This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to engage with the detail, and increasingly expects the world to conform to its expectations. That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements.
Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century.
It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
> I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did
Not disagreeing with your overall point but this isn't correct. Medieval peasants worked about 150 days a year, and while they were obviously very busy during planting and harvesting times, they had lighter workloads at other points in the year.
This is poignant in the age of LLMs. What cultural richness are we going to lose as a result? What societal cohesion are we going to lose? What wealth inequality are we going to create?
That period was when all the lords had captured the land and forced people to toil on the land, without access to large land ranges the average person cannot live independently
Before your ancestors would have kept a large herd of mammals and lived nomadically moving to fresh pastures when the grass and vegetation was eaten
It's rare but there are some modern nomadic people who live like this camels and goats in the desert
Old diets were primarily carnivore and plants were struggle foods
That's why Europeans killed all the buffalo and why the Japanese on average are shorter because they had long periods where meat was restricted for religious reasons
Don't compare yourself to a people under exploitation, independence was taken by force
Sometimes bespoke subtlety is bad or superfluous and sometimes its innovative. Ideally, you streamline a golden path as best you can but its also important to leave room for new good ideas.
I saw someone saying that it is as though tech read Seeing Like a State and took the wrong lesson
I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
> That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements.
That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions.
When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
Ironically at my company, our custom software made us too flexible. There was too many crazy left field demands that weren't really that useful.
So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can touch.
This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
We got one of our largest and definitely most complex customers not long ago. Being rather small, we pushed hard against any customization that we didn't feel was necessary due to business demands, and asked them to follow the way we'd successfully used with our many other customers.
After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
> every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead
I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.
And this has been true since states wrought the cadastral map, last names, the metric system and taxes on us.
The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).
I had a fleeting hope for a while that the sheer complexity of reality would thwart these forces, a la https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard -- but I'm increasingly worried that the explosion in performance of machine learning plus the fact that much of the world's population has willingly handed over their data in service of convenience will just make it a cakewalk. What is the modern digital equivalent to the War Machine (e.g. Deleuze) that can fight this? is it possible? Am I overreacting?
> This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again
Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening.
It's the complexity of reality sure - but that's not the only lesson.
Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.
>users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling.
This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience.
But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.
It's mildly amusing that AO3 is considered more palatable than booru websites. Both AO3 and many of the boorus have content that would be hard for most folks to stomach. I guess AO3 has the advantage of being mostly text, (which seems to be generally less visceral to people,) but it is also nearly completely uncensored, since that's kind of the point of it.
Yes, overall I wouldn't describe either of them as particularly palatable to a general audience, haha. Your hunch is the same as mine -- text has much less potential for instant shock. On AO3 you have to, sort of, go out of your way (by reading, or searching for specific tags, etc.) to hit the unsavory stuff.
A lifetime ago, on Stack Overflow, I was one of those people that monitored tags. I nuked needless new tags as often as I could, replacing them on each post with more correct existing tags. I ended up with a set of huge search bookmarks with regularly recurring bad tags to help keep things under control. Burninating bad tags became a delightful passtime. But eventually I burnt out on SO as a whole and dropped out. That was a decade ago now. I recently rediscovered one of the search bookmarks and lemme tell you things got really bad in my absence. The New Tag Deletionist Cabal is no more.
> Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else.
"Featuring". Yes Wired that is a technically accurate description.
They could have tried Steam, but I don't think it works as well. Although they did start with the pure freeform one and switched to a managed one the next day.
Exactly that, it's labor intensive, while tech tries to reduce labor intensivity by using magic or rules or whatnot. Related and larger scale projects are sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes, although Wikipedia makes use of a lot of automation as well.
You can totally use machine learning to classify stuff, that's one of the main things we've been trying to do with it, after all! But that automatic stuff often is entirely without soul and without contextual understanding. Useful as a starting point, perhaps, but the human touch is still needed to organize information like a human wants.
The huge number of communities that have elected to move to Discord, an information black hole, seems like a strong counterargument to the generality of this claim.
This seems to be a generational issue. It makes me sad, but I suspect it's because doing things "in public" on the Internet has become increasingly exhausting and people have retreated to gated communities. It's not a black hole, it's a "dark forest": you can't find their information because they're scared of you.
It's not super new though, people had private forums in the phpbb era as well, which you could only read after login. Or think about IRC, private torrent trackers etc.
I think the sort of Discord group being discussed here counts as "in public". You can join interest groups by just clicking a link with an anonymous account. It's out of view of Google, unindexable, hardish to search and to collect organized information from, but it is more public than say, old newspaper archives in microfilm that anyone can look at in a library.
People are going to discord for that because it is convenient as a platform for a variety of reasons, not because they want to hide it from the public imho.
OSINT communities use discord to communicate and discuss information from mostly twitter and telegram and organize and share the packaged information.
Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone (or every community) has the same need to organize information, and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so.
Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and frequently there is another distribution network involved.
Accurate Problem description, which can easily be countered with .. [extra effort expended in idealized behaviours] .. [I could paste Lore Ipsum here everybody stopped reading at the idealization]
People who care deeply tend to do things better than people who don't care. Large organizations only organize information to the point of short term marginal profitability. If being better organized beyond a point doesn't get you more money in the next few months/years, it isn't worth it to most businesses.
Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably unnecessary, but to each their own.
IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on that item is very minimal. The current version is what you sell and that is it. The previous versions are just historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the margin.
But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3.
What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what they find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal. I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.
Archive Of Our Own is not just any group of fans of course, the very name of the website refers to them deciding to write a better version of fanfiction.net. The award reflects the main goal of the website, not something that happened by accident.
Reminds me of Google's old motto, "Organizing the World's information" (is it still?). Even at their best, Google was never really "organizing" as much as "making it searchable". e.g. YouTube - for a given band, why can't I browse a list of their past concerts (with dates and locations) and see all videos from each?
And people realized it was easier to just search, just as they are now realizing it is easier to just ask, and have an LLM synthesize all the search results.
The upsetting part isn't that fans are better at organising information, it's that companies and governments are so incredibly bad at it.
Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend on organisation having done exactly that in advance.
There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.
To me that sounds backwards. Who knows your business better than you and your staff? How would anyone from the outside be able to manage your internal information better?
I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire consultants and bring in outside help and products to get back on track because they honestly don't know how their own business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're missing the middle part so they not actually doing their best.
Sure, it works for your anime fan site, but what about when money is involved, like in a search engine? That attracts bad actors, who can use their power to abuse your site.
Solvable with a combination of robustness and stochasticity. If you say need two randomly selected people to approve an edit, and you flag users who make too many attempts at making rejected edits (either one user, lots of bad edits or lots of users trying to make the same bad edit), the only way for a bad actor to reliably make undesirable edits would be to gain control of a very large number of potential approvers. More generally, if the cost to effectively manipulate the system is greater than the perceived reward from manipulating the system, bad actors aren't an issue.
I noticed the article didn't speculate on why, but I think you nailed it. This system is probably incompatible with a commercial site. It requires too many volunteers.
Readit News
Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century.
It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
Not disagreeing with your overall point but this isn't correct. Medieval peasants worked about 150 days a year, and while they were obviously very busy during planting and harvesting times, they had lighter workloads at other points in the year.
Before your ancestors would have kept a large herd of mammals and lived nomadically moving to fresh pastures when the grass and vegetation was eaten
It's rare but there are some modern nomadic people who live like this camels and goats in the desert
Old diets were primarily carnivore and plants were struggle foods
That's why Europeans killed all the buffalo and why the Japanese on average are shorter because they had long periods where meat was restricted for religious reasons
Don't compare yourself to a people under exploitation, independence was taken by force
Dead Comment
I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions.
When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.
The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).
Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779
There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.
This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience.
But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.
Every volunteer counts.
"Featuring". Yes Wired that is a technically accurate description.
They could have tried Steam, but I don't think it works as well. Although they did start with the pure freeform one and switched to a managed one the next day.
People are going to discord for that because it is convenient as a platform for a variety of reasons, not because they want to hide it from the public imho.
Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone (or every community) has the same need to organize information, and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so.
Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and frequently there is another distribution network involved.
Deleted Comment
Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably unnecessary, but to each their own.
IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on that item is very minimal. The current version is what you sell and that is it. The previous versions are just historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the margin.
But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3.
What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what they find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal. I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.
Deleted Comment
Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend on organisation having done exactly that in advance.
There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.
I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire consultants and bring in outside help and products to get back on track because they honestly don't know how their own business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're missing the middle part so they not actually doing their best.