One of the current discourse of the Internet is that it’s either or. Either something is the greatest thing that has ever existed, or it’s the worst thing that someone had the capacity to create, no in between. This sort of polarization is bad for us as a whole because the world isn’t like this. It’s fully possible to like something while being critical of it. And it’s also possible to understand that even things that are considered ‘bad’ can be used in a good way.
I hate to say it but the world ain’t like that
The first thing I wanna talk about is Discord. It’s been really good to me in many ways. I met some of my current (online) friends there, and its way of handling discussions via servers you can join is nothing short of absolutely genius. However the platform as a whole has a lot of problems. Some of them can’t simply be fixed with just updates because they are part of human nature, so you need to reinforce some behaviors directly through the platform. But some are easily fixed with updates that could make the application simply better to use. The fact that I have to say this means that no one at Discord uses Discord daily for some reason.
Next one: Steam. To think that Valve was shoving it our throats at a certain point in time, and now it’s a platform that most people want to jump in once they get a gaming PC. It has its issues as well, like Offline Mode never working correctly and some other minor things, but unlike the Discord company, Valve works (actually slowly) to update Steam and make it better to use. And since Valve does appear to use the product they make, they strive to improve it.
Another one: Windows. I have no idea why people take Microsoft’s Windows dept. seriously at this point. Windows 11 continues to piss people off with its ‘features’ and is certainly a product that no one there uses like regular people do. Recently they announced that Recall feature (which allowed the PC to take snapshots of itself and go back to a certain point of time) and no one thought for a second of how much of a massive security risk this might be? Crazy. I personally like Windows but the handling from the company that makes it is nothing good.
With these examples, it’s really easy to say that “Discord sucks” or “Windows sucks”. I think it’s important have some moderation on how to classify things. It’s fully possible to enjoy things while understanding that they could improve in some way. What isn’t good is to take a hypocrite stance and loudly complain about something while using it daily, and think that is the way to fix it.
What can we do?
We can do simple things to stop this mentality, if I can be honest. The first to think that life is completely this way, either you lose everything or win everything. It ain’t like that. A bad program can be a good way to teach someone on what notto do. A good program can be updated and improved further. A bad program can be updated to be a good one. A good program can be updated and the end result could make it bad. All of those are real things that can happen and can’t be justified with an ‘either or’ stance, because it doesn’t work like that.
Looking at things and accepting them as they are is much better to deal with. Programs, people, so on, they all have their good and bad parts. Some are more good than bad, some are more bad than good. Dismissing as completely bad just because they have some bad parts is not a healthy mindset.
End of the Post?
I didn’t know exactly how to end this, because I think that was pretty final, but it feels rather good to just post about things that sometimes concern or upset me. I also want this to feel like a time capsule, like that company BS that they do with employees regarding “where do you think you’ll be in 5 years?”. I can answer that, right now: Hopefully better than today.