{"id":488,"date":"2010-09-13T08:40:37","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T07:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/?p=488"},"modified":"2010-09-13T08:40:37","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T07:40:37","slug":"vitamins-and-pain-killers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/2010\/09\/13\/vitamins-and-pain-killers\/","title":{"rendered":"Vitamins and pain killers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A while back there was a thread on Hacker News asking <a title=\"Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? | Hacker News\" href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=1329334\">why there is no search functionality<\/a>, Paul Graham responded with:-<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus on the latter instead of the former &#8230;&#8230; This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want. Lots of people say they want search, but I would be surprised if there was a single user who&#8217;d left HN because it lacked search. Whereas if I let the front page get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The point being that the absence of some negative behaviour can be more valuable than the \u00a0presence of some positive behaviour. The more effective you are at removing negative behaviour the less people will notice your efforts since the pain point is hidden from them.<\/p>\n<p>I think management is great example of this, sure there will be times where your actions are highly public and obvious to all, but you really earn your bread and butter by working furiously to maintain a state where your team can simply get things done. If anything, too many active interventions should be a warning sign that you are not picking up on things quickly enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/2010\/09\/13\/vitamins-and-pain-killers\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Vitamins and pain killers\"><p>A while back there was a thread on Hacker News asking why there is no search functionality, Paul Graham responded with:- What makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus on the latter instead of the former &#8230;&#8230; This is a classic example of how one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[29],"class_list":{"0":"post-488","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-management","7":"tag-motivation","8":"h-entry","9":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}