I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.
1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.
2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.
3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.
Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.
The medium is the message. We've been talking about this for decades - the structure of the thing you are interacting with determines how you interact with it. Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter. Infinite scroll and auto-play video eliminates the "decision points" where people would otherwise reconsider if they want to continue, so people spend more time on those sites than they would otherwise. Maybe the attributes of these mediums aren't "inherently bad," but they absolutely do influence the way that they are used and it is up to us to make the judgement of whether that has good or bad outcomes. And a lot of us think the results of infinite scroll is a bad outcome.
My understanding is that Hacker News currently paginates comments but they’re working hard to put them all on one page.
Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.
> Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter.
When it comes to politics, Twitter is the absolute worst. When you have only 140 characters, there's no room for nuance or actual discussion, so arguments get boiled down to short 1-sentence zingers that are often nothing more than really bad straw men.
I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.
I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.
1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.
2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.
3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.
Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.