My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just because I expressed interest in this show does not mean I want to be inundated with recommendations for its genre” “Disregard [that I pressed ‘thumbs up’] my cat walked over the keyboard” “I am making bad choices and hatewatching this” (which reminds me of ) What’s great about the examples in Eric’s post is how familiar they are. We can read them and laugh because we’ve had the same thought — “I’m pressing ‘thumbs up’ here, but what I really mean is…” We know when we click that button that it’s a reductive expression of our experience that’ll be erroneously interpreted, but we do it anyway. As Bryan Cantrill shared from his experience: There's no way to indicate, “I’m engaging with this, but I hate myself for doing…