Trying to stay on topic, when have you most feared...
# thinking-togethera
Alex McLean
05/02/2025, 8:27 AMTrying to stay on topic, when have you most feared clicking on something? How could you have been reassured via humane programming language experience design?
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Konrad Hinsen
05/02/2025, 2:10 PMI just had one of those fear-of-clicking experiences. A frequent one for me, being cause by Zotero. Every now and then, when I visit the site of some scientific journal, Zotero Connector (a Firefox extension) displays a banner asking if I want it to install a proxy for accessing this site. I have no idea what consequences this would imply. I have no idea either if Zotero is aware of the complexities of my journal access setup (which involves an OAUTH site and a certificate stored in my browser). So I see a lot of risk of breaking something, in exchange for an advantage that isn't quite clear to me.
The worst: I cannot tell Zotero to leave me alone. About once per week, it asks me again. And I fear that one day, I will click on "yes" by mistake.
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Alex McLean
05/02/2025, 4:46 PMAh I'm quite fearful of zotero as well! In theory it's great for sharing references and PDFs with a group of people, except it's very easy to do destructive operations that can't be undone, and then are difficult to spot that they've happened. I've had to rebuild community bibliographies from scratch, so I'm particularly fearful of accepting someone's application to a group, in case they accidentally delete stuff.
Alex McLean
05/02/2025, 4:47 PMI guess fear can be quite a useful emotion as well. E.g. fear of pressing 'submit' on a funding application you've been working on for months helps you with double checking everything is OK.
Alex McLean
05/02/2025, 4:48 PMIt's quite hard relating this to programming though, as things you do are generally low stakes at that moment, unless you're live coding.
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Lu Wilson
05/03/2025, 7:41 AMclicking on an email or message that I'm nervous about reading
Lu Wilson
05/03/2025, 7:42 AMi find notifications scary. big red warning signs with growing numbers inside them. it would probably be less scary if they were more subtle, less attention grabbing
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Alex McLean
05/03/2025, 8:35 AMTyping not clicking but the sudo command used to really scare people with a "This incident will be reported." error message as well as giving a slightly odd message the first time you successfully used it
Alex McLean
05/03/2025, 8:40 AMEvery time I switch my car on I have to accept terms of use that allow the manufacturer to track my movements. Similarly the terrible Google, meta etc terms we accept every day as a mild annoyance to access some community should really strike fear into us but doesn't..
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Lu Wilson
05/03/2025, 8:45 AMhitting "send" on a message you're not sure about
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Alex McLean
05/03/2025, 10:25 AMJust reading a PhD thesis "What live coders fear most is a bored audience." So mistakes, unintended behaviour, crashes are all positive, but smooth running, fulfilled expectations etc are potentially to be feared
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Lu Wilson
05/03/2025, 10:55 AMright, standing there frozen, panicking and doing nothing!
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Steve Dekorte
05/05/2025, 5:19 PMThere’s so many sites where if you click on an item in a list, it will take you to it, but if you hit back, you’ve lost our position in the list. So I’m constantly afraid to click on any list item anywhere without command-clicking to open it in a separate tab.