Yeah. Yeah. And Jason Shellen is a real piece of work, apparently. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him stop being an asshat. You would think that someone who's the VP of Product Stupidity (or User Alienation Director or whatever his title is) would take down the journal entries showing "hey, I just got an LJ for the first time, oh, five months ago", and "hey, sweet, they gave me a permanent account!".
One might also assume that said august personage, given his clear knack for calming patrons and defusing flamewars, might not have been the PR flack chosen to lead the response to these questions.
On the other hand... a lot of those "one might assume" thought exercises come down to the basic assumption that the world makes sense, to which one might reasonably reply "George W. Bush". Or something.
But yeah. A recipe for user-interaction success: (1) do something unpopular. (2) hide it. (3) call it something else, so you can reframe the debate. (4) claim altruistic motivation for (1). (5) lie about (1-3). (6) claim that (5) never happened.
And that recipe is, sadly, a pretty succinct description of their basic tactics so far as I can tell.
Is it really so hard for such a big corporation to a) hire anybody with any tact, and b) make and enforce company rules that those people hired for their tact are the ones to talk to the consumer base about anything new, and the people who are not hired for their tact should not perform the jobs of people who are?
The problem stems, in part, from the fact that people who lack tact and subtlety tend not to be aware of that lack. Since apprehending the deficiency requires subtlety in itself.
I think the other thing is that technical disciplines seem to shun organized, rule-based thinking about certain kinds of things, and this seems to be one of them.
Sigh. What are you doing with yourself these days?
Yeah. Yeah. And Jason Shellen is a real piece of work, apparently. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him stop being an asshat. You would think that someone who's the VP of Product Stupidity (or User Alienation Director or whatever his title is) would take down the journal entries showing "hey, I just got an LJ for the first time, oh, five months ago", and "hey, sweet, they gave me a permanent account!".
One might also assume that said august personage, given his clear knack for calming patrons and defusing flamewars, might not have been the PR flack chosen to lead the response to these questions.
On the other hand... a lot of those "one might assume" thought exercises come down to the basic assumption that the world makes sense, to which one might reasonably reply "George W. Bush". Or something.
But yeah. A recipe for user-interaction success: (1) do something unpopular. (2) hide it. (3) call it something else, so you can reframe the debate. (4) claim altruistic motivation for (1). (5) lie about (1-3). (6) claim that (5) never happened.
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One would apparently be wrong, though.
And that recipe is, sadly, a pretty succinct description of their basic tactics so far as I can tell.
Is it really so hard for such a big corporation to a) hire anybody with any tact, and b) make and enforce company rules that those people hired for their tact are the ones to talk to the consumer base about anything new, and the people who are not hired for their tact should not perform the jobs of people who are?
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I think the other thing is that technical disciplines seem to shun organized, rule-based thinking about certain kinds of things, and this seems to be one of them.
Sigh. What are you doing with yourself these days?
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