Sinclair Chen's Shortform

Sinclair Chen

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LW posts about software tools are all yay open source, open data, decentralization, and user sovereignty! I kinda agree ... except for the last part. Settings are bad. If users can finely configure everything then they will be confused and lost.

The good kind of user sovereignty comes from simple tools that can be used to solve many problems.

4Dagon3y

This comes from over-aggregation of the idea of "users". There is a very wide range of capabilities, interest, and availability of time for different people to configure things. For almost all systems, the median and modal user is purely using defaults. People on LW who care enough to post about software are likely significant outliers in their emphasis on such things. I know I am - I strongly prefer transparency and openness in my tooling, and this is a very different preference even from many of my smart coworkers.

2Sinclair Chen3y

I think the vast majority of people who use software tools are busy. Technically-inclined intelligent people value their time more highly than average. Most of the user interactions you do in your daily life are seemless like your doorknob. You pay attention to the few things that you configure because they are fun or annoying or because you get outsized returns from configuring it - aka the person who made it did a bad job serving your needs. Configuring something is generally something you do because it is fun, not because it is efficient. If it takes a software engineer a few hours to assemble a computer, then the opportunity cost makes it more expensive than buying the latest macbook. I say this as someone who has spent a few hundred dollars and a few hours building four custom ergonomic split keyboards. It is better than my laptop keyboard, but not like 10x better I guess there is a bias/feature where if you build something, you value it more. But Ikea still sends you one set of instructions. Good user sovereignty is when hobbyists hack together different ikea sets or mod it with stuff from the hardware store. It would be bad for a furniture company to expected every user to do that, unless they specifically target that niche and deliver so much more value to them to make up for the smaller market. I think a lot of people are hobbyists on something, but no rational person is a hobbyist on everything. Your users will be too busy hacking on their food (i.e. cooking) or customizing the colors and shape of their garments and won't bother to hack on your product.

I don't know what the vast majority thinks, but I suspect people value their time differently, not necessarily more or less. Technically-minded people see the future time efficiency of current time spent tweaking/configuring AND enjoy/value that time more, because they're solving puzzles at the same time.

After the first few computer builds, the fun and novelty factor declines greatly, but the optimization pressure (performance and price/performance) remains pretty strong for some. I do know some woodworkers who've made furniture, and it's purel... (read more)