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Flip the question around and you either see how ridiculous the question is, or how disdainful it is of the art of writing (or both): “What happens when the best writer, ever, does VFX for a film?”.

Also by what measure is this person “the best practical VFX artist, ever”? Is there some global competition with leaderboards going back decades where this person is ranked objectively as number one?

This kind of nonsense making it to the front page makes it really hard to enjoy HN.

This brings back memories of the Friday Night Skate in SF in the 90s (still going but not weekly I don’t think). Started out after the 89 earthquake on the closed sections of the freeways and continued as a skate through downtown. As a neat anecdote, it was regularly attended by Tsutomu Shimomura, the guy whose team caught Kevin Mitnick. A number of other folks from the hacker/phreaker scene were regular attendees too.

I work in SRE where a pretty common expression is “what gets measured gets fixed”. I used to take that as at least mildly inspirational, and to mean that more and better monitoring leads to more things being fixed. And to some extent that’s true.

In recent years though I’ve come to see the downsides of that mantra as outweighing the good of it. Because some things are either extraordinarily difficult or expensive to measure, or because understanding what the measurement is demonstrating is beyond the intellectual reach or experience of many people. By the latter sentiment I mean, it’s not enough to just show a number or a graph, it has to be interpreted, and for some things that interpretation is very challenging if you’re not a (or the) expert in that system.

As a result, it’s more like “easy to measure and understand things get fixed, everything else gets ignored”. It disdains or glosses over the idea that maybe a person or team’s subjective opinion about what’s important to fix carries any weight at all, because if it was really so important, surely they’d be able to demonstrate that in a form that someone (possibly willfully) ignorant of the system can understand.

I see the same forces at work here, in marketing and a/b testing. The simple to understand metrics are what are optimized, while the more complicated ones get ignored or drowned out. The longer term benefits are hard to measure, and more importantly, hard to understand and interpret.

The level of hateful, spiteful, and bitter disdain I see in comments across all of Reddit have led me to believe it’s not just popular subs and it’s not even just Reddit: this is where the younger generations in America are right now, emotionally. People are looking for someone or something to judge and hate. It’s not limited to any particular political cohort or socioeconomic strata either. I see it here on HN quite a bit too, even in more anodyne discussions you can read it prowling around the edges of the discourse.

It’s not just that there’s people who make these comments - of course there’s always going to be - but that fact that they’re typically so highly upvoted anywhere there’s a voting/likes system. Anything that attempts to reflect nuance or lower the temperature has no boosters, while anything that reflects the worst, most reductive or least honest take is what bubbles to the top.

While not letting PMs off the hook - I think “PM culture” is a cancer on the tech industry, and companies have ceded far too much influence to them overall - I think the issue is something else. The way I’ve described it is: the goal of many apps, services and sites now is to get you to spend as much time as possible in/on them, not to make you happy while doing so. They’ve learned that FOMO increases engagement. That the more time a user spends fumbling around for what they want, the more time they hold your attention. That user re-education means more time, more attention, more eyeballs.

We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless, because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it, while the metrics faction has reams of “data” to back then up. A thousand times a day we’re subjected to things we don’t want to experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use software is just one facet of it.