No Skill. No Taste
blog.kinglycrow.com160 points by ianbutler 6 hours ago
160 points by ianbutler 6 hours ago
I don't know man. I'm writing a flashcard app, and I like it. It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want. BC I could never get into quizlet. Whatever. Maybe others will like it, maybe not, I don't care.
Taste is subjective. Having 1 million todo apps, great. Maybe someone I know will find one they like and tell me about it. Maybe I'll find one that doesn't suck. Maybe I'll just make my own.
One thing I won't do though, is complain about how there's now 1 million todo apps that aren't up to my standards. Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful thing.
> Taste is subjective.
If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
I agree! Taste is downstream of such things as design principles which can be described in objective terms.
Taste is not synonymous with personal preferences, otherwise we wouldn't describe some taste as "bad taste" or "poor taste." Rather, to me, one's taste refers to one's power of discernment as to what is good.
We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.
> We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.
Agreed. As someone who watches an embarrassingly large number of isekai, I'm not going to drink from a public water fountain and call it a pierian spring.
Taste is downstream of something, but I very much doubt that it is design principles.
That would honestly be an incredible performance art piece, like a distilled waste of a human life just to prove a point. Then even after all that you could ask the question "Is the art inferior, did it prove the point effectively.". I think there's a real argument to be made that it didn't, becuase just having the argument surfaces some very interesting points about worth.
Haha, you made me laugh. With my eating habits - I'm already halfway there to realizing my vision of becoming a hemoglobic Jackson Pollock.
>I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "Because most people don't like it, it shouldn't exist"?
> Taste is subjective.
I would like to offer a counterexample: iPhone, when it first came out anyways. Tasteful design is rather so obvious that when you see it you'd say yes, this is what anyone would expect from a "phone". That doesn't seem to be so subjective.
That was not at all the universal response to the iphone. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone is a (nsfw) contemporary article that I agreed with at the time, and I knew a decent number of people who got an early iphone and then switched back to a blackberry.
Except for all the people who used it and realized they hate touch screens for typing.
That's awesome! I love that energy, it's the opposite of the energy I was trying to talk about in the post actually, you're not trying to tell me why your app is the best thing in the world and spamming it everywhere when it has nothing to offer me or other people, and having not considered other people.
Where by "spamming" you mean daring to post it to HN under a "Show HN" title.
Among other places sure, I pivoted off the Show HN strictly, but it's fair for you to raise this given your thread was inspiration.
Posting something to SHOW people without considering how people may want or need what you're showing is just bad etiquette anywhere frankly. If you're building for yourself that's great, maybe qualify it in your post because otherwise it's free game to judge poorly. Spam is inherently unwanted content, you don't get to decide what is wanted content the collective community does.
It's something many of us have learned building software for years that all the new people building are going to figure out for themselves. Just because you can build it doesn't mean anyone will care if you're trying to show it off and with the flood of new apps, it's fair game to discuss.
Edit: all of us -> many of us on the last paragraph
This is exactly the sentiment I detected in the previous thread, where a small group of people seem to have decided what the etiquette of daring to post a Show HN is. I'm not sure I remember being consulted on whether you should be keeping these gates for the rest of us. My reaction is the same as it was when people tried to argue Show HN was only for open-source software: says you.
I'm not gate keeping anything, to do that I would have to make specific statements beyond "consider other people when you post something"
Right and my point is you (or i) will never be consulted, it happens emergently through community dynamics. No one sat in a group and decided this, Show HN in particular has always been selective. Different things are interesting to different sub groups and they select for different things. Show HN is not homogenous. My argument is not to not post, it's to post knowing who you hope to reach and why it would matter to them, don't just post to post, that is a large part of taste to me.
Shaming, ridiculing. People that dare to create something you don't like. Maybe the right answer is if you don't like what people are sharing that they made.. YOU make something and share it and lead by example instead of complaining.
First I never did that.
Second, I've founded several companies, had customers, put out products to be judged by the market and raised capital. I'm more than qualified to put out an opinion here. Been there done that.
> I'm not gate keeping anything,
Might be unintentional then, but the language in your post comes across as a textbook case of gatekeeping.
I think society could benefit from a little more gate keeping these days. IMO, we’ve swung way too far to the other direction. We all need a little friction and constraint.
Gate keeping isn’t inherently good, but I think Trump is essentially the right wing outcome of zero gate keeping.
I honestly tried to not inject my own standards into this and tried to stick around dynamics as much as possible. I think you shouldn't post to post, but if you've considered your audience and thought about something outside of yourself as to why someone may like this, earnestly, and not just kidding yourself, you are acting in good faith imo.
Similarly, I should have done more in the post to steer people way from the perception I'm shitting on them for building for themselves, that's great I have plenty of personal projects running at home that are just for me, if I ever decided to share them out I'd work to make sure its ready and valuable for people to receive.
The way you're expressing it, it sounds like you simply believe your own standards are representative of what everyone else's are. I disagree, for whatever that's worth.