Neither of them comes anywhere close to fitting the Young Brogrammer stereotype they are, if anything, its antithesis, in both form and deed. My point is that ThinkUp is a product of two of the smartest and most caring people I know, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash. In fact, whenever I’ve sent them feedback, the responses have been fantastic - really thoughtful and detailed. They really, really care about getting this right. If they haven’t found solutions yet, I know they’re trying. I’m not bringing this up to shame ThinkUp, and I hope I haven’t mischaracterized them here. Smaller in scale, but very similar in structure. ThinkUp put what its code found into a “most popular” box. Facebook put what its code found into a Year in Review “ad”. This was exactly what Facebook did with Year in Review: found the bit of data that had the most easily-tracked response metrics. Something like, “You must be doing something right - people loved what you had to say!” But the accompanying copy was upbeat, cheery, and totally didn’t work. “Popular” is maybe not the best word choice there.Īdmittedly, this is a small wrinkle, a little moment of content clashing with context, and maybe there isn’t a better single word than “popular” to describe “the thing you posted that had the most easily-tracked response metrics”. It was when I posted a link to Rebecca’s obituary. So I started getting reports from ThinkUp, and one of the first was to tell me about my “most popular shared link” on Twitter. It’s a fun service, and it is specifically designed to “show how well you’re using your social networks at a more human level,” to quote their site. I’d let it fall by the wayside, but the Good Web Bundle encouraged me to sign up for it again, so I did. It is everywhere.Īs an example, I recently re-joined ThinkUp, a service I first used when it was install-yourself-and-good-luck alpha ware, and I liked it then. Second, failure to consider worst-case scenarios is not a special disease of young, inexperienced programmers. So maybe dial back your condescension toward their lived experiences. This is not something you can blame on Those Meddling Kids and Their Mangy Stock Options.įirst off, by what right do we assume that young programmers have never known hurt, fear, or pain? How many of them grew up abused, at home or school or church or all three? How many of them suffered through death, divorce, heartbreak, betrayal? Do you know what they’ve been through? No, you do not. “What do you expect from a bunch of privileged early-20s hipster Silicon Valley brogrammers who’ve never known pain or even want?” seemed to be the general tenor of those responses. What surprised and dismayed me were the…let’s call them uncharitable assumptions made about the people who worked on Year in Review. But then it took off, and a lot of people came into it without the context I assumed the audience would have. The very early responses to the post were about what I expected. The people who I envisioned myself writing for - they got what I was saying and where I was focused. I was using Facebook’s Year in Review as one example, a timely and relevant foundation to talk about a much wider issue. Taking worst-case scenarios into account is something that web design does poorly, and usually not at all. This happens all the time, all over the web, in every imaginable context. Yes, their design failed to handle situations like mine, but in that, they’re hardly alone. (And yes, I’ve reflected quite a bit on the irony that I inadvertently made their lives more difficult by posting, after they inadvertently made mine more difficult by coding.) But I am very sorry that I dropped the Internet on his head for Christmas. Also determined to do better in the future. I did get email from Jonathan Gheller, product manager of the Year in Review team at Facebook, before the story starting hitting the papers, and he was sincerely apologetic. So the first thing I want to say: I owe the Year in Review team in specific, and Facebook in general, an apology. I never expected widespread linking, let alone mainstream media coverage. I hoped that I’d maybe give a few of them something new and interesting to think about, but it was really mostly just me thinking out loud about a shortcoming in our field. I honestly expected “ Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” to be read by maybe two or three hundred people over the next couple of weeks, all of them friends, colleagues, and friends who are colleagues. This post is probably going to be a little bit scattered, because I’m still reeling from the overwhelming, unexpected response to the last post.
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