group: people that make phone calls when traveling or being busy with something else. Could be an electrician or something, driving the car from one customer to the next it's easy to wait in a phone queue and then ask someone for the information. Relative to sitting down and being useless for a while, thumbing away at some badly structured corporate FAQ, that can seem quite attractive. When you're on your break, you're on your break, you want to savour the cinnamon bun and coffee, and would rather not sully it with some boring web page.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Good point, yeah. Multi-tasking is a lot easier with voice interfaces.