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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m going to guess

    • poor media coverage
    • media is explicitly hostile to protests and pro trump/right-wing-extremism
    • many people are living paycheck to paycheck + we have minimal labor protection
    • years of left-wing organizations being kneecapped (eg: the murder of fred hampton)

    A lot of people are angry but there’s not really much organization. As much as I would love someone to take 50,000 of their closest friends, march down to DC, and shoot every republican in the head, without years of organizing that’s just a fantasy. Unfortunately, the right wing has been doing years of organizing and it’s now bearing fruit for them.





  • moving mouse targets. Like let’s say you have two pinned items on the start menu, Firefox and steam. You click Firefox and it starts to open. You go to click steam, but Firefox finishes opening and the icon gets bigger. Steam’s icon then moves to the right, so you click where it was but instead just hit Firefox again. It’s stupid.

    Note how Firefox has solved this with tabs. Open a bunch of browser tabs. Enough so they shrink a little. Then rapidly close some, starting from the left. Notice how they don’t change size until you’re done closing tabs.

    Mouse tunnels. Like you click the “File” menu, and then mouse over “New” and a long sub menu opens. Longer than the original File menu. If you mouse directly from the top of File to the bottom of New, your cursor will briefly be outside either menu. This often will cause the entire menu to close. Mouse tunnel. Have to keep the cursor in the tunnel. Annoying.

    Had an old job that insisted this was fine and refused to let me or anyone change the interface to fix it (on a website)

    Focus stealing. Like you’re typing, and some other application pops up and takes focus. The absolute worst is when it pops up and puts focus on a dialogue box, and you just happened to hit “enter”. Instead of adding a new line to your document, you just accepted something. Awful.


  • i am inclined to agree. the final fantasy 7 remake was surprisingly gentle about not having stupid missables. You could miss stuff, but it was recoverable without starting the whole thing over.

    i had a whole argument with someone on here a while ago where they insisted i just had “fomo” because i didn’t like this sort of surprise consequences. Foreshadowing is cool. Unpredictable is, to me, unsatisfying.





  • Sometimes it’s funny when tabletop RPG players expect the game to behave like a video game.

    GM: “The nearby town sent a message that a swarm of zombies is coming down the haunted mountain for them! They need help!”

    PCs: “Cool. But let’s finish that mushroom side quest first, and then we gotta help our wizard buddy get his new broom tuned up.”

    GM: “…okay.”

    <two in-game days later>

    PCs: “Ok, what do we see when we get to that town?”

    GM: “Seems like everyone’s dead. Looks a swarm of zombies or something came down from the mountain and ate everyone alive or something, maybe a day or two ago.”

    PCs: <confused, shocked>




  • This is interesting. Hinge pushed out a message to users that was like “studies show that ghosting makes you and the person you’re ghosting feel bad! It’s not a big deal to just say no thanks!”. I don’t know if it made a difference.

    One of the things to take into account is some people (often but not always men) are dangerous. Women have told me they’ve ghosted because the man was giving them danger vibes. Encouraging the person to unmatch might be good enough.

    One thing I’d like to see, I think, is some way for me to rate people I match with but didn’t keep dating. Like Alex was polite and punctual and respectful, but they hate cats so we can’t be a thing. All that info just goes into the void. Though i wouldn’t have this be free text, and there’s more ways to screw it up than do it right. Information about people ghosting or flaking would go in the same bucket.


  • I think getting people to pay anything will be a hard sell. But I also think “free” creates bad incentives. This is probably “better” but humans are really bad at understanding things.

    I wonder if a tip / pay what you want model would have legs. Probably there’s too many freeloaders, sadly.

    I would also feel pretty bad if I paid for the match and it fizzled out. Like we chat but don’t have a date, or realize there’s some deal breaker (eg: they’re moving away in a month, they smoke, they hate bisexuals, etc). Some of that would be covered by the profile, but some won’t, or won’t be noticed.

    I might try it, based on what I saw with the first couple free matches. But it would also get expensive really quickly. Cheaper than subscriptions though. I think hinge wants like $50/mo for it’s top tier.

    Like, do I pay $100 up front to have 100 likes in flight? Or do I bottleneck it to some smaller number and wait for the duds to expire? Wait for others to make the first move? The optimal strategy is unclear.

    Sorry, sort of just rambling a bit.

    Is NYC one of your target markets?



  • Pledge is kind of a weird term for it. Sounds like one of those culty christian “purity pledge” things. Would not recommend using that word. Maybe “like” or “wave” or “wink” or something like that.

    Is it 3 free matches per lifetime? Or per some smaller period of time?

    That’s good that it doesn’t hide matches. That’s a really irritating behavior on Tinder, Feeld, and others. Just tell me who’s already interested so I can focus on that instead of throwing more into the void.

    Now, next questions: What, if anything, are you doing about conversation and profile? In my experience, a lot of people absolutely self sabotage here. They have a blank profile, or one without any hooks, and then they get upset that the only messages they get are “hey”. Or they only send messages that are “hey”, and then are like “i hate small talk why is only small talk happening”

    Personally I don’t think you can fix that without like several generations of intense investment in education, but maybe a well thought out app could nudge people in the right direction. Hell, even a thing that scanned a message for a question mark and reminded the user “If you don’t ask them any questions, you’re not going to seem interested in them” would make a difference.



  • Run this flow by me?

    I load up the app. I see an attractive person. I hit “like”. Do I pay now? Or do I only pay if they also like, so there’s an extra step of “you both hit like but didn’t pay”?

    Does the other person get notified when I hit like?

    I think Tinder started by going to college campuses, finding who was hot and popular, and paying for them to throw parties. Anyone who went was told to install the app.

    I’m in NYC. I can get a date a week on the apps, but the quality varies. And like I just got ghosted twice this month. There’s room for improvement.