>I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.
The Banality of Evil, this is just a version of "We were just following orders"
The Banality of Evil, this is just a version of "We were just following orders"
I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.
1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.
2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.
3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.
Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.
Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.
When it comes to politics, Twitter is the absolute worst. When you have only 140 characters, there's no room for nuance or actual discussion, so arguments get boiled down to short 1-sentence zingers that are often nothing more than really bad straw men.
Evil is committed in actions - not intent. That's part of the whole banality of evil.
The Nazis made essentially this same argument at Nuremberg. Didn't work out too well for them.