jack

i'm not very good at gift giving. i don't know how to express my love with props. i have met the people who do. they see an item for sale and, with clairvoyant precision, know who it should belong to. i most often have to ask, and that makes me feel like i'm just doing somebody else's shopping.

i'm also not good at gift receiving. when i tell people this they get confused about how someone could be bad at receiving gifts. i guess it takes a truly autistic person to rob someone else of the joy of gift giving by accident. i express all of my feelings, including sincere gratitude, with very subdued mannerisms. even if i receive a gift that makes me feel genuinely touched, being outwards about that is a performance. and hitting all the right notes is how a gift recipient reciprocates in the gesture of gifting.

i bought board games for my parents for christmas. "decrypto" and "azul". i figured one would be good for the week before christmas when the family is gathered, and one will be good for a quiet christmas day, when it's just me and my parents. in a way i do think this is a good gift, because i at least know my parents' taste in board games, so i can at least say i thought of them. and also because giving someone a board game hints the intention of spending time with them, which is something i am much better at than gifting.

the point of this post though is that, if you also struggle with compulsory gifting, this year i went to craft mom youtube. so at minimum, i am now absolutely cracked at gift wrapping. that's my hint!

"people always complain about UI changes at first and then they get used to it" i'm going to break into your house and put all your important stuff you use every day in random drawers and see how you like it. i'm gonna hide your phone in the towel cupboard. i'll put all your spoons in the fridge. all writing utensils are now stored under a floorboard that i've drawn a pencil on (in very light pencil so you can't actually see it)

if you want your software to be a part of users' everyday lives then it has to be reliable and predictable. you can't just change the entire shape of it on a whim no matter how much better you think it is. make small changes slowly or leave it the fuck alone. a UI overhaul is rarely a good idea because even if it really is "better" you are straining the fragile trust of your userbase by throwing them unexpectedly into HEY LEARN A NEW THING when it is fucking thursday or whatever and they are busy or maybe have an urgent message to send to someone. it's disrespectful. it's a breach of common decency. you shouldn't overhaul your entire UI on a whim any more than you should "deliver" a package by hucking it through an open window at the recipient's head. take the time to knock, or at least don't complain when they yell at you and throw stuff back.

or at least, outside of their areas of deep understanding

Like look, most people, the vast majority of people have absolutely abysmal computer skills. I'd wager that's not you, the person reading this, by virtue of a selection bias - but it is most people.

But I've seen this pattern over and over with people who aren't enthusiastic computer touchers - they don't internalize a computer/app as a generalized system with common UI conventions and frameworks and reusable elements that always behave predictably in different contexts, etc, etc. They interact with these things through a set of memorized steps that gets them to the thing they want to do.

And this is particularly disastrous because if you just constantly change the steps out from under them, not only do you break their set of memorized steps, but their understanding of the program is often limited in ways that make it harder to explore software as a collection of common, understandable systems and what you end up teaching them is learned helplessness.

It is a system of arbitrary changes inflicted on them for seemingly no discernible gain that constantly changes the thing they're trying really hard to memorize how to use. It's a random punishment scheme!

And it's kind of a delicate balance, because yeah, you know what? Your UI as it exists now is probably not ideal. You probably made some compromises or didn't anticipate ways that it would be used, or accessibility pitfalls only became evident after it shipped! Sometimes you've gotta do the hard thing and break routines to get better!

But gosh it sucks that all of our tools that we use every day keep changing unpredictably every few months.

every time this topic comes up, i'm reminded of that scene from The Social Network where good ol' zuck describes facebook as being like fashion, constantly changing and evolving. this is such an apt comparison because fashion, like social media, is a wasteful, corrupt, backwards-facing engine of classist norm-production and voracious profiteering masquerading as the enlightened development of the cutting edge of human expressivity.

it's not about the tech. it's not about the users. these changes never make sense because the function of the change is epiphenomenal to its real purpose: giving investors a reason to stick around. redesigning discord or creative cloud or the idea of pants is "stimulation in your enclosure" for venture capitalists. our economy is a series of gambling addictions stacked in a trenchcoat and unwelcome unasked for alterations to perfectly functional products is the only tool any company has left to keep the gamblers sitting at their table. the profit motive is poison to integrity and usefulness. it is antithetical to the very idea of sustainable function. this trend will never stop so long as profit is the only value that matters

"people always complain about UI changes at first and then they get used to it" i'm going to break into your house and put all your important stuff you use every day in random drawers and see how you like it. i'm gonna hide your phone in the towel cupboard. i'll put all your spoons in the fridge. all writing utensils are now stored under a floorboard that i've drawn a pencil on (in very light pencil so you can't actually see it)

if you want your software to be a part of users' everyday lives then it has to be reliable and predictable. you can't just change the entire shape of it on a whim no matter how much better you think it is. make small changes slowly or leave it the fuck alone. a UI overhaul is rarely a good idea because even if it really is "better" you are straining the fragile trust of your userbase by throwing them unexpectedly into HEY LEARN A NEW THING when it is fucking thursday or whatever and they are busy or maybe have an urgent message to send to someone. it's disrespectful. it's a breach of common decency. you shouldn't overhaul your entire UI on a whim any more than you should "deliver" a package by hucking it through an open window at the recipient's head. take the time to knock, or at least don't complain when they yell at you and throw stuff back.

or at least, outside of their areas of deep understanding

Like look, most people, the vast majority of people have absolutely abysmal computer skills. I'd wager that's not you, the person reading this, by virtue of a selection bias - but it is most people.

But I've seen this pattern over and over with people who aren't enthusiastic computer touchers - they don't internalize a computer/app as a generalized system with common UI conventions and frameworks and reusable elements that always behave predictably in different contexts, etc, etc. They interact with these things through a set of memorized steps that gets them to the thing they want to do.

And this is particularly disastrous because if you just constantly change the steps out from under them, not only do you break their set of memorized steps, but their understanding of the program is often limited in ways that make it harder to explore software as a collection of common, understandable systems and what you end up teaching them is learned helplessness.

It is a system of arbitrary changes inflicted on them for seemingly no discernible gain that constantly changes the thing they're trying really hard to memorize how to use. It's a random punishment scheme!

And it's kind of a delicate balance, because yeah, you know what? Your UI as it exists now is probably not ideal. You probably made some compromises or didn't anticipate ways that it would be used, or accessibility pitfalls only became evident after it shipped! Sometimes you've gotta do the hard thing and break routines to get better!

But gosh it sucks that all of our tools that we use every day keep changing unpredictably every few months.

as someone who works with Regular Folks at a computer repair shop, i will stress that if you are making software for the general public, and you move the UI around for what to you feels like a decent reason, your customers want you dead. they hate you. they would like to see you crucified for making their tool change shape while they're holding it

Howdy everyone. Please share this. I don't care how, I don't care to whom, but you need to listen and you need to send this around.

Patreon has been mobilizing on a lot. 3D Face Scanning technology requirements, increasing scrutiny on content published, purges of various NSFW kink artwork through the years, but this last chapter in Patreon as a Queer-enabling Platform is likely to close with a hell of a bang.

Allegedly, Patreon will be going Public very soon. For those not aware, going Public means the company is going to offer Shares to Investors via the Stock Market. An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is a big deal for a tech company like Patreon, which follows the model of many Silicon Valley start-ups of blitzscaling and then retroactively changing the rules of business with their non-worker clientele. Articles from Summer of this year suggest that the company may be going Public during 2024, or perhaps right at the end of 2023. The company isn't doing so hot based on projected valuation, this might be the moment they have to go full hog.

Read on for more details. SFW content, NSFW blog, just as a heads up.