Not being an android user and not being familiar with the Play story I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App" and thinking it was a category, not the developer's name.
I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App"
I bet many thousands of people on HN would have done the same thing.
I think it's an issue with reading comprehension. In general, comprehension seems to have plummeted in the last five to ten years. I send people e-mails asking two questions, and only get the first one answered. People read a headline and think it means something other than what it says. Flamewars erupt online over something that nobody actually wrote, but someone thinks they saw.
It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough.
Or, if I can put on my old man hat, maybe it's just that people aren't as good at reading as they think, and that if people looked at a book half as often as they look at their telephones, they might get some good reading practice.
It is also the case that people aren't as good at writing as they think. I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things, don't separate the important from the unimportant, etc, and then wonder why others don't take 15 minutes out of their busy day to read the incessant, flavorless text until they find the actual point.
A good way to write text where you're going to ask people for stuff is to write it in a top-down manner, where first of all you mention "I want X", then you quickly summarize what exactly you want and why, and then write a more detailed paragraph on the various nuances, always making sure to cut everything down to its absolute essentials.
I really like that style. It's related to the Inverted Pyramid style in journalism, meaning others have thought a lot about how to get important information up to the front of a piece of writing.
I learned about this in journalism class in high school over 20 years ago and it's still one of the most valuable lessons I remember from high school. As someone with ADHD, I really appreciate when people follow this style.
Blog articles, especially medium, are really bad about this. I've clicked on headlines about an interesting topic only to find the article no even mention the topic from the headline until 2/3 of the way into the article.
> I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things
Heh...reminds me of a couple anecdotes from my days in school.
Sometimes as we were being handed back tests/quizzes that had some questions that required a couple sentences to answer, there'd be times where I did exactly that. I wrote only a couple sentences. Meanwhile, I glance at the person next to me to discover that they had wrote two entire paragraphs. I got marked as having a correct answer with only two sentences, so what the hell were they writing about?
Then I had a teacher who, before the final exam, said that every question is able to be answered in four sentences or less. If you write several paragraphs, you would lose points for wasting his time, even if your answer was correct.
> In general, comprehension seems to have plummeted in the last five to ten years. I send people e-mails asking two questions, and only get the first one answered.
OMG, this happens to be all the time, and I don't even use email as a primary communication mechanism. It's so frustrating. I think the case is that people are reading and responding to emails on the go on their phone and so don't have/take the time to write a full response.
In the "old days" it was appropriate to answer emails by leaving a partial quote in place and responding below that for each answer. Something changed (I blame Outlook) and now that never happens.
> It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough.
I think it is the former. I'm perfectly capable of reading a poem or code word-for-word, but as soon as I'm in my browser something "clicks" and I'm just skimming text. It is usually completely subconscious, but while reading your comment for example, I realized I was only reading half of each sentence.
> I send people e-mails asking two questions, and only get the first one answered.
This has been bugging me for at least 10 years, and also extends to IM. If it's IM, I ask one at a time.
If it's email, I either have to ask one at a time, form the two questions into one, or turn it into a sandwich - question 1, question 2, rephrase question 1.
What I really want to do is grab them by the shoulders and shake them, shouting "You saw the second question - yes?!?!"
> It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough.
One aspect is that it's a parasitic efficiency increase. The 80/20 rule applies here; you can answer 80% of the emails by skimming. If you just don't handle, or poorly handle, the 20% of the emails that take 80% of the time, you get a bunch of time back.
I also think that the overload comes from notifications, not general information. We get a crazy number of notifications from our personal devices (and many/most people check them), and during the work day that's compounded with all the systems at work that send notifications. I think that we've subconsciously taught people to work between the notifications. It can feel like if you don't respond to them in real time then you might end up with an insurmountable backlog of notifications to handle, so people have acclimated to handling them in real time. Each time someone responds to an IM, a mental timer starts, counting down how long it is until it thinks the next notification might come. Or, conversely, you're in a notification lull, and you start thinking this is your only time to get anything done towards the sprint, so you smash out fast responses to the notifications you do get, trying not to break your train of thought.
Others may have different experiences, but I get notifications from so many systems and people that it can be overwhelming. And the tools we are offered to manage it suck. Slack's notification settings are better than what I had before with Lync, but they're still lackluster. Email has the best filtering record so far, but it is also by far the most abused by tools.
Some things I would love to see in a chat system:
* Chat and notification filters based on whether the user is a bot or not
* A sane "handle this later" queue or some kind of integration with a task manager to let me click to create a ticket
* A way to communicate busy-ness through my status. Either a level I can manually set, or a system that can guesstimate it (i.e. "curryst has 8 active private chats right now") so we can all gauge whether what we need is that important right now
* Customizable options to batch notifications. I would love it if I could have Slack batch my notifications and just send me one notification per minute that says "3 new messages"
My holy grail is if they would let me write my own functions to determine whether to notify for an event, batch it into the next batched notification, or to not alert at all. Most of these desktop clients are in Electron anyways, just let me pass it a path to a Javascript file that exports functions to filter notifications.
Being an Android user, I looked for the developer's name, saw "Develop App" and thought it was a category and I was just mistaken about where on the page the developer's name was supposed to be. This was all instinctive, I didn't sit down to think about it, though.
It doesn't help that the developer name and category have the exact same visual style, I guess.
I wasn't trying to excoriate you for your mistake, so I apologize if that's how it comes across.
I did try to modulate the harshness of "Come on, dude" with the rest of my comment. Like I said, sometimes we let our guard down. So it's understandable if you got fooled.
In hindsight there are more red flags in just that screenshot ("More by Develop App", obviously fake reviews to point out just two), but God knows I've clicked through installs for shit apps on iOS many times.
I still can't believe myself I fell for this, as said I have 2FA on all accounts and I'm normally very cautious. I guess it's a combination of all the factors here at play: Facebook allowing a fake TikTok Ads advertiser, the ad looking very legit (referring to an existing ad credit program), Google allowing a fake TikTok Ads app with fake reviews, and not getting any notifications until the amount was charged from my PayPal account.
FWIW, Given the surrounding context, I interpreted "Come on, dude" as an exhortation for the author to cut themselves some slack. I agree that 100% correct 100% of the time is an exhausting bar to maintain, and one that we should be working very hard to ease this requirement.
I think it's worth pointing out that the difficulty / impossibility of achieving that bar (at least in the general case) is one of, if not the central tenet of Christianity, ostensibly the dominant religion of the West for something like 1500 years. Regardless of one's metaphysical beliefs, it's worth remembering that arguments for the necessity of grace and slack in positive interactions have a long historical precedent, and I find we ignore them at our peril.
I didn't notice it the first time I looked either :-(
Bad spelling and grammar used to be a great indicator of something being amiss, but the volume of it in legit business these days has made me so desensitized that I didn't even blink at this one.
