doodlemancy
@doodlemancy

"people always complain about UI changes at first and then they get used to it" i'm going to break into your house and put all your important stuff you use every day in random drawers and see how you like it. i'm gonna hide your phone in the towel cupboard. i'll put all your spoons in the fridge. all writing utensils are now stored under a floorboard that i've drawn a pencil on (in very light pencil so you can't actually see it)

if you want your software to be a part of users' everyday lives then it has to be reliable and predictable. you can't just change the entire shape of it on a whim no matter how much better you think it is. make small changes slowly or leave it the fuck alone. a UI overhaul is rarely a good idea because even if it really is "better" you are straining the fragile trust of your userbase by throwing them unexpectedly into HEY LEARN A NEW THING when it is fucking thursday or whatever and they are busy or maybe have an urgent message to send to someone. it's disrespectful. it's a breach of common decency. you shouldn't overhaul your entire UI on a whim any more than you should "deliver" a package by hucking it through an open window at the recipient's head. take the time to knock, or at least don't complain when they yell at you and throw stuff back.



arpad
@arpad

they tried to say he was illiterate, but knew his teachers had been wrong; it was just that the books they assigned were so boring, he was never able to make it through a single paragraph before it became more appealing to trace the lines of wood grain in his desk until his vision blurred.

if only they knew how fast he could read an interesting book - but he wasn’t about to admit where he’d spent his day, not when there was a field that still needed plowing!

(or, pre-chine chine finds a cleaver’s fable book and steps out onto the slippery slope)



Keeble
@Keeble

Look, trust me. I understand the frustration at people who don't wear masks. I work a customer-facing service job in a liberal area, and very few customers or coworkers wear masks, even the young leftists. I'm one of like two employees left who mask daily and this a job that gives the masks out for free still. And, yes, this is incredibly sad and bleak. I wish it were different.

Here's the problem, though--as anyone who has tried to get people to mask has likely experienced, for most people there is basically nothing you could say as an individual layperson to get someone to start wearing a mask again. Period. Think about it like smoking--do you really think youd be able to get someone to stop smoking by telling them about data on lung cancer? do you really think they don't know that? you really think that yelling at them from a sense of what will come across to the smoker as a condescending sense of unearned moral superiority will work either, even if you're 100% right? Masking, is, unfortunately, a losing issue. Which, yes, to me is personally weird: ive been dutifully wearing mine everyday; its hardly something i think about at all. its like wearing socks. and yet i have NO CLUE how to get people to move on this. Because it is true that, much like "only" 14% of smokers get cancer, most non-maskers wont get covid, much less long covid. but the reason people will start again can't really be data (people dont make decisions bc of data, really) and it cant be shaming/condescending people (that never works for anyone). i dont know what works, on the short to medium term.

But. Think about how long it took societally for anti-smoking measures to take hold. Years, decades even. There are tons of smokers now, many of whom want to quit, most of whom know its terrible for them. It took a concerted, coordinated movement, who had one message at a time, that they focused on one-by-one with laser precision, with the power of the literal surgeon general at their side at that.

you know what people will get on board with, like immediately? ventilation, because it doesn't require much individual decision making on their part. Instead it more closely resembles the sort of populist cause celebres that inspire people to actually act--there is a power structure above you that has the power to make things safer for everyone, but isnt because it will cost them marginally more money in the short term.

What this requires though is coordinated action and messaging rather than mourning and cathartic yelling (as much as i understand why this mourning and catharsis is needed). A good parallel in contemporary organizing is the Jewish Voice For Peace's actions in grand central station to campaign for a ceasefire in gaza, one of the protests that made the news and drove home the change in opinion that happened. As Vincent Bevins (author of the Jakarta Method) put it recently:

I was also impressed with that action the one at Grand Central Station like the Jewish voice for peace one...it was quite clear like they're all like they all identify like, as Jews, they're all wearing the shirt. They're like, "we're here for this reason. We are this group of people. You can't say that we're not." You know, like, "we we are very very clearly organized as this group and with this message." and I think that was quite powerful...
You can't get a half a million people on the street in London that are all going to have a perfect answer for, you know, the evolution of Hamas...if you make [the protest] about everything then you'll be able to find someone that slips up, or is stupid, or says the wrong thing or is like, just put there by MI5 to say the wrong thing...This is what happened in Brazil...one thing that made [Brazil's 2010s protest movement] really untenable is it really became about everything. Like, everyone was invited to kind of bring whatever cause they wanted to the streets; like literally WHATEVER. and so the government, which was even like, trying to be sympathetic didn't know how to read the streets! and so, the media ended up kind of picking and choosing the things that worked best for them. 1

Think about how this relates to covid. Right now, i see most covid-concious people still doing their own safety measures but beyond that in a resigned state of half mourning, half disgust. Right now a lot of that gets released as anger, as frustration, as a steam release, or as thoughts you choke down. These are individual actions, not group action.

What is needed is this kind of message discipline, on focusing on the thing you think you can win on, go as far as you can with that, and be prepared for a long term fight. Ventilation is an easy one bc you can point to individual state board of health suggestions and go "why are we not meeting these" to whatever person with power that the group is focused on (which requires a named target rather than gestures vaguely at everything. Making a scene at city council or school board meetings, about that one issue. dont even mention masks. Governments set recommendations on this stuff, so make them live by it.

I, for one, would be willing to volunteer time to such a movement, to such an organization. but nobody can do this shit alone. We can make the world safer for everyone, including the people who dont mask, without making them really have to change their behavior. It requires, though, for anger to turn into coordination, into tactics.


  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWSkSqm9p0w


kda
@kda

Like, I can nicely encourage people to wear N95s forever, and once in a while, that yields non-zero results! I guess! But the mask fight is… …not a winning battle, at least not during this pandemic.

Everyone deserves clean air — air without airborne pathogens, air without wildfire smoke, air without highly-concentrated VOCs and other chemicals released from plastics and various other chemicals indoors, and air without brake and tyre dust from (increasingly heavy, particulate-emitting!) vehicles in it.

And in basically every case, how we get clean air is demanding it from property owners and government agencies.

General COVID &c. safety information still needs to be spread to people, just in case they decide for personal reasons that they want to take it more seriously, but the most effective political demands we can make at this point amount to:

Give us clean air.

We usually have clean water and safe food, but as it is right now, most indoor air is not clean. We can change that — and we can change that by applying pressure against the powerful, not screaming into the void against an unyielding flood of propaganda.