Huh, my take on this has always been the opposite. Friction is how the "attention economy" makes money. You can't monetize people's attention directly - but you can throw in friction - ads, dark patterns - in the way of people. Like a metaphorical donkey on a treadmill hooked up to a dynamo, attention is how you make people chase your carrot; friction is how you slowly bleed them out of their money.
In this view, friction is bad - and the reason I've been using this metaphor for years, it because it makes it clear the reason tech sucks is intentional - the parts that suck are the parts that make money.
EDIT:
More aligned with the article, you could say that attention economy strategically manages friction; it removes it where the article is looking for them, and placing it elsewhere. You can imagine the user to be a wooden ball, rolling around until they fall into a pit structured like this:
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
** **
* *
*******
That is: low friction when they fall into the hole, moderate friction (sandpaper) as they tumble around inside it, chasing rewards or fulfillment or just wanting the software to do the promised job - that's the part that continuously extracts value - and very high friction (spikes) should they want to try and leave the hole.
Also very visible in (mobile) video games, which limit how much a player can do or achieve in a period of time, but they offer a purchase to unlock that friction / limitation.
Because of the medium that is the internet (low friction and high observability) it has a glaring lack of interest in solving problems where the destination is high friction low observability.
In fact, because the digital world explicitly competes with friction for engagement any financially incentivized platform must direct people away from the real world and real people.
So the endgame is to replace real people with digital people even in our relationships.
Real spaces with fake places.
Real disagreements with manufacturered ones.
Only people who have been heavily involved in 3rd places seem to be able to quantify what our modern world has unnecessarily thrown away.
It's a glaring ommission once you realize it, working to solve that atm.
I don't understand from your comment why a 3rd place - the importance of which I do indeed recognize in our modern world - is impossible on the Internet, if that's what you are implying? I imagine most of us on HN have been part of online communities that were meaningful. Some people, myself included, keep those places going - on Discord and the like.
Post is about incentives and qualia; digital 3rd places exist on the internet and have their own value. I'm glad they exist and that people maintain them. Some of the best early digital 3rds were BBSes which were also high friction and low observability.
I mean, it's that digital "places" are not nearly as good as physical places, is the sense a lot of us have.
I've seen some people who have good descriptions or arguments for why they think this is true. But for me, it's pretty much entirely a visceral intuitive feeling about it. But nevertheless I think it's right. I think we need in-person connection to thrive.
Not saying this is what you're doing, but I find requiring someone to solve a problem immediately after sharing it can (ironically) stifle finding a solution. The act of identifying and the act of solving rarely happen all in one motion, and often the first step to solving a problem is to establish its validity among peers so meaningful solutions can arise.
But the headline is really bad. It's not a commodity and it's not valuable. It is what creates value; it's what makes value meaningful.
Don't get hung up on the headline. It's a thesis equivalent to the notion that art comes from struggle against some kind of limitation. That limitation is usually arbitrary (the form of poetry, the rules of a game, the difficulty of oil paint and brush), but the result is meaningful despite and because of it.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
What is the idea of the article? It's all over the place. Zuck is bad, Trump is bad, a degree in basket weaving can be obtained by a chatbot, it's who you know, the Fed held rates, Uber drivers are somehow related to friction, we need change but we also need things to go back to how they were.
The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it, so the poet isn't limited to any specific form, and many did write in different forms. Similarly unclear what was arbitrary about oil paints, what was a similarly colorful alternative without such limits?
>The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it
Only in abstract - before you get to do it. When you do start to write a specific poem this doesn't hold anymore, and a big part of the art is fitting the form you chose.
I mean poetry is an arrangement of symbols, generally symbols that are related in their representation: assonance, dissonance, rhyme, meter, stress, meaning…
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
Toqueville wrote about American believing in themselves, but not in isolation.
> Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.
But that was based on need, back before a lot of modern institutions existed. Where public schools didn’t exist yet, there were private academies. Before insurance companies, there were mutual aid societies.
Nowadays there are businesses and other organizations serving every need, though sometimes only if you have enough money.
Feudalism wasn't at all about people. It was about land. That's the principal difference with slaveholding: in a slaveholding society, principal asset is people, and the land is usually cheap, just worthless unless you own slaves who can cultivate it - it is the people who are the limited resource. In a feudal society, it is the land - if you have land, people will come - there was no point to instill gulag-like conditions on them - land was limited, people were not - so there was nowhere for them to run.
You can see it differently: Digital world is almost entirely friction, shoveling useless info into our brains from morning till evening and preventing them from functioning normally. And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
Is the friction of establishing trust via TLS on the way to consuming all the bandwidth?
One seriously wonders if the cost of zero trust will kill off the open internet, reducing us to walled gardens of SSH connections that can only be obtained by invitation.
We're falling far short of the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no?
The friction is incompatibility. That's what makes it difficult to interact with the system, and for the system to interact with itself.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision is great, but no one has really figured out how to make it feasible. To make matters worse, the interests of capital have taken over the system, and replaced most interpersonal interactions with an advertising market.
When a participant in the system is able to monopolize interaction in that system, they end up writing the rules that define compatibility for other participants of the system. The effect is not only that people on different platforms are isolated from the people on other platforms, it's also that they must interact with the system through the rules of their chosen platform. Rules don't just define the bounds of interaction: they define the interface, the logic, the goals, etc.
---
It's impossible to build a set of rules that captures the entire potential of digital interaction. Objectivity is impossible, because the moment we write down its meaning, we subject it to a specific isolated context.
I'm working on a way to change the perspective that the system has with itself, so that subjectivity can be a first-class feature, and compatibility can be accomplished after-the-fact. What I have so far is still an extremely abstract idea, but I do think it's possible.
Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
Is the correct response to someone who hates their job, who happens to take a hike and enjoy nature once in a while, "why don't you go live in the woods then?"?
I think this is true to an extent and it’s good to take a step back and remind yourself that thing you think is making you miserable is ultimately a small square of metal and glass. But the actual situation is more complicated. Clearly phones have utility beyond being skinner boxes, the ability to contact your loved ones, navigate roads and transit systems, translate languages, retrieve information from the web, etc are all extremely useful and their absence would decrease your quality of life. But since that’s all bundled together with the stuff people find harmful you’re left in a constant struggle to only your device in a beneficial way. You can lock down your phone but that’s just a band-aid. If someone can figure out a “smart-ish” phone that does the things I listed above but not the harmful things I think there would be a real market for it.
Well, you call it friction, but others call it just the real world. It's going to be there, firm and fine, unaware of this digital, virtual bacteria. Just like those rocks who saw a highway come up beside them, a city getting built, and then all becoming ruins, restoring the natural landscape. All happening in a blip of time for the rocks. Adaptation would restore normalcy.
If social isolation and digital-ness is not rewarded, it would go away on its own. If it is not supported by the decaying social fabric, it would fall like facade of playing cards. Everything must interact with real world and adapt at the ground level.
Human endeavor has insignificantly small effect on the real world. Cultures and schools of thought fall and new ones rise. Real world doesn't adapt to your wish, you adapt to the world.
99% of the world population might not know any stuff you are talking about - trumpcoin, VR headsets, AI etc. That's not what the life on earth is made of.
I don't get the whole friction thing. Yes, it's a thing. No, I don't see how it makes any kind of point here. What you call friction appears to be the inverse of investment. Not monetary investment, but actual resources put towards making something work.
I also don't see a strong connection between the digital world getting more frictionless and the physical world getting worse. Unless you're suggesting that we're forgetting about the physical stuff because we're going all digital, they seem to just be two things happening at the same time. There are ways they can be linked. We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to save money. But I don't think it's a direct relationship.
Is the FAA letting air traffic control fail because the FAA is busy tweeting? I don't think so. It's because it's being defunded... by a guy who spends all his time tweeting. Another weak connection there, but it's simply because of government priorities. But it started before then. I think physical infrastructure has been on a slow decline since long before things like social media existed.
Tangential: More than once (I refuse to say the two nickels catchphrase) I have spotted a person at a techno party sitting down with their phone and been like "oh no you don't" and they have never been annoyed by this.
> We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to save money.
Exactly what I understood.
Also if people in country forget that infrastructure need uptake to keep it running this crumbles and to get it running you need to spend 10x times more money to get it up again.
This seems like a pretty confused piece, with poorly defined terms and poetic associations more than arguments.
Friction can be both a natural obstacle, an accident, or a deliberate tool of social and business engineering. It's not inherently good or bad. It's value depends on context. We most often think of friction as evil, because it makes easy things hard. But there are lots of cases where someone might decide something *should* be hard (eg the educational examples she brings up, or any kind of athletic or intellectual training where you can need to be good to surpass a threshold of performance).
In a broader context, friction is always part of an effort/reward ratio. It's the effort part, but part of its meaning is derived from the reward.
Readit News
In this view, friction is bad - and the reason I've been using this metaphor for years, it because it makes it clear the reason tech sucks is intentional - the parts that suck are the parts that make money.
EDIT:
More aligned with the article, you could say that attention economy strategically manages friction; it removes it where the article is looking for them, and placing it elsewhere. You can imagine the user to be a wooden ball, rolling around until they fall into a pit structured like this:
That is: low friction when they fall into the hole, moderate friction (sandpaper) as they tumble around inside it, chasing rewards or fulfillment or just wanting the software to do the promised job - that's the part that continuously extracts value - and very high friction (spikes) should they want to try and leave the hole.In fact, because the digital world explicitly competes with friction for engagement any financially incentivized platform must direct people away from the real world and real people.
So the endgame is to replace real people with digital people even in our relationships.
Real spaces with fake places.
Real disagreements with manufacturered ones.
Only people who have been heavily involved in 3rd places seem to be able to quantify what our modern world has unnecessarily thrown away.
It's a glaring ommission once you realize it, working to solve that atm.
Deleted Comment
I've seen some people who have good descriptions or arguments for why they think this is true. But for me, it's pretty much entirely a visceral intuitive feeling about it. But nevertheless I think it's right. I think we need in-person connection to thrive.
Deleted Comment
But the headline is really bad. It's not a commodity and it's not valuable. It is what creates value; it's what makes value meaningful.
Don't get hung up on the headline. It's a thesis equivalent to the notion that art comes from struggle against some kind of limitation. That limitation is usually arbitrary (the form of poetry, the rules of a game, the difficulty of oil paint and brush), but the result is meaningful despite and because of it.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
Instead I got a pretty interesting article about human nature and the economy as a whole.
Dead Comment
Only in abstract - before you get to do it. When you do start to write a specific poem this doesn't hold anymore, and a big part of the art is fitting the form you chose.
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
> Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.
But that was based on need, back before a lot of modern institutions existed. Where public schools didn’t exist yet, there were private academies. Before insurance companies, there were mutual aid societies.
Nowadays there are businesses and other organizations serving every need, though sometimes only if you have enough money.
One seriously wonders if the cost of zero trust will kill off the open internet, reducing us to walled gardens of SSH connections that can only be obtained by invitation.
We're falling far short of the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no?
Tim Berners-Lee's vision is great, but no one has really figured out how to make it feasible. To make matters worse, the interests of capital have taken over the system, and replaced most interpersonal interactions with an advertising market.
When a participant in the system is able to monopolize interaction in that system, they end up writing the rules that define compatibility for other participants of the system. The effect is not only that people on different platforms are isolated from the people on other platforms, it's also that they must interact with the system through the rules of their chosen platform. Rules don't just define the bounds of interaction: they define the interface, the logic, the goals, etc.
---
It's impossible to build a set of rules that captures the entire potential of digital interaction. Objectivity is impossible, because the moment we write down its meaning, we subject it to a specific isolated context.
I'm working on a way to change the perspective that the system has with itself, so that subjectivity can be a first-class feature, and compatibility can be accomplished after-the-fact. What I have so far is still an extremely abstract idea, but I do think it's possible.
Then sell your phone?
Sorry to be dismissive, but you are locked in a prison of your own making.
Then don't be dismissive?
Seriously, isn't this answer the exact application of your own philosophy?
Dead Comment
If social isolation and digital-ness is not rewarded, it would go away on its own. If it is not supported by the decaying social fabric, it would fall like facade of playing cards. Everything must interact with real world and adapt at the ground level.
Human endeavor has insignificantly small effect on the real world. Cultures and schools of thought fall and new ones rise. Real world doesn't adapt to your wish, you adapt to the world.
99% of the world population might not know any stuff you are talking about - trumpcoin, VR headsets, AI etc. That's not what the life on earth is made of.
I also don't see a strong connection between the digital world getting more frictionless and the physical world getting worse. Unless you're suggesting that we're forgetting about the physical stuff because we're going all digital, they seem to just be two things happening at the same time. There are ways they can be linked. We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to save money. But I don't think it's a direct relationship.
Is the FAA letting air traffic control fail because the FAA is busy tweeting? I don't think so. It's because it's being defunded... by a guy who spends all his time tweeting. Another weak connection there, but it's simply because of government priorities. But it started before then. I think physical infrastructure has been on a slow decline since long before things like social media existed.
Tangential: More than once (I refuse to say the two nickels catchphrase) I have spotted a person at a techno party sitting down with their phone and been like "oh no you don't" and they have never been annoyed by this.
Exactly what I understood. Also if people in country forget that infrastructure need uptake to keep it running this crumbles and to get it running you need to spend 10x times more money to get it up again.
If at all.
Friction can be both a natural obstacle, an accident, or a deliberate tool of social and business engineering. It's not inherently good or bad. It's value depends on context. We most often think of friction as evil, because it makes easy things hard. But there are lots of cases where someone might decide something *should* be hard (eg the educational examples she brings up, or any kind of athletic or intellectual training where you can need to be good to surpass a threshold of performance).
In a broader context, friction is always part of an effort/reward ratio. It's the effort part, but part of its meaning is derived from the reward.