Going to plug my project Fraidycat here. Feels like it satisfies many of these. http://fraidyc.at/
It compiles RSS feeds and YouTube, Twitter, etc into a dashboard-like view rather than a crowded timeline. No notifications, no algorithm. Just a tool for a human. Easy to “move into the periphery”. Very calm, even when I’m following 100s of people.
I just wanted to add my voice to the growing chorus of people saying that the explanatory video is amazing. I shared it with several friends. I love how earnest and straightforward it is, how it’s focused and honest and NOT super slick and bland like every trendy thing in the world right now.
I feel the same about the UI. It’s cozy. I will be installing this next time I’m at a computer. I agree with others that I would gladly pay for this, support it on patreon, etc, especially to help pay for the web hosting to make this into e.g. a website I could use on my phone.
That video introducing this project, oh my. Your delivery and what you're saying are just such a pleasure. Totally convinced me to take this for a spin.
Cool idea and nice video explaining the project! As it's described it seems like I would be able to create one record for a real person and add multiple links if they have more than one URL I want to follow. But it looks like I have to create one "follow" per URL. What are your thoughts about grouping "follows" that belong to the same person? Should the top-level model in the user interface be real people that you want to keep up with or URLs that you want to keep up with?
My older brother developed a more sophisticated version of this idea a decade ago and never released it to the public. You're showing successfully that the old internet 'dashboard' idea still hasn't died yet and I think it's valuable still.
The internet's content should be controlled by the individual, not the feeds a big reddit,hn or facebook gives you. Simple good tools like what you provided should be a good step in cultivating an internet garden that can integrate into people's lives in a more orderly fashion.
Oh wow, this looks just like something I’ve been meaning to build for a while now, but couldn’t find the time. Definitely taking this for a spin. Your intro video is great btw, and I also love your own site, the style is just pure love![0][1]
>There is no news feed. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines.
Pretty much what Telegram does.
Yet people are finding their ways to abuse this approach and "noisily take over" your attention.
What am I doing wrong? I installed the Firefox add-on, addded some RSS feeds then closed the tab. When I opened it again, I got an empty faidycat feed, as if I added nothing.
Sounded nice, but I couldn't add a twitter account I wanted to follow because of unspecified network issues, so I'll return to it whenever I come across it again.
Few days back, I was thinking on similar lines about Instagram. It does not respect norms of our society. Consider this, our society deeply values competence but Instagram does not seem to take it into consideration at all. A user promoting his content or using proper hashtags or generating activity on platform will be promoted more than the user who just posts brilliant photographs.
Who I maintain relations with and who I don't is not other people's business similarly who I follow and who I don't follow should not be visible to anyone except me but that is not the case.
I can go on and on about similar things but the bottom line is everything on Instagram is designed in a way such that it generates more activity on platform and ultimately more revenue. This is true for almost all the social networks though. A social network that respects norms of our society and does not attempt at maximizing revenue at users expense will probably fill the void left by the existing ones.
Calm Tech is one of those ideas that's been in floating around for decades but has never quite gotten the attention it deserves (... sort of a funny paradox, "pay attention to making tools you don't have to pay attention to").
This article doesn't mention some of the old standard examples:
Live Wire was a sculpture at Xerox Parc that twitched every time some number of network packets went through the office's router - you could get an intuitive feel for how much load was on the system.
There's an X Windows applet called "LavaPS" which shows all your unix processes as colored blobs in a lavalamp, sized by memory footprint, floating to the top by age. It gives you a quick impression of what your computer is doing - is one webserver process eating your whole core? Or are you getting forkbombed by thousands of little ones? Those look really different.
The definitive works on Calm Computing are a paper written by Mark Weiser (RIP) in 1996, "Designing Calm Technology" (which has unfortunately fallen off the internet)
and an O'Reilly book called "Calm Technology" by Amber Case (the Cyborg Anthropologist)
Ideally we'd go calmer than a "status light" or "status tone" - those are still pretty active! What can you convey with the color of a Phillips Hue bulb that changes slowly?
I just finished building a DIY word clock (https://bitbucket.org/sjoerdtimmer/wordclock/), which indicates time by lighting LEDs behind a laser cut stencil with letters, producing text like "IT IS A QUARTER PAST SIX". The display only updates every five minutes, calmly fading between word combinations. It is one of the least obtrusive technologies that I have!
Status tones made me immediately think of Star Trek. Imagine what if everything around you used status tones - the ambience will start to resemble that of a starship bridge in Star Trek - lots of things constantly humming and beeping in the background in a calming way (until there's some emergency, that is).
The vast majority of technology doesn’t need to notify you or somehow artificially announce its status. It seems strange, then, that a site on calm technology primarily concerns technology that does, devoting a good portion of the page to promoting ”calm communication” through buzzing, beeping and blinking.
We should instead question whether we need the information that is being communicated in the first place, because even a colored LED or a soft haptic buzz can be stressful when we know what they mean. Maybe we should minimize the use of such technology instead.
In my view, calm technology only functions when you use it. It answers your questions or solves your problems only when prompted to do so. Maybe a robot vacuum cleaner that beeps on faults and vacuums on its own initiative is helpful technology, but with alternatives that won’t have any reasons to steal your attention I can’t say that it’s calm technology. IM with a soft haptic buzz to notify you of the receipt of a message may again be immensely helpful, but an email account that I check myself when I feel like reading messages is more calm.
If your life seems calmer when you know exactly when you’ve received a message regardless of what you are doing at the time or the nature of its content, you should perhaps think of how to lead a calm life before worrying about whether a pleasant beep or a soft buzz is the best way to direct your attention to it.
> We should instead question whether we need the information that is being communicated in the first place, because even a colored LED or a soft haptic buzz can be stressful when we know what they mean. Maybe we should minimize the use of such technology instead.
This is why I love Apple for pretty much eliminating blinking lights in their devices, while other manufactures of laptops etc. still don't seem to get it.
The only lights remaining in my room at bedtime are the power strip and external hard disks, and even they can be annoying.
I have a dashboard at work to help me monitor a bunch of systems, but I still have a small BlinkStick LED cube attached to a Raspberry Pi Zero (probably overkill, I used what I was comfortable with) and it changes the LED color depending on a system status warning or failure. I already receive enough email that I filter to different categories, but having the LED bring my attention to the right place is way less stressful IMO.
Car dashboard lights meet most of these criteria and yet they are routinely bad. My partner had trouble figuring out the "flat tire" icon and they are a fairly intelligent, well-educated person. The icon was basically a circle with an exclamation point inside. The fact that it had a slightly flat edge actually made it harder to recognize as a wheel since we normally associate wheels as being perfectly round. It almost looked more like a steering wheel. There was no status code to look up, only an icon which they had to match visually against every other possible icon. And this is one of the most common warning lights to appear in a car, so imagine how much harder the more obscure ones are.
Roombas, which the article mentions don't use voice, actually did start using voice in the last couple of generations. And it's great. It tells you that it's stuck rather than just beeping sadly at you.
I'm not necessarily saying the car dashboard should speak warnings, as it may startle people on the highway, but I also think there's a lot to improve on.
I am currently building a personal journal app will become what I calling a "quiet social network" [0]. The idea seems similar of this calm tech, although they are talking more about hardware.
I am on the fence about notifications though. They can be very useful for the user. I am planning to add notifications, but probably all off by default, and the user decides very granularly what they want on. Does it seem the right approach? I would appreciate any opinion
What about a notification digest, where the user gets a list of updates every (day|week|<configured duration>)? Perhaps after explicitly requesting to receive updates about so-and-so. This allows the user to decide, "At 20:00 each night, I'll get a list of new stuff from my friends, and I'll take some time and peruse it," rather than getting blasted at odd times.
there are so many problems with our norms around social networks that I don't know where to start, but two of the worst for my brain are: 1) getting interrupted when I'm thinking about something else 2) the slot-machine-like intermittent reward feeling of checking constantly. and those two together mean that my phone is constantly saying "hey! stop what you're doing and lose an hour in the distraction engine!"
I switched to the Android Headspace app recently and the juxtaposition of what they're trying to achieve (meditation / mindfulness and being in the moment) with the onslaught of unasked-for notifications, sometimes when I was already asleep, was jarring. They should be a poster boy for Calm Technology, but Tech just can't seem to help itself.
Tech products starts this way but eventually they need to make profit and then ads take over the product. The only way this works is for paid products.
I order a pizza, I have no choice but to provide details since they need them for delivery. Guess what happens next? Yeah, e-mail and SMS spam.
I pay hundreds of bucks for a complete Tado system (thermostat, radiator valves, etc). Guess what I get? E-mail spam about discounts for their "new" app which actually has less features than the current one.
I buy a PS4 and try to set it up. Even for a few hundred bucks for a new console, there is still bullshit telemetry and other crap I need to opt-out of, not to mention some half-assed attempt at a social network where I have to spend 15 minutes setting everything to "No one can see this" so I can regain some privacy because I have no desire to use the social features.
Heck, even some US government agencies (DMV I think) sell your data to scum and you can't even opt out.
I can go on and on. We need some actual ethics, and regulation as a fail-safe for cases where the former doesn't work.
This is an important point that is worth including in this manifesto: calm technology must be paid for. It absolutely cannot be supported by advertising. Advertising is antithetical in every way to this philosophy and way of life.
As a corollary, I would add that there is an inequality problem here: those with means will more easily be able to afford "calm technology" that isn't ad supported. Those without will have to suffer through the ads. I don't have the answer to this problem -- just noting that we cannot seriously endorse the idea of calm tech unless it is ubiquitously calm, and that requires a different business model.
I'd go further and say that it only works for products that are paid for entirely up-front. If there's any ongoing revenue, that creates an incentive to optimize for engagement.
I want products and services that i can ignore - product owners should track their success by how infrequently i interact with their product, not how frequently i interact with it. And even on a monthly payment basis, if i don't interact with a product for a whole month then maybe they start worrying that i'm going to stop paying them.
html {
overflow-y: scroll;
}
body {
overflow-x: hidden;
}
This makes both the <html> and <body> elements scrolling areas, so that you see two scrollbars (the outermost one disabled), and keyboard scrolling doesn’t work until you click within the body.
Simplest fix is to shift the overflow-x: hidden to the html element, or remove it altogether.
The Android app for 100 Million Books is meant to abide by these principles...to the point I thought it made sense to call it an "anti-app"!
I see Calm's purpose seems to extend far beyond smartphone apps and consumer technology, but I was hoping more people would create "anti-apps" when I created mine, and it it seems like Calm is doing a better job than me of pushing for such things.
The number one rule I learned for interfaces is “Don’t interrupt the proceedings” , which means which means the tools should be optimized for the task and don’t burden the user with unwarranted windows, buttons, lights or beeps. Optimize for flow. Recognize the posture of the application.
It is kind of funny to compare that early example of a notification, which was likely novel and rare enough to actually be exciting, to today's onslaught of notifications where at least for me it's extremely unlikely that any single notification is anything actually exciting or meaningful
I am becoming more and more convinced that keeping my data and programs on other peoples computers is not a good idea. They can not seem to resist the idea of 'harvesting' information from me to 'monetize' me for a small monthly fee. The PC revolution is over. The smartphone killed it.
The opposite of calm tech could be called something like hustle tech, where the interfaces create user stress by opening cognitive loops. Nagging indicators, garden path personal information extraction, leveraging users time investment, Nir Eyal's "hooked model" designs, automated sales pipelining (or spam), dark patterns, etc.
Funny that some startups by middle class people thought "hustle," meant energetic teamwork like on a kids sports team, whereas if you had any street smarts at all, hustle means getting leverage over someone by pre-empting their ability to reason accurately, often by bullying, nagging, feigning offence, and exploiting their agreeableness by making them think they "owe," you.
Preying on human goodness like reciprocity, empathy, fairness, and agreeableness is basically what a hustler and hustle tech does.
Wish my Sony headphones had this for when switching modes or battery low indications.
Currently it will mute all sound and speak in a voice regarding what is going on with limited info, instead of some clear beeps. Get to the point tech!
> Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention
The challenge — and I believe this is one of the fundamental challenges of the Information Age — is that the business model of most companies making tech today is that user attention funds the development of the technology.
Every ad-driven business rests on this trade: We give you software X and in return you give Y% fraction of your attention. We sell that attention to company Z which pays us in cash.
Tech from these companies cannot reduce the amount of attention the software consumes without directly affecting their bottom line and their ability to deliver tech to users in the first place.
It boils down to incentives. When entire business models are built around hijacking your attention and keeping you "hooked" for as long as possible, you can't expect calm technology.
[+] [-] kickscondor|6 years ago|reply
It compiles RSS feeds and YouTube, Twitter, etc into a dashboard-like view rather than a crowded timeline. No notifications, no algorithm. Just a tool for a human. Easy to “move into the periphery”. Very calm, even when I’m following 100s of people.
[+] [-] tomcooks|6 years ago|reply
The explanatory video alone is a gem, the fact that this extension is open source is a juicy bonus, the coziness factor is sky-high.
From a person that doesn't install any extension ever: great concept, amazing execution, installed right meow.
PS: How much money would you need to program a CLI version of this that I could host, and run forever and ever, on a tiny VPS?
[+] [-] mplanchard|6 years ago|reply
I feel the same about the UI. It’s cozy. I will be installing this next time I’m at a computer. I agree with others that I would gladly pay for this, support it on patreon, etc, especially to help pay for the web hosting to make this into e.g. a website I could use on my phone.
Thanks for making this!
[+] [-] m_fayer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rojobuffalo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friendlybus|6 years ago|reply
The internet's content should be controlled by the individual, not the feeds a big reddit,hn or facebook gives you. Simple good tools like what you provided should be a good step in cultivating an internet garden that can integrate into people's lives in a more orderly fashion.
[+] [-] Minenash|6 years ago|reply
Damn that was amazing though, definitely will try out.
[+] [-] mstade|6 years ago|reply
[0]: for anyone interested in looking its at https://www.kickscondor.com/
[1]: I am not in any way shape or form affiliated with the author, just very impressed!
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|6 years ago|reply
Pretty much what Telegram does. Yet people are finding their ways to abuse this approach and "noisily take over" your attention.
[+] [-] legionof7|6 years ago|reply
This is great! I'd definitely subscribe to a Patreon or something to support this project.
[+] [-] bla3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] geolgau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlhavema|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayne_skylar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohan1024|6 years ago|reply
Who I maintain relations with and who I don't is not other people's business similarly who I follow and who I don't follow should not be visible to anyone except me but that is not the case.
I can go on and on about similar things but the bottom line is everything on Instagram is designed in a way such that it generates more activity on platform and ultimately more revenue. This is true for almost all the social networks though. A social network that respects norms of our society and does not attempt at maximizing revenue at users expense will probably fill the void left by the existing ones.
[+] [-] jes5199|6 years ago|reply
This article doesn't mention some of the old standard examples:
Live Wire was a sculpture at Xerox Parc that twitched every time some number of network packets went through the office's router - you could get an intuitive feel for how much load was on the system.
There's an X Windows applet called "LavaPS" which shows all your unix processes as colored blobs in a lavalamp, sized by memory footprint, floating to the top by age. It gives you a quick impression of what your computer is doing - is one webserver process eating your whole core? Or are you getting forkbombed by thousands of little ones? Those look really different.
The definitive works on Calm Computing are a paper written by Mark Weiser (RIP) in 1996, "Designing Calm Technology" (which has unfortunately fallen off the internet) and an O'Reilly book called "Calm Technology" by Amber Case (the Cyborg Anthropologist)
Ideally we'd go calmer than a "status light" or "status tone" - those are still pretty active! What can you convey with the color of a Phillips Hue bulb that changes slowly?
[+] [-] GuiA|6 years ago|reply
https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf ?
[+] [-] livewire999|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irq-1|6 years ago|reply
Building requires the old gnome libraries (180mb on ubuntu)
[+] [-] boomlinde|6 years ago|reply
We should instead question whether we need the information that is being communicated in the first place, because even a colored LED or a soft haptic buzz can be stressful when we know what they mean. Maybe we should minimize the use of such technology instead.
In my view, calm technology only functions when you use it. It answers your questions or solves your problems only when prompted to do so. Maybe a robot vacuum cleaner that beeps on faults and vacuums on its own initiative is helpful technology, but with alternatives that won’t have any reasons to steal your attention I can’t say that it’s calm technology. IM with a soft haptic buzz to notify you of the receipt of a message may again be immensely helpful, but an email account that I check myself when I feel like reading messages is more calm.
If your life seems calmer when you know exactly when you’ve received a message regardless of what you are doing at the time or the nature of its content, you should perhaps think of how to lead a calm life before worrying about whether a pleasant beep or a soft buzz is the best way to direct your attention to it.
[+] [-] Razengan|6 years ago|reply
This is why I love Apple for pretty much eliminating blinking lights in their devices, while other manufactures of laptops etc. still don't seem to get it.
The only lights remaining in my room at bedtime are the power strip and external hard disks, and even they can be annoying.
[+] [-] m-p-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sholladay|6 years ago|reply
Roombas, which the article mentions don't use voice, actually did start using voice in the last couple of generations. And it's great. It tells you that it's stuck rather than just beeping sadly at you.
I'm not necessarily saying the car dashboard should speak warnings, as it may startle people on the highway, but I also think there's a lot to improve on.
[+] [-] Neil44|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|6 years ago|reply
I am on the fence about notifications though. They can be very useful for the user. I am planning to add notifications, but probably all off by default, and the user decides very granularly what they want on. Does it seem the right approach? I would appreciate any opinion
[0] https://www.quidsentio.com
[+] [-] floren|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jes5199|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jonovono|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cykod|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gandutraveler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
I order a pizza, I have no choice but to provide details since they need them for delivery. Guess what happens next? Yeah, e-mail and SMS spam.
I pay hundreds of bucks for a complete Tado system (thermostat, radiator valves, etc). Guess what I get? E-mail spam about discounts for their "new" app which actually has less features than the current one.
I buy a PS4 and try to set it up. Even for a few hundred bucks for a new console, there is still bullshit telemetry and other crap I need to opt-out of, not to mention some half-assed attempt at a social network where I have to spend 15 minutes setting everything to "No one can see this" so I can regain some privacy because I have no desire to use the social features.
Heck, even some US government agencies (DMV I think) sell your data to scum and you can't even opt out.
I can go on and on. We need some actual ethics, and regulation as a fail-safe for cases where the former doesn't work.
[+] [-] jordanpg|6 years ago|reply
As a corollary, I would add that there is an inequality problem here: those with means will more easily be able to afford "calm technology" that isn't ad supported. Those without will have to suffer through the ads. I don't have the answer to this problem -- just noting that we cannot seriously endorse the idea of calm tech unless it is ubiquitously calm, and that requires a different business model.
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
I want products and services that i can ignore - product owners should track their success by how infrequently i interact with their product, not how frequently i interact with it. And even on a monthly payment basis, if i don't interact with a product for a whole month then maybe they start worrying that i'm going to stop paying them.
[+] [-] hliyan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|6 years ago|reply
Simplest fix is to shift the overflow-x: hidden to the html element, or remove it altogether.
[+] [-] m52go|6 years ago|reply
I see Calm's purpose seems to extend far beyond smartphone apps and consumer technology, but I was hoping more people would create "anti-apps" when I created mine, and it it seems like Calm is doing a better job than me of pushing for such things.
https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/android-app-err-anti-a...
[+] [-] prox|6 years ago|reply
The number one rule I learned for interfaces is “Don’t interrupt the proceedings” , which means which means the tools should be optimized for the task and don’t burden the user with unwarranted windows, buttons, lights or beeps. Optimize for flow. Recognize the posture of the application.
[+] [-] efa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukey_q|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elweston2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|6 years ago|reply
Funny that some startups by middle class people thought "hustle," meant energetic teamwork like on a kids sports team, whereas if you had any street smarts at all, hustle means getting leverage over someone by pre-empting their ability to reason accurately, often by bullying, nagging, feigning offence, and exploiting their agreeableness by making them think they "owe," you.
Preying on human goodness like reciprocity, empathy, fairness, and agreeableness is basically what a hustler and hustle tech does.
[+] [-] mrarjen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|6 years ago|reply
"Technology should make use of the periphery... A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back."
And this ->
"Machines shouldn't act like humans. Humans shouldn't act like machines. Amplify the best part of each."
[+] [-] munificent|6 years ago|reply
The challenge — and I believe this is one of the fundamental challenges of the Information Age — is that the business model of most companies making tech today is that user attention funds the development of the technology.
Every ad-driven business rests on this trade: We give you software X and in return you give Y% fraction of your attention. We sell that attention to company Z which pays us in cash.
Tech from these companies cannot reduce the amount of attention the software consumes without directly affecting their bottom line and their ability to deliver tech to users in the first place.
[+] [-] jmstfv|6 years ago|reply
Vote with your wallet.
[+] [-] teddyh|6 years ago|reply