The opposite is true. I don't need to know anything more about this feature to conclude: 1. it's anti-useful for me and 2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach.
What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.
How is it anti-useful? In which way does it hinder anything useful?
>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
It is not. It is a buttonbar for selecting pre-categorized mails. It does nothing against email itself and doesn't change its usefuleness for discussions at all.
>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
I'd love to hear you expand on this, because for me it seems like the exact opposite. By taking extraneous and superficial emails out of the main view, doesn't this make e-mail better suited for serious discourse?
People who are serious about email don't have this problem. The feature isn't useful much as medication for metabolic syndrome isn't useful to athletes. More generally, statistical filters I can't train are useless -- like gmail's spam filter. That's one reason I don't use gmail (I keep an account for testing). I host my own mail and my own statistical filter, which takes care of three nines of anything that isn't real correspondence with no false positives. This was a solved problem in 2003. But rather than provide features that help users learn to train their filters, google followed the other webmail providers with a shared filter. That leads to a high false positive rate (despite rigorously training it since 2004, my gmail spam box has about one false positive a month).
Then there's automatic signature hiding, hiding of addressees, lack of support for constant-width typography, integration of bullshit from Plus (like insisting on autocompleting names from Plus rather than what's been previously sent and received), many facets of the new "compose experience", etc.
Google have made it clear they intend to be the McDonalds of software. Too bad... I used to be such a fan. But since they make ad-supported software, the McDonalds equilibrium was bound to obtain eventually.
Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach.
What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.