Product Design: The Asshole Contingency

Anyone interested in the design of software (or anything, really, but particularly software) really should take a read through this short but correct article.

Its point is simple: software is often designed for (in the telling of the famous physics joke) perfect spherical users, who are all cooperative and well-intentioned towards each other. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that -- there *are* assholes out there. Not a gigantic number, but it doesn't *take* a gigantic number to mess everything up: the old adage "It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch" is nowhere truer than in the online experience. The proof is all over the Web.

I suspect Querki is going to get some pushback for some of its baked-in decisions, such as the fact that there is not, and probably never will be, a way to enable anonymous, unmoderated commentary. This article is a good outline of why: my consistent assumption is that a small but non-trivial number of the users are going to be bad actors, who are attempting to harm others or the service itself, or are simply assholes; the whole system is designed around that assumption. Dealing with that, and taming the resulting complexities, is one of its biggest ongoing design challenges...

Review: Tubshroom

Indiegogo is the new "As Seen on TV": the place where you find the gadgets that are almost ridiculously mundane, and yet often innovative and useful. Today's example is the Tubshroom.

The Use Case: thanks to the genetic combination of a father who started balding at 21 and a mother who still has a fine head of hair (plus my own lifestyle choices), I have longish hair that is, let's not mince words, continually falling out. A shower hair-catcher is a necessity, but I've long struggled to find one I really like. The ones that sit inside the drain tend to quickly fill up and clog; the ones that sit over it tend not to stay in place. For the past several years I've been using one of the latter, an Oxo that mostly works well, but I've had to reset the suction cups that hold it down before each shower.

Along comes the Tubshroom, which is a clever twist on the problem. As the name suggests, this looks like nothing so much as a bright-green silicone mushroom (other colors are now available) that you drop into the drain. The "stalk" is highly perforated -- the hair wraps around that, but since it has a lot more surface area, it doesn't clog up as quickly as the traditional in-drain models. (And the cap has more holes, to serve as an emergency valve if things start to clog.)

It looks like I need to clean it every 4-5 days. It's easy to pull out by the cap, and while the hair winds up tightly wrapped around the stalk, the bendable silicone makes it easy to pull it all off.

Overall, the best solution I've found to this particular problem. Recommended to anyone with long hair, who needs to deal with the resulting shower issues...