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Dev.SN ♥ developers

What Have We Created?

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.

jcd writes:

"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.

So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:59PM

    by lennier (2199) on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:59PM (#3765)

    (Wish I had a 'quote' button...)

    Yes, 'UX' is a good description of what I'm personally rebelling against. And as you say, it's not about the superficial eye-candyness of modern sites. It's about something deeper: the 'curated design' philosophy which is fundamentally, deeply, anti-democratic and disempowering.

    'Design' has become a monster. It's about a few, self-appointed control freaks setting up systems which give them all the power and the users none. It's about the users being reduced to passive 'content consumers'. It's the disease which raged at Apple since the Macintosh (the opposite of the hacker-friendly Apple II), which has now spread to Microsoft and Ubuntu. It's about user forums where all the users shout saying 'we can't use this interface! It's broken!' and the designer comes back with 'I don't care, I went into space, I know better than you, you have no voice.'

    'Design' is code for authoritarianism, actually. And this is about whether we want to tolerate hardcore authoritarianism as the template for computing for the next century - or whether we can create democracy.

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