3 ms·

"Do you expect people to sit in front of a screen for sixteen hours a day, being constantly productive?" If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours

by rizzn 17y ago

"Do you expect people to sit in front of a screen for sixteen hours a day, being constantly productive?" If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift. "It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large." Constant change does not equal success, either in UX or fiscal reward. They've yet to be decidedly in the black, they've yet to find a solid business model, and they've yet to find dedicated evangelists in the tech blogosphere at large. They're simply growing because they're growing, and that momentum won't last forever (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard).

unalone 17y ago
Use astericks to italicize. :-) If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift. I'm not a programmer, but I'll tell you that this is a belief that's widespread throughout almost every industry and it's one that's very rarely accurate. The man who's most indicative of the flaws in this thinking is Ricky Gervais, the man who probably influenced highbrow comedy more than any man in the last 20 years. The DVDs to The Office include lots of behind the scenes showing Ricky dawdling during the writing process (he plays a rubber band, shoots it at his cowriter, spills coffee on the script, mashing napkins into his mouth and throwing them up), and then again during the process of directing/acting, essentially sabotaging things to have fun with the process. His work ethic is famously bad, yet the products he puts out are more tightly made than nearly anything else I've seen. The creative process - and making a huge web site like Facebook is absolutely a creative process - is not one that can be forced out. Creative minds work to their own schedules. Some people are capable of churning out a dozen hours of work every day. Others procrastinate and still end up with great pieces of work. (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard) It's not worth the time it would take to argue with you, but I've spent a lot of time in this particular medium and you are dead wrong comparing Facebook to these.
rizzn 17y ago
Unalone: I'm new to this particular forum as a regular user, so I'm not sure why I'm not immediately able to reply to your post, yet you're able to immediately able to reply to mine. I'm sure I'll figure it out in time, but in the mean time, I'll respond up here: I'll simply let you have the last word on all of these threads since I'm not worth arguing on it. You're obviously much more qualified, and I unequivically accept your summary judgement that Facebook is superior to everything else ever. Sorry.
- unalone 17y ago
  rizzn: Don't be a sarcastic arsewipe. On Hacker News, everybody argues everything. That's how we learn from people who know things we don't. If you've got a legitimate argument to make against Facebook, make it; if you don't, you're allowed to stop arguing at any time. It's not like people will dislike you here for not pressing an argument. The one thing you will get judged for is snark. Stop it. If you don't see a reply button (I think that's a glitch in the site; happens to me all the time), then you click the "link" button up top, next to "parent". That'll give you a box in which to reply. I'll apologize for the abruptness of my last comment to you. Hopefully you'll understand there was a reason behind it, and that reason is: This debate springs up once a month, and every time somebody new comes up saying Facebook is like MySpace is like Friendster, and every time I feel the need to explain why they're wrong, and it takes an hour and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a bit of a Facebook fan, and I figure that since most HN users aren't I might as well step in and shout my things. If you'd like to, I can craft a response to you that addresses that one point specifically. As it is, I spent a good twenty minutes looking for previous things I've said in the hopes that you can get the gist of my argument, and hopefully respond in a non-arsewipe way that leads to fun conversation that leads to us each enjoying the sight of our respective names in future debates. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550 In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket. This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up. Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532 Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that.

by rizzn 17y ago

unalone 17y ago

Use astericks to italicize. :-) If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift. I'm not a programmer, but I'll tell you that this is a belief that's widespread throughout almost every industry and it's one that's very rarely accurate. The man who's most indicative of the flaws in this thinking is Ricky Gervais, the man who probably influenced highbrow comedy more than any man in the last 20 years. The DVDs to The Office include lots of behind the scenes showing Ricky dawdling during the writing process (he plays a rubber band, shoots it at his cowriter, spills coffee on the script, mashing napkins into his mouth and throwing them up), and then again during the process of directing/acting, essentially sabotaging things to have fun with the process. His work ethic is famously bad, yet the products he puts out are more tightly made than nearly anything else I've seen. The creative process - and making a huge web site like Facebook is absolutely a creative process - is not one that can be forced out. Creative minds work to their own schedules. Some people are capable of churning out a dozen hours of work every day. Others procrastinate and still end up with great pieces of work. (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard) It's not worth the time it would take to argue with you, but I've spent a lot of time in this particular medium and you are dead wrong comparing Facebook to these.

rizzn 17y ago

Unalone: I'm new to this particular forum as a regular user, so I'm not sure why I'm not immediately able to reply to your post, yet you're able to immediately able to reply to mine. I'm sure I'll figure it out in time, but in the mean time, I'll respond up here: I'll simply let you have the last word on all of these threads since I'm not worth arguing on it. You're obviously much more qualified, and I unequivically accept your summary judgement that Facebook is superior to everything else ever. Sorry.

unalone 17y ago
rizzn: Don't be a sarcastic arsewipe. On Hacker News, everybody argues everything. That's how we learn from people who know things we don't. If you've got a legitimate argument to make against Facebook, make it; if you don't, you're allowed to stop arguing at any time. It's not like people will dislike you here for not pressing an argument. The one thing you will get judged for is snark. Stop it. If you don't see a reply button (I think that's a glitch in the site; happens to me all the time), then you click the "link" button up top, next to "parent". That'll give you a box in which to reply. I'll apologize for the abruptness of my last comment to you. Hopefully you'll understand there was a reason behind it, and that reason is: This debate springs up once a month, and every time somebody new comes up saying Facebook is like MySpace is like Friendster, and every time I feel the need to explain why they're wrong, and it takes an hour and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a bit of a Facebook fan, and I figure that since most HN users aren't I might as well step in and shout my things. If you'd like to, I can craft a response to you that addresses that one point specifically. As it is, I spent a good twenty minutes looking for previous things I've said in the hopes that you can get the gist of my argument, and hopefully respond in a non-arsewipe way that leads to fun conversation that leads to us each enjoying the sight of our respective names in future debates. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550 In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket. This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up. Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532 Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that.