EffortPost [any]
Still reading through, commenting as bits speak to me.
most people don’t even consider that the infrastructure exists
I see this constantly in tech at both the infra and higher levels. Perfect example is the “why don’t you have x feature yet? Should be simple” shit that idiots say.
IMO it comes from this very weird entitlement complex created by the seeming “effortlessness” that the giant platforms are able to roll out new features.
Behind the scenes however, these corporations have billions in venture capital funding and thousands of workers labouring. They build out a release pipeline lined up months in advance to create the illusion of effortless development.
Meanwhile, that dynamic is very different for open source projects that rely on collective contribution. The internalized view of technological advancement as something that just happens without any work from the users of a platform instills itself even in leftists.
The alternative side of this is that constant rapid development isn’t always needed for a project to really be successful, it’s fine for software to just slowly improve in occasional bursts as needed. If no one feels the need to work on a project, then perhaps that shows the project meets enough of the userbases needs at the current moment.
This is probably a tangent, but your comment got my brain going hah
Edit:
It’s a sign of virtual abundance to simply expect infrastructure to exist and be passively confused when it malfunctions
YES! 👏 The laziness and liberalism of “it should just work” completely disrespects and devalues the labour of everyone involved with keeping the infrastructure of these systems up and running. Of course sites should have reliability and good uptime, but taking it for granted and then being enraged at the occasional bug or downtime is anti-worker.
A reciprocal ethos developed where someone expressing a desire for more content would be told to post more. A person wanting more engagement on their posts would be told to engage with others’ posts more.
While there is a gamification aspect that has since been tied into this cycle to further augment, I actually believe this mechanism of mutual engagement is reflective of (although not identical to) in-person social dynamics. If you’re having a conversation with someone and are being one-sided / monopolistic most people will respond by disengaging.
We’ve all had it happen where you rabbithole a bit too much and lose someone. Similarly, talking to a wall or not finding someone to socialize with at a party results in you being more likely to leave that party earlier than you would if you plugged in.
maintenance can also be largely automated (Not shitting on devops people here, they generally try to automate their deployments as much as possible
I think this overlooks one of the causes of this automation, which is the compounding complexity of the architecture needed to service these massive platforms.
Even with a best in class infrastructure and a fully manned department of SREs, you still encounter frequent threats that could escalate into actual system outages or service degradation. There is also the need to continually pace the growth of the infrastructure just far enough ahead of the platform’s growth to anticipate demands without incurring unreasonable costs.
My point here is that total automation to remove the need for sustaining DevOps is of course an ongoing goal of tech capital, but it is not the only driver.
Things that require more coordination than just showing up and seeing who’s around. And once these groups form, if they’re making something of value, that creation process can be iterated on and improved by anyone in the group. This ability is, in my opinion, at the core of all human social value and creativity. This is the way that people invest in their communities and make their own lives better.
YES. Love this point. Humanity’s ability to collectively organize is how we’ve been able to progress to the extent which we have. It is much less common for a single individual to achieve anything of note by themselves only.
curation was in major demand for people who were overwhelmed by having an entire encyclopedia indexed and searchable for free at any time. Of course, a capitalist creating a platform and “borrowing” all these established social mechanisms couldn’t resist heightening the force applied.
Will potentially come back to this human need for curation. There’s very much something to this and it has always been needed by us, whether it was in the form of curated museums or well maintained libraries.
Thank you for calling me out on this lol I am not a devops person.
Not a problem. I think it actually further illustrates your point about this complexity being obscured by these giant corporations. DevOps is hard for even large companies to understand the value of because if SREs are doing their jobs efficiently it can seem like “nothing is happening”. A big part of the role is combatting entropy.
what it must have looked like to see all these small forums operating
Great point. I would imagine the DevOps burden for smaller forums is significantly lower. When I think about the early internet, I don’t particularly associate it with DevOps as a discipline in part because the role arose due to the pressures of running massive web-based software at scale during the early days of “web 2.0”.
To anyone reading this, please feel to correct if I’m misremembering my history here.
Take a look at how Facebook events have decayed over time. They made them worthwhile so that they became a de-facto standard and then they kneecapped them by forcing you to pay.
I haven’t used Facebook in years so I had no idea they’d forcibly monetized this feature. Did they fully put a paygate in front of it or just lock new features behind a paid tier?
people view the designs we’re used to as not affecting our own behavior and therefore see any change in that design as manipulative
Interesting. If you set a manipulative design as standard at an early stage, then people will naturally be resistant to changing it even if it is in there interest to do so. Very reflective of the class system in our society.
design language has a giant moral component that I’ve only heard a handful of silicon valley folks discussing.
The UX thinking that has gone into identifying “dark patterns” is great reading. Once you know what it looks like you can’t unsee it.
