s11e33: Okay, just hear me out
0.0 Context setting
It’s morning on Thursday April 14, 2022. Today is another day where Elon Musk is treating The Media like a cat toy and batting it around, but the analogy doesn’t quite work because The Media enjoys it. I suppose it’s like a sociopathic cat torturing a puppy? Wait, the media isn’t necessarily like a fluffy cute innocent naive puppy either.
Anyway.
A quick reminder: Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1 collecting the 45 best essays from episodes 1-50 is out now. You, my three thousand-odd subscribers, can get a copy with 20% off.
Paid supporters and subscribers get a free copy, so imagine a great upsell here to become a paid supporter/subscriber.
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
1.1 Do Not Recommend, continued
Yesterday I was thinking about Do Not Recommend, how I’d like apps/products/services to just knock it off and Not Recommend Things.
This led to the realization that using Instagram these days (and other feed-based, recommendation-making applications) feels claustrophobic and stifling, just because of the ratio of “content” to sponsored posts and suggested posts. So, I did a science!
This is the state of education and culture, where I get to say “I did a science!” and all I did was “count some things”.
This is what I saw in the first 20 posts in my Instagram feed:
-
friend post
-
friend post
-
sponsored post
-
friend post
-
suggested post
-
friend post
-
sponsored post
-
friend post
-
suggested post
-
friend post
-
sponsored post
-
friend post
-
suggested post
-
friend post
-
sponsored post
-
friend post
-
suggested post
-
friend post
-
sponsored post
-
friend post
That’s 10 friend posts, 5 sponsored posts and 5 suggested posts. Apart from opening up the app, there’s no point in the first 20 posts where I’m shown more than one post from an explicitly followed account.
This… sucks? I mean, on the one hand a 50% content to not-content ratio doesn’t feel horrible (presumably it doesn’t feel horrible because I have lived with platform abuse and am now inured to it).
Other ways to look at this:
-
Your recommendations aren’t recommendations. They’re interruptions.
-
How would you measure for this degree of pissed-off-ness? What sort of research? Are you really going to find out the qualitative degree of sheer rage by asking if the recommendations were “relevant” or if there are “too many”?
-
Even commercial radio of all things, in the US at least, has invented the concept of commercial-free periods where they acknowledge that maybe you just want to listen to music for a bit without being interrupted (they literally say, “without interruptions”!)
-
That’s to say nothing of high-end/premium glossy magazines who (after quickly checking with admittedly outlier Vogue US) front load with a crap ton of full-bleed colour ads, and then by my reckoning when the cover feature started, then continued in an ad-free manner for a good 60-odd pages.
-
Like I said, your recommendations are interruptions.
What would I do? I’d take suggested posts out of the Instagram feed. But maybe I wouldn’t get promoted for that. I have a private account, so I get account suggestions in Follow Requests and hey, the entire search tab in the bottombar is full of suggested content anyway. I mean, why not just try rebranding the search page as “shit we recommend you” or if you’re going full on “we’re not trying to do a TikTok honestly”, just… turn that search view into an FYP?
1.2 Okay, just hear me out
Look I don’t know what you think about in the shower, but I think about the love child from the unholy union of e.g. Miro and Excel.
Bear with me, I might even draw some pictures.
Okay, so: I like spreadsheets. They’re fantastic. I also love drawing. If you are like me, two of your favorite things are a) quick and dirty spreadsheets and also immaculate spreadsheets and b) whiteboards. If so, congratulations, we are friends now.
But sometimes there is a diagram that I want to draw quickly in something like Miro which is one of the least bad online collaborative drawing things and, well, stay with me: what if there were live data in the Miro board. Now Dan, you’re going to say, Miro already has integrations that pull in live data from Google Sheets, you can use them to populate cards or whatever, and I am going to say: ha, that’s not what I meant at all, I’m going to have to draw a picture.
What I mean, he says, staving off drawing a picture, is having both your spreadsheet array in a workspace and your drawing canvas in the same workspace – in the same window! – and being able to directly reference one from the other. Now you may also say, look, what about Airtable or whatever? And I will also say this: we keep talking about AirTable and SmartSheet and they’re kind of in evolutionary dead ends right now, a bit like 2022’s Lotus Improv. You all love them, and they’re not going to survive, sorry. I mean, they have a niche. Don’t interrupt me explaining my new exciting niche!
Anyway: my new niche. At the least, each text field you whack somewhere on Miro can reference a cell in your spreadsheet array that’s in your workspace. You can see both at the same time. You’re just, like, hey: this text box just uses whatever’s in E4 or whatever labeled cell.
Or, you can tear bits of your spreadsheet array off. Think of them as… tabs in a conventional sheet? Just but a tab here of arbitrary side and you’ve accidentally gotten an input form.
I think what I’m saying is some sort of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster of spreadsheet-as-IDE combined with Miro-as-interface-builder, and the reason why it’s interesting is because spreadsheets are the most widely used programming language and development environment in the entire world, and if you thought Visual Basic was bad or if you thought just spreadsheets on their own were bad, you’re going to hate this. Which is why if you’re going to make it, you’d build in version control etc from the start and also build in testing, validation and so on so as not to repeat the sins of the past.
I suppose I will try to do a drawing and treat that as healthy practice.
Wow that’s a terrible drawing, I need to practice more.
Okay, so here you have a canvas that has a 6 by 3 spreadsheet matrix on it, someone’s started counting how many things Amy, Josh and Sunil have. Those values for Amy, Josh, Sunil, say ($A1:3) are incorporated by reference in the text box on the left. (Huh, you might even do a thing where you can tear off a spreadsheet cell, turn it into an aliased text box, and then do whatever you want to the text box on the canvas?). There’s another 1 by 1 spreadsheet matrix on it which displaying the “16” total which I think (this took like 3 minutes and I haven’t had any tea) is just displaying the sum of $A1:3.
Oh look at that, it’s meeting time.
Hm, I want to think about this more. In my copious free time.
Okay, felt like a but of a weird one today, but it did come in at under 25 minutes.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan