In between the lines

Over the years, I acquired this weird collection of almost-invisible, but important signifiers of when I know a product really focuses on craft and thinks about its users. I thought about one recently. Here’s what happens when you try to copy a long block of text from YouTube’s (otherwise very useful) text transcript pane: And here’s an analogous example from GitHub: GitHub’s arrives ready to go. YouTube’s throws in a lot of messy things in between the lines. Why does it matter? Because these both feel like places you’ll be copying a lot from, and dealing with a messy paste can feel so, so unpleasant. You have probably seen this chart before, from xkcd: This is the fabled automation trade-off, or the high fixed cost vs. low variable cost dilemma. Yeah, if you’re doing a lot of copy/​paste, you might invest in creating some sort of a clean-up step, or even going through a programming text editor which has multiple cursors or other casual automation. But what if you don’t do that often,…