[wristmittens]

Something about this rubbed me the wrong way and I realized it was because this pretends that ignoring much of the long tail of userbase is not only okay but beneficial to the majority. If, say, Quip ignored bugs in IE6 that's likely fine because my parents using their CRT iMac aren't going to be using Quip, but imagine if a crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers; suddenly all the disadvantaged people that can't afford new laptops lose access to their email.

If it's a bug that 10 users are hitting because they were migrated from an earlier version incorrectly, sure it might be okay not to fix, but if 10 users are hitting it because they're legally blind and using an extraordinarily large font to use your product, it's crappy to say they don't deserve a fix. You have to understand what part of your userbase is hitting a bug and then decide from there.

[twtw]

> crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers;

Google started telling me some months ago that my browser is unsupported and random stuff has stopped working every few weeks since. I'm running circa 2015 Safari.

[trav4225]

Something to perhaps consider: if both groups of 10 people are experiencing a bug, especially one not caused by their own doing, why is one group more "deserving" of a fix than the other?

[taejo]

A bad migration can be worked around by a clean install, but blindness can't, so there's one. Legal reasons are another (e.g. the Americans with Disabilities Act).

OT: does anybody know of a site with similar interesting content and discussion to HN, but with a fraction of sociopaths closer to that of the general world population?

[trav4225]

Thanks for the input!

I hope the sociopath comment wasn't triggered by my question. I tend to question widespread assumptions, perhaps more often than I ought to. But I find that, more often than not, people don't have a good reason for the positions they hold. I abhor groupthink which, sadly, dominates our culture today.

[taejo]

The sociopath comment was indeed triggered by your question, though it wasn't fair that it got directed at you rather than any of the hundreds of other comments that make me feel the same way, and I'm sorry for that, but I suspect that any of those commenters would have given a similar defense.

It matters very much which widespread assumptions one tend to question, and which subconsciously get a free pass, and I find that HNers on the whole are likely to question assumptions like "people should be kind to each other" more than most people, while questioning "companies are legally required to maximize shareholder value" less, where in fact it's the latter that's false, and while the former isn't a statement of fact, it's a very healthy axiom for humanity.

Shared values are not "groupthink": they're what allow us to have society at all, and while we should be allowed to discuss them, dismissing them carelessly is anti-social.

[wristmittens]

Not exactly the same thing but this is a similar idea of using data and algorithms to ignore the disadvantaged.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/review/automating-i...