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Seems ridiculous for any website without a very localized userbase.
by sadga 14y ago
Seems ridiculous for any website without a very localized userbase.
- alwaysdoit 14y agoYeah, it at least needs IP based localization.
- fletchowns 14y agoNot really, the missing person could turn up pretty much anywhere. Even if it leads to a single success story of somebody being found, I think it would be worth doing.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoWhat if it causes someone in, say, Massachusetts to memorize the face and name of a missing child in, say, California and doing so causes them to forget or concentrate less on some local missing child?
- qq66 14y agoI don't think people have a "missing children" memory buffer like that. I might be wrong though. If anyone has links to articles on human memory segmentation it would probably be interesting.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoProbably not. I'm just saying, the "if only one child is saved!" argument is flawed, and ignores things like opportunity costs.
- vhf 14y agoYou're right, they could turn up anywhere. Problem is, the alerts are shown in Dutch and German on my french-speaking Swiss blog. I don't think my readers, when coming across a 404 while looking for something, will read "Verdwenen op 2-jarige leeftijd" and head straight to google translate to look up what it means.
- zmj 14y agoGood point. In fact, you and I should go looking for missing children right now. If there's any chance at all, it's worth doing, right?
- tomjakubowski 14y agoThere is significant opportunity cost in dropping everything to search for missing children. There is practically no opportunity cost in changing a 404 page.
- wpietri 14y agonot so sure about that. With 404 pages, a user was trying to do something, and it's pretty much guaranteed that it wasn't looking for pictures of stolen children. A task-irrelevant interruption increases the likelihood that they give up or get thrown off task, and certainly delays task completion. A 404 page is an especially bad time to distract users because they're already in the weeds. Were I wanting to use a site to help search for missing children, I'd probably just devote some of the ad units to it.
- glhaynes 14y agoAdditionally, it induces anxiety/sadness/etc in lots of people. Some can apparently just tune it out, but some are significantly emotionally affected by this kind of thing.