under/over

[Jeremy David]

This related to a general trend I'm noticing lately in humanity. Most
people don't mind when stuff sucks. In fact, they love it.

Case study #1: Crappy DJing. People don't notice, and they don't care.
They love it! If you're DJing well, they'll actually complain.

Case study #2 (my personal mission of the week): Myspace.com.
According to everything I've ever studied about the best practices of
web-design, Myspace.com does just about everything as wrong as you can
do it. Their error messages are misleading and uninformative. They
send you your password in the clear in an e-mail especially when you
don't ask for it and then make it difficult to change it again, even
though they'll just send you your new one in an e-mail anyway. The
URLs are long and convoluted. The visual layout is horrid. Unreliable
servers. Etc. Etc. Etc. And yet *people love it*. It's the most
popular website in the entire world. Because of this, I've decided
that there is something that the Intelligent Web Designers don't know
about what people actually want and I took it upon myself to figure
out what that is. I got a myspace account and started learning.

I still don't know why people love it, and it still does suck, but I
have a hunch as to why people love it. It might have to do with the
fallacy of sunk costs. It takes so much effort to figure out their
unintuitive interfaces, deal with their misleading error messages and
broken links, that once you've put so much effort into wrangling the
thing to your will, you feel like you can't give up because you've put
so much into it already.

That kind of veered off from the main course. The point is, people
actually want stuff that sucks most of the time, probably because
they're too dumb to know better. But that doesn't change the fact that
if you want to win over the masses, the best strategy may be to offer
sucky services and let the cash roll in.

I think there's something in the bible about how you shouldn't cast
your pearls to swine.

-Jeremy

What a tangent!

On 6/23/06, Ancilla Sea-Maid <ancilla6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Over the 9 years of observing Ceremony crowds,
> no....I'd have to say Brian is right. this scene just
> doesn't give a hoot. I've seen Brian go nuts just
> bursting forth with mad technical skill, Arvin makes
> his own remixes, guest DJs from all over do crazy
> tricks, incredible technical mixing, and then at the
> end of the day......people whine "the DJ changed the
> song that was playing."
>
> that's it. they whine that the song that was currently
> playing got "messed with." I paid $400 for decent CD
> decks that simulate the abilities of vinyl, and that
> was a mistake. no one cares.
>
> the Upstage CD players were recently replaced with a
> pair of My First Sonys. and it wouldn't matter anyhow.
> I noticed no difference in crowd reaction between
> then, and when Brian brought in his own CD players and
> I could beat-match again. oh wait. the one crowd
> reaction I got was someone told us to quit mixing the
> songs so much :o
>
> - t
>
> --- Chris Rapier <rapier1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > technology exists to press one's own records, but
> > it's prohibitively
> > > expensive.  Also-- as much as I enjoy the
> > technical tricks one can
> > > bring to DJing-- it is not something the G/I crowd
> > typically cares
> > > much about.
> >
> > I disagree. I think the G/I scene doesn't tend to
> > care because the G/I
> > scene has developed very low expectations. G/I DJs
> > back in the late
> > 80s and early 90s *used* to do all of the turntable
> > action. I think
> > partly because they wanted to play around and the
> > tools they had
> > available allowed (if not actually encouraged) them
> > to.  That sort of
> > died out and I think it was in part due to the fact
> > that people were
> > switching to CDs and the technology at the time
> > simply didn't lend
> > itself to playing around like that (there were some
> > people using
> > digital samplers to cut loops but that never really
> > moved that far).
> > Times change, eventually they will change back
> > because I really think
> > once you have a G/I DJ that can really excite people
> > with what and
> > *how* they are playing more clubgoers will demand
> > it. It would
> > certainly make the experience more interesting.
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-- 
"A guy walks up to me the other day and asks, 'What is punk?' So I
kick over a garbage can and say, 'That's punk!' So he kicks over a
garbage can and says, 'That's punk?' And I say, 'No. That's trendy.'"
- Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day)