Interesting to see the top comments in this thread.
* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."
The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."
Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"
* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."
Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.
* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"
Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).
(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.
> it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users
You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.
It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.
Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct: Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places.
That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).
UX will eventually become fully personalized to the user's preference rather than the latest fashion vaguely branded to the site owner. If they could figure out how to personalize the UX as well as they personalize ads...
Now redirects to a page titled "Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?" -- which speaks volumes about the new UI is being much more coercitive on the user than previous ones.
* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."
The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."
Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"
* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."
Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.
* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"
Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993532
(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.