Neologism for a neologistic age: "Minimum viable user"
In my recent comments on Google Chrome, I tossed out a phrase describing the lowest-skilled user a product might feasibly accommodate, or if you're business-minded, /profitably/ accommodate. The hazard being that such an MVU then /drags down/ the experience for others, and in particular expert or experienced users. More to follow.
First, this appears a new coinage:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22minimum+viable+user%22
#tootstorm
1/
At its heart, a desire path is the failure for designer to correctly anticipate, or facilitate, the needs and desires of their users. Such paths reflect emergent practices or patterns, some constructive, some challenging the integrity of a system.
Mastodon Tootstorms are an example of a positive creative accomodation. Mostly.
On other services, the lack of an ability to otherwise dismiss content frequently creates an overload of the spam or abuse reporting mechanism. G+ comes to mind.
6/
@RefurioAnachro Circles ... done right.
I'd prefer to have "audiences" and "sources" specified, somehow.
It's complicated.
> better than [... g+] circles
@dredmorbius, how so? Circles are sets. They can represent everything! But since such a feature would hopefully come as an api, let me say I'd happily implement any missing operations or other conveniences myself.
@RefurioAnachro G+ circles aren't specified as /audience/ or /sources/. They play both roles. Without regard to content. And blind the source or target to how they are classified by the Circling user.
If I can specify:
1. Standardised topics
2. By sending or receipt
3. Sources of interest
4. Audiences for distribution
Then I can filter my /incoming stream/ to topics of interest, from specified authors. Say, "personal posts" from "friends".
And I can filter my /outgoing/ stream similarly.
@RefurioAnachro This solves the specific problem of, say, following Linus Torvalds, if:
1. You're a member of his family.
2. You're interested in scuba diving.
3. You're interested in Linux.
4. You're interested in Portland, OR, regional matters
With standardised topics, you could include, or exclude, his public personal posts. Or he could limit personal posts to some non-public distribution, whilst Linux and Scuba would be. Regional filters might include Portland or Oregon. Etc.
me>> g+ #circles
dred> standardized topics
@dredmorbius, ah, that's what they are for! Cool. Is there a self-organizing alternative, or a good democratic variant you can think of?
Why would my mental picture of word2vec be harassing me right now... Bzzz!
@RefurioAnachro The more I consider this, the more the the Library of Congress Classification System seems the only logical choice. An alternative would have to strongly resemble it:
* Unencombered
* Extant
* Widely standardised
* Comprehensive
* Hierarchical
* Numerous tools
* As coarse- or fine-grained as desired
* Extensible
* A well-established process for extending, or retiring parts of, the classification
* Multi-organisational adoption
* A large extant set of practitioners
@RefurioAnachro Contrast that with the inverse:
* Encumbered (e.g., Dewey Decimal: a proprietary system)
* Greenfield: newly-created -- would have to be created, designed, and worst of all, sold to adopters
* Unstandardised
* Non-comprehensive -- it would have to be built out. And the design failures addressed.
* Non-hierarchical -- flat spaces suck
* No tools
* Unflexible
* Unextensible
* Poor/no processes
* Single-site
* No practitioners
Thanks for gathering these points, @dredmorbius! Hierarchies are cool. But having them curated not very. Btw, a (binary) tree gives a (is iso to an) ordering of a set. I imagine preferring a position on this line/spectrum, and the tree might catch up later.
A tree is basically a line! Although one may blow up arbitrary portions of it I feel a higher-dimensional representation might turn out more natural.
However, all this doesn't make it self-organized (nor standardized).
I wonder, @zalexz, what could be the cause for such an explosion of complexity? We can already subscribe filling a single list, now all we need to do is allow each user to map list items to labels to group them.
Oh wait, mastodon does have lists by now, and it seems to work well. Except that some clients don't support lists...
Yes, mastodon has lists. I have used circles on google+ to follow my engagers and organically keep my relationships slim and relevant. In theory you can do these things with pen and paper, but having some ui support makes these kinds of interaction with one's relationship graph available to a wider audience, and I think that's a good thing! Negative listings are much more controversal, but I believe they're important, too!
Doc Edward Morbius ❌
Refurio Anachro
zalexz