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by petterroea 55 days ago
One of the favorite lessons I learned is that anything at scale has to be designed for idiots. I am pretty sure every person reading this has had days where they have done absolutely stupid things without realizing. Now assume there are thousands of users, and you could be providing tools to the smartest people in the world and still have people do stupid stuff all the time. This doesn't just apply to UX.

Then there's the question of trust. You probably have friends you know not to tell certain secrets to, because they believe they get to delegate your secrets onwards to people they trust. The further away someone is from you, the less respect they will show. Researchers have been loaning the dataset in good faith to people who they trust, but who probably didn't take the whole secrecy thing as seriously.

With 20k researchers this was inevitable. The kind of factors above need to be factored in when designing on what grounds such a dataset is to be released.

2 comments

"Favorite" in what sense? "Most critical" is a very different meaning of the word, usually it implies pleasure/happiness.

Internalizing that people are frequently less intelligent and less respectful and less kind and less thoughtful than you previously believed is a tragic loss of innocence and hope, not a favorable experience.

Favourite as in "realizing it was an interesting aha moment". Sure, it's a depressing loss of innocence. But on the other hand I always love learning things where I feel like I'm closer to knowing what I'm doing. Not that I think I'll ever get there, it's an ever lasting journey
> One of the favorite lessons I learned is that anything at scale has to be designed for idiots

And in the end it is designed _by_ idiots and only idiots find it usable.