7 ms·

Stop Ruining It

325 points by herbertl 4mo ago

dijksterhuis 4mo ago
> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
- naravara 4mo ago
  I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
  - fydorm 4mo ago
    All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
  - JohnFen 4mo ago
    > But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.
    - b112 4mo ago
      Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving. At least, more room than if not. I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
  - b112 4mo ago
    Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is). Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them. Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
  - hemogloben 4mo ago
    An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan. Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).
iLoveOncall 4mo ago
[flagged]
- zaphar 4mo ago
  Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating. Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
  - stavros 4mo ago
    I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.
Hugsbox 4mo ago
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
  - rileymat2 4mo ago
    https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital-ad-spend-by-200-million-in-2017-idUSKCN1GD653/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital... > The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year. >P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters. Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
- hootz 4mo ago
  I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
  - Hugsbox 4mo ago
    I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
FinnLobsien 4mo ago
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust. I've seen this pattern a bunch: 1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has. 2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content. 3. They post the content 4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up 5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts. 6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop. There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished. (Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
- JackFr 4mo ago
  Path to X happiness: - Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow. - Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    I agree, but sadly it’s kinda like telling someone the best way to have fun at the casino without losing too much. It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.
- munificent 4mo ago
  > a lot of one-time cashing in of trust. I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term. Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
epsteingpt 4mo ago
The irony that the packages system looks so obviously and clearly 'baseline claude' designed is a sign of the moment itself.
fifticon 4mo ago
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.) "Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!" NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability. It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
- jollyllama 4mo ago
  Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI
- elevation 4mo ago
  > Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
  - 4mo ago
justinsaccount 4mo ago
Wait, the example held up for "Stop ruining it" is a company that sells snake oil audiophile bullshit?
- Eric_WVGG 4mo ago
  with blue LEDs, an instant demerit on any consumer electronic
- kennyadam 4mo ago
  The product descriptions on audiophile equipment are always gold! "Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form." The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol. https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.png https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...
  - TremendousJudge 4mo ago
    wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like btw it costs $9,999 according to google edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
    - rightbyte 4mo ago
      It would be funny if the "improvement dial" measured amplifier gain in a linear scale. Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.
nathan_compton 4mo ago
It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.
munificent 4mo ago
Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight. By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe. But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them. It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
- Syzygies 4mo ago
  There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role. In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
  - munificent 4mo ago
    Beautiful metaphor. I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.
aerodexis 4mo ago
Sounds like subsidiarity to me
mft_ 4mo ago
In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.
  - osjdiwnfiwjfi 4mo ago
    It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread. No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.
  - austinthetaco 4mo ago
    Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.
  - vitally3643 4mo ago
    We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.
tacostakohashi 4mo ago
I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this. A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and... I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
- rootlocus 4mo ago
  "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- sumtechguy 4mo ago
  Start simple add the rest later when you needed it. How will you know you need it later? At 3AM. If it makes you feel better add a comment what will be needed when it breaks. I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to? Boring wins almost every time.
jstummbillig 4mo ago
Eh. > Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it. ~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy. Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
aantix 4mo ago
The reverse can be true too. Don't make a bad situation worse.
blt 4mo ago
Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling. A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
- IAmBroom 4mo ago
  But MP3 players have proven that adding another weak link can still enshittify more.
luxuryballs 4mo ago
The education quote is great, I wish selecting text on iPhone was not ruined by the Facebook icon popup.
samcgraw 4mo ago
Aha, once you start seeing via negativa[0] you’ll likely see it everywhere. [0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)
kazinator 4mo ago
Paul McGowan makes bullshit: "Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation" Yikes; run the other way ...
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- djkoolaide 4mo ago
  On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc
  - kazinator 4mo ago
    No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform. The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly. I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?) Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.
    - deleted 4mo ago
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    - account42 4mo ago
jp57 4mo ago
Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.
doctorpangloss 4mo ago
On the one hand, you complain about software changing. On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.
cs02rm0 4mo ago
MacOS overly rounded corners.
smcg 4mo ago
Unless Seth gets the ear of some high-up executives, I don't think this article will change anything. The workers "ruining" products have to do their job, and often don't have much input into these decisions.
- sumtechguy 4mo ago
  those story points do not earn themselves!
profsummergig 4mo ago
The bias to action. Buffett and Taleb write about it. People feel like they have to "earn" their time. If something is good, or good enough, they still have to do some sort of "improvement" because they want to feel like they earned their salary.
mweb 4mo ago
[flagged]
brailsafe 4mo ago
> Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it. Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second
- small_scombrus 4mo ago
  > some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning I feel like that's a result of prior bad experience. Noone goes into university, or even primary school a blank slate. It's very easy to fall into a trap where education is transactional if that's what was modelled to you or that's how previous teachers treated you
  - brailsafe 4mo ago
    I agree, but throughout those earlier steps as well, there's a sizable contingent of people who just never seem interested in asking "why" or "how"
NagatoYuzuru 4mo ago
Unless the company and team’s KPI or OKR system changes, things will stay this way. You need something to report on to your superiors. But to you, these things are just another job.
everdrive 4mo ago
No, we've got to ruin everything. We might make another $0.05 in the next 6 months if we make our product worse for years. There is NO WAY to avoid this problem, and so we must make things worse no matter what all the itme.
pradn 4mo ago
Well, yea. Everyone agrees with these points. Who wants to ruin things for the sake of it? The reason why things get worse is because of systemic problems: misaligned incentives, information asymmetry, diffuse responsibility, etc. It's actually hard to improve these aspects of large systems. Hence, why the world is an imperfect place.

325 points by herbertl 4mo ago

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.

naravara 4mo ago
I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
- fydorm 4mo ago
  All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
FinnLobsien 4mo ago
I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
- JohnFen 4mo ago
  > But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.
  - b112 4mo ago
    Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving. At least, more room than if not. I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
- b112 4mo ago
  Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is). Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them. Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
- hemogloben 4mo ago
  An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan. Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

iLoveOncall 4mo ago

[flagged]

zaphar 4mo ago
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating. Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
- stavros 4mo ago
  I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.

Hugsbox 4mo ago

> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.

tardedmeme 4mo ago
According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
- rileymat2 4mo ago
  https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital-ad-spend-by-200-million-in-2017-idUSKCN1GD653/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital... > The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year. >P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters. Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
hootz 4mo ago
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
- Hugsbox 4mo ago
  I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.

FinnLobsien 4mo ago

As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust. I've seen this pattern a bunch: 1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has. 2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content. 3. They post the content 4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up 5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts. 6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop. There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished. (Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

JackFr 4mo ago
Path to X happiness: - Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow. - Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  I agree, but sadly it’s kinda like telling someone the best way to have fun at the casino without losing too much. It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.
munificent 4mo ago
> a lot of one-time cashing in of trust. I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term. Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.

epsteingpt 4mo ago

The irony that the packages system looks so obviously and clearly 'baseline claude' designed is a sign of the moment itself.

fifticon 4mo ago

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.) "Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!" NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability. It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

jollyllama 4mo ago
Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI
elevation 4mo ago
> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
- 4mo ago

justinsaccount 4mo ago

Wait, the example held up for "Stop ruining it" is a company that sells snake oil audiophile bullshit?

Eric_WVGG 4mo ago
with blue LEDs, an instant demerit on any consumer electronic
kennyadam 4mo ago
The product descriptions on audiophile equipment are always gold! "Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form." The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol. https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.png https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...
- TremendousJudge 4mo ago
  wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like btw it costs $9,999 according to google edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
  - rightbyte 4mo ago
    It would be funny if the "improvement dial" measured amplifier gain in a linear scale. Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.

nathan_compton 4mo ago

It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.

munificent 4mo ago

Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight. By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe. But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them. It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.

Syzygies 4mo ago
There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role. In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
- munificent 4mo ago
  Beautiful metaphor. I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.

aerodexis 4mo ago

Sounds like subsidiarity to me

mft_ 4mo ago

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.

ryandrake 4mo ago
I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.
- osjdiwnfiwjfi 4mo ago
  It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread. No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.
- austinthetaco 4mo ago
  Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

tacostakohashi 4mo ago

I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this. A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and... I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.

rootlocus 4mo ago
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
sumtechguy 4mo ago
Start simple add the rest later when you needed it. How will you know you need it later? At 3AM. If it makes you feel better add a comment what will be needed when it breaks. I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to? Boring wins almost every time.

jstummbillig 4mo ago

Eh. > Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it. ~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy. Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.

aantix 4mo ago

The reverse can be true too. Don't make a bad situation worse.

blt 4mo ago

Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling. A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.

IAmBroom 4mo ago
But MP3 players have proven that adding another weak link can still enshittify more.

luxuryballs 4mo ago

The education quote is great, I wish selecting text on iPhone was not ruined by the Facebook icon popup.

samcgraw 4mo ago

Aha, once you start seeing via negativa[0] you’ll likely see it everywhere. [0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)

kazinator 4mo ago

Paul McGowan makes bullshit: "Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation" Yikes; run the other way ...

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djkoolaide 4mo ago
On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc
- kazinator 4mo ago
  No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform. The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly. I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?) Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.
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  - account42 4mo ago

jp57 4mo ago

Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.

doctorpangloss 4mo ago

On the one hand, you complain about software changing. On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.

cs02rm0 4mo ago

MacOS overly rounded corners.

smcg 4mo ago

Unless Seth gets the ear of some high-up executives, I don't think this article will change anything. The workers "ruining" products have to do their job, and often don't have much input into these decisions.

sumtechguy 4mo ago
those story points do not earn themselves!

profsummergig 4mo ago

The bias to action. Buffett and Taleb write about it. People feel like they have to "earn" their time. If something is good, or good enough, they still have to do some sort of "improvement" because they want to feel like they earned their salary.

mweb 4mo ago

[flagged]

brailsafe 4mo ago

> Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it. Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second

small_scombrus 4mo ago
> some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning I feel like that's a result of prior bad experience. Noone goes into university, or even primary school a blank slate. It's very easy to fall into a trap where education is transactional if that's what was modelled to you or that's how previous teachers treated you
- brailsafe 4mo ago
  I agree, but throughout those earlier steps as well, there's a sizable contingent of people who just never seem interested in asking "why" or "how"

NagatoYuzuru 4mo ago

Unless the company and team’s KPI or OKR system changes, things will stay this way. You need something to report on to your superiors. But to you, these things are just another job.

everdrive 4mo ago

No, we've got to ruin everything. We might make another $0.05 in the next 6 months if we make our product worse for years. There is NO WAY to avoid this problem, and so we must make things worse no matter what all the itme.

pradn 4mo ago

Well, yea. Everyone agrees with these points. Who wants to ruin things for the sake of it? The reason why things get worse is because of systemic problems: misaligned incentives, information asymmetry, diffuse responsibility, etc. It's actually hard to improve these aspects of large systems. Hence, why the world is an imperfect place.