Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

by Mike Monteiro

Twitter never built in a way to deal with harassment because none of the people designing it had ever been harassed, so it didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with threats because none of the people designing it had ever gotten a death threat. It didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with stalking because no one on the team had ever been stalked. It didn’t come up. That’s not to say those things don’t happen to white boys. They do, but very rarely.

Other important reasons

Hopefully, we can agree on this: as dumb and thoughtless as her cultural appropriation was, no eighteen year old deserves the weight of the internet on their head for making a dumb decision. It’s beyond a measured response. If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking you were glad the internet wasn’t around when you were eighteen, you should think about what it’s doing to the kids for whom it’s ubiquitous.

To be ddnoted

Every outrage is the exact same size, whether it was a US president declaring war on a foreign nation or a movie we remember fondly from our childhood

To be noted

Ten years ago, before the iPad and iPhone were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about twelve seconds. Now research suggests that there’s been a drop from twelve to eight seconds... shorter than the attention of the average goldfish, which is nine seconds.

To be noted

Only people who ask me why I need the users’ gender, or physical address, or really, anything but their email address get a second interview. I won’t hire a designer who doesn’t ask why, and I won’t hire a designer whose desire to arrange boxes is more important than their desire to protect users’ data.

To be notef