The article says "If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art."
I think that's not true. Cover art / album art allows you to visually scan through a pile of different podcasts to find the one podcast you're looking for. E.g. "I know it's mostly purple with a little white, so now I'm scanning for purple… there it is." You can find the one you want even if the art is tiny and you can see 100 at a time.
Let's not allow the lesson to be "text is better, don't display cover art". Instead, let's allow the lesson to be "let me make the software work the way my brain does." It's not that Spotify has made a terrible decision, necessarily. It's just that their UI isn't optimized for a non-visual person, or a person who prefers text to images.
What if software had far more customizable UI, such that I can make the software display the information to me in the way that makes the most sense to me? Harder to test, for sure, but if they made it a paid feature (meaning only for paying users) it might pay for itself.
> Things got tense over the years when they realized we did it faster / better than they did.
Having lived most of my life in the Midwest, and about six years in Silicon Valley, I had to agree with this. There are smart people everywhere, but I've found above-average intelligence is somehow common in the Twin Cities area. (I know that's mathematically problematic.) There are a lot of unusually smart people living in the Twin Cities. I didn't know that was weird until I lived elsewhere.
From the Slippery Slope page, their first example of a false slippery slope: "We can't permit the sale of marijuana by doctor's prescription, because that will lead people to believe it's an acceptable drug; this will open the floodgates to the complete legalization of the drug for use by every pothead in the country."
Is no one going to comment about how it looks and sounds like their voices were overdubbed by professionals? It just doesn't sound natural _at all_. I know it's not actually overdubbed, but it's so smooth, the inflection is perfect... it's freaking me out.
Growing up in the USA, my parents called farts "toots" just because they thought the more popular term was too vulgar. I don't think it's that rare, honestly.
I can't take the platform seriously if I have to be talking about toots all the time. Sorry. I doubt I'll ever get used to that one.
