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Nick Punt
Personal blog · nickpunt.com/blog · on HN as npuntdesignwriting
Nick Punt's personal blog at nickpunt.com covers design and writing. Since 2008, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “De-escalating social media conflict”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
31mentions?
7HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Ideas to elevate humanity, and a few other things
Most-linked posts?
- De-escalating social media conflict3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-04
- Apple's Next HomePod Should Monitor Indoor Air Quality2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-09-15
- Spaces: A New Way to Organize Our Digital Experience2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-22
- Designing a better memberships platform that scales2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-31
What Hacker News says?
Meta didn't have the ecosystem advantage nor trust Apple has, and they were too early with AI. This corrects all three. Timing is super important in launching products, I wrote a bit about timing and its relationship to category defining products here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Apple HomeView”Submitted De-escalating social media conflict as a story · 583 points
HN discussionI implemented something like this on my website [1] and I'm not really sold on it and I'm considering changing back. The two things that I've lost are collapsing margins between paragraphs/headers and the ability for any asides (like a floating image or a footnote) to vertically span multiple paragraphs. For margins between paragraphs I replaced them with grid-gap, but always having the same grid-gap is not great; y…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid”Submitted De-EscalatingSocial Media – Designing humility and forgiveness into social media as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat's definitely an alternative, I almost did it that way! I went with 'forgive' because I think the broader problem we have on social media is when looking across all users, it can be really ambiguous what things mean, which has led to a lot of misinterpretation of intent. The people entering the worldwide commons of Twitter are from every life stage, skill level, opinion tribe, culture, personality type, etc, and…
Comment linking /blog/spaces/
on “De-escalating social media conflict”Submitted De-Escalating Social Media (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMagic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans”Submitted Apple's Next HomePod Should Monitor Indoor Air Quality as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEh, not really. Symbian was right for the wrong reasons . They were right to warn users about apps using internet access, but they were wrong about the reason - it was about data caps, not privacy or security. Data caps mattered in that era, so from a narrow point of view it was the smart thing to offer those features. But to launch a category defining smartphone, that limitation needed to be broken entirely, and th…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Symbian Won”Submitted Apple's Next HomePod Should Monitor Indoor Air Quality as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYeah another use case is broadcasting air quality metrics for consumption by the Health app, to start capturing exposure to various air environments you spend a lot of time in (office being primary example). I talk about this air quality broadcast a bit toward the end of my piece on repositioning HomePod around air quality - https://nickpunt.com/blog/apples-next-homepod-should-monitor...
Comment linking /blog/apples-next-homepod-should-monitor-indoor-air-quality/
on “Emulating AirTags to upload arbitrary data via Apple's FindMy network”Submitted Designing a better memberships platform that scales as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAt least for me, I've spent the last ~3 years designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products as a hobby and been involved in various communities working on these issues. Ways to improve quality of comments, reduce conflict, improve context, build media literacy, etc. I need to get around to publishing these ideas but have definitely put real work in. This is the only one I've published in blog for…
Comment linking /blog/deescalating-social-media/
on “Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login”Submitted Spaces: A New Way to Organize Our Digital Experience as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis piece was a perfect opportunity for the New York Times to use data and charts to visualize the magnitude of the problem and the timeline of the discoveries and activities. Instead we got a wall of text, and numbers without context like '97,100 metric tons'. I'm sure somewhere deep in there the context was provided, but it wasn't readily available for me as a reader to make a quick assessment of the issues impor…
Comment linking /2016/03/31/journalism-and-user-experience/
on “The Invisible Catastrophe: Record Methane Leak in CA”Submitted Why twitter matters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThanks for responding. I imagine many things are growing and changing there, and it's great to hear the team retains that kind of humility and self awareness. In our industry it's pretty common for companies to let success get to their heads and not do the kind of critical examination necessary to overcome the momentum of early missteps or treat early temporary decisions as permanent. Having run product/design for a…
Comment linking /blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/
on “UX Issues with Notion”Submitted Group Messaging's Balancing Act: Design tradeoffs in small group social medium as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget. Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their supp…
Comment linking /blog/designing-a-better-memberships-platform/
on “Five Buck Fatigue”Submitted Apple's Next HomePod Should Monitor Indoor Air Quality as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe SE/30 is such a fantastic, charismatic little box. The community is always cooking up new things, plus there were a bunch of lesser known contemporaneous add-ons that expand its functionality (touchscreen! greyscale!). I summarized all of these here for the 30th anniversary of the SE/30: https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/
Comment linking /blog/se-30th-anniversary/
on “Mac SE/30 Odyssey”That's not my takeaway - I think they just critically mistimed the idea and didn't have much business sense to realize it. Even if their experience was bs-free and they were extremely well capitalized, they wouldn't have succeeded because the tech wasn't anywhere near ready. 90s tech (batteries, cpus, screens, etc) could only reasonably produce single function hand-held devices like phones and CDs. Even late 90s tec…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Fax on the beach: The audacious, visionary, calamitous iPad of the 90s”SE/30's are the best. Here's a summary of some other modern and contemporaneous upgrades available: https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/
Comment linking /blog/se-30th-anniversary/
on “My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer”Agree that learning from past efforts can be helpful, but I think you're shooting things down way too early here. I'm not seeing any specific critique you're making about mouth-based input being a bad pursuit, in fact the three efforts you linked hardly qualify as evidence against the opportunity: GlassOuse - very different form factor, bulky and limited appeal to a narrow set of the most extreme users (quadriplegic…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “MouthPad – In-Mouth Bluetooth Mouse Uses Tongue Sensitive Trackpad”tbh the real question is not the output (whether this succeeds or fails), it's whether Apple followed the same inputs that made prior products category-defining like Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Airpods. All of those took niche computing ideas and made them mainstream, creating a new market and new way of life, and did so by following a playbook of timing the tech right, scoping narrowly, and unders…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Apple's Vision Pro headset deserves to be ridiculed”Enshittification is a great term! Similar concept is what I refer to as 'UX Erosion': >UX Erosion, n; 1. shiny new service & concept appears with great UX that attracts creators, followed by a slow undermining of that UX, transitioning from delight-oriented to lock-in, habit, and apathy. https://nickpunt.com/blog/ux-erosion/
Comment linking /blog/ux-erosion/
on “Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple bring continuity to the Music app?”Love the effort here, been thinking about what this kind of tool might look like for a while. Something like this coupled with better prosocial affordances in the medium will do a lot to improve discourse online. I wrote up one a while back [1] but things like that are only a small part of a much bigger picture. The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify…
Comment linking /blog/deescalating-social-media/
on “Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches people to argue better”1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “Halt and Catch Fire: TV's Best Drama You've Probably Never Heard Of (2021)”Disagree, I think this is not a good read on Apple strategy and you may be heeding the wrong lessons in computing history. 1. The passive vs active framing applies primarily to non-Pro iPads. I don't think it can be reasonably argued the $3k Vision Pro is attempting to cannibalize low end iPads. iPad Pros are very different beasts that are designed for a particular type of creative output, and are very capable gener…
Comment linking /blog/category-defining-products/
on “SimulaVR $1.2M short of the project's total cost”https://nickpunt.com occasional product & design stuff
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”
