@LesterB99 their value proposition definitely is price based. i love them for that. but building pretend customer service that does nothing but literally play for time until the customer goes away is negative value at zero price. i'd prefer they simply not offer the channel, or offer a real one at an upcharge.
i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.
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@scott whatever the physics of a brick wall is, we don't call it "friction"!
Unsurprisingly, @akkartik is well ahead of me:
"it is all too common for seamless experiences to hide all manner of deeper malfeasance. When we push for more seamless experiences we’re also encouraging the organisms we interact with to grow more tentacles (hiring! HR!), make them more muscular (growth team!), use them more ceaselessly in search of advantage (an ad protruding slickly from the bottom of the pane! Marketing materials persuading people to not organize!)" https://lobste.rs/s/idi1wt/open_source_vs_ux
@dingodog19 @guacamayan we could have just two timezones: UTC, and sunrise is exactly 6am.
i have come to have a very negative reaction to high quality user-interfaces. not just dark patterns and stuff like that, but genuine user-interface quality.
UI quality is painstaking and expensive, much more than most backend functionality. i associate investment in UI with well-funded growth-seeking ventures, and i associate those kinds of ventures with traps, enshittification, neofeudalism. 1/
the world of UNIX command lines and emacs/vi-ish editors is, not unreasonably, associated with a kind of bearded-dude elitism, a caste of self-styled wizards not always very inclusive or kind to those who have better things than try master its arcana. 2/
but what has been touted to supplant that caste is capitalist "democratization", which has nothing to do with democracy at all. it just means widespread access to products in the role of often captive consumers, rather than agents who exercise meaningful control. 3/
i think it's probably more helpful expand the circle that enjoys the broad, flexible agency provided by cheap user-interface tools than to treat as progress expensively making capabilities very widely accessible, but always under the control of and largely captive to the people who paid the expense. /fin
@guacamayan @BruceMirken it has to be changed, perhaps, in coordination with the work day. but that can be done as well!
winning isn't everything it's the only thing only in places where soon there will be nothing at all.
@BruceMirken @guacamayan isn't the whole point of education to begin in darkness and then end in light?
@erispoe @scott @guacamayan yes. we humans, we are not atoms. clocks and times and time zones exist for our coordination, and asking us to individually opt to our preference is like telling people who can't afford some charming mixed-use neighborhood that if they don't love cars they can always just not drive. we have to make collective choices. i say late-in-day sun supercedes symmetry.
if you’re going to be mad, be mad you ever had to do “standard” time, not at daylight savings time, which is brilliant and bright.
why can’t one simply make both choices, and then snip away the timeline that least well works out?
@davemark happy new year!
"the Americans are arriving at the conclusion that supporting Netanyahu means being harmful to Israel. There is a distinction between Israel’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests." #NogaTarnopolsky https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-biden-plan-to-ditch-israels-netanyahu.html
changing the subject to wokeness lets plutocrats find solidarity with broad classes of people who might otherwise realize that, despite sharing a penis and pale skin color, their interests are rather at odds with those of our billionaire caesars.
a politics of “protecting what’s ours” is naturally promoted by those who have a lot.
we need to reform our institutions so they take us toward a politics of what rather than who.
@elbowspeak @kencrandall turning it off and on fixes that too.