Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/03/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-families/

by edent • 9 years ago

38 37 9 years ago

shkspr.mobi

jpiasetz• 9 years ago

Most of these sound like Falsehoods the law believes about families rather than programmers

dogecoinbase• 9 years ago

This is directly addressed in the linked article.

rodgerd• 9 years ago

I wasn't aware the law limited the number of children you have, or whether one parent is out of country.

cortesoft2• 9 years ago

This is silly... those restrictions are there because they don't want everyone to just form one large family and share everything.

kuschku2• 9 years ago

So where’s the issue with that? Groups which share newspapers, DVDs, books, etc between them, often counting hundreds of members, rotating them from member to member every week have existed for centuries. Why shouldn’t they be allowed anymore?

The only limit should be "only one device can consume the content at a time", nothing more or less.

sgift• 9 years ago

No idea. Where's the issue with copying software and giving it to others?

jerf• 9 years ago

"So where’s the issue with that?"

Contractual. Not a moral issue, not an ethical issue, just that Google doesn't want to deal with people that way.

One can fruitfully discuss the second-order issues of excessively-strong DRM but I'd consider that, well, a second-order issue. The first-order issue of Google not wanting to contract with an amorphous group of "family", a word that has basically no agreed-upon meaning (even if there is a legal one it won't match everybody's idea) isn't that horrifying.

cortesoft2• 9 years ago

I am not going to argue whether your 'only limit' is the one we should have, but there is a fundamental difference between digital goods and physical ones in this area.

You can't send a DVD or a book instantaneously around the world, but you can with a digital copy. This means there is a lower bound to how fast you can share a physical copy, so the practical effect of the ability to share a book has a limit. There is no such limit with digital goods.

Second, do you really want to go down the route required to ensure that 'only one device can consume the content at a time'? You can only ensure that by requiring a constant internet connection, to verify that you are the only one consuming the content at a time (or at least require you to go online to 'check it back in' to allow another device to use it)

PeterisP• 9 years ago

Because (a) they have a motivation to limit sharing, and (b) unlike with books or DVDs, an ability to limit sharing.

There's some amount of allowed sharing that (they believe) is optimal for their revenue, and apparently that's greater than zero, so that's why they have introduced this "Family Library" concept. They could have chosen not to do it at all, that's a valid setting too.

I'm sure that they have considered "only one device can consume the content at a time" but decided that it's not the best option, especially for the sales of "long tail" older content - your own mention that "Groups which share newspapers, DVDs, books, etc between them, often counting hundreds of members" exist is a very good answer about why allowing groups without limits could be a bad decision.

Fully meeting arbitrary definitions of "family" isn't the goal of such policy; the goal is to balance ease of use (i.e. match the general expectations of target audience) with limiting exploits to something that doesn't have a big impact on revenue. The bottom line doesn't care if Bob is your roommate or bedmate or what family relationship you (don't) have; but it does care about how convenient it is for random Bobs or distant family members to join your group instead of paying for another copy.

It's worth to look at the alternatives you have - a roommate that's not a family member is anyway likely to watch your copy, so allowing them to join a group isn't a lost sale; but an overseas adult child is likely to buy stuff on their own, therefore excluding them is a feature, not a bug.

civilian• 9 years ago

But "only one device can consume the content at a time" is so restrictive! We have multiple devices, so we shouldn't have the classic "siblings arguing over which channel to watch" fight again.

So I think the family number limit makes sense.

I dated a woman with Russian ancestry in NYC, she used her family's Amazon Prime account. Her parents weren't the primary account holder either-- the account had nearly 200 addresses in it when you go to the "where do you want to ship this?" option. The extended family and "friends of the family" were all on it. It worked great--- except everyone can see the order history. So there was some family drama when her younger sister ordered lingerie to her boyfriend's apartment, using that Prime account.

nkrisc• 9 years ago

Those things are still allowed. Just don't use Google services.

slededit• 9 years ago

These restrictions seem more about preventing people from using the feature to share with friends/acquaintances rather than a misunderstanding that non-traditional families exist. I guess this is why pretty much everything these days needs an asterisk next to it.

I doubt the programmers had any say in what the restrictions would in the first place.

porpoisemonkey• 9 years ago

Agreed. Honestly from a feature implementation perspective there's more business logic required to take this approach and I don't think it would behoove any programmer to come up with these restrictions.

If I had to hazard a guess the arbitrary nature of these rules sound like they come from someone in the legal department and was established as part of contract negotiations for the price of the content.

draw_down• 9 years ago

I wonder if there's a name for seeing a product with flaws and attributing the flaws to dumb programmers. (e.g. a game has unrealistic female characters with big ridiculous boobs -> programmers are horny idiots)

And of course, nobody enjoys using a product/service and then thinks, wow, they must have amazing programmers!

ehutch79• 9 years ago

The lesson here is only offer individual plans, and not deal with crap like this.

ronilan• 9 years ago

Even better, don't offer any plans and don't deal with users at all.

- "But, yo, how are we gonna make money?"

- "Hummm, advertising, maybe?"

See, they've been down that road, we've been down that road. When you grow up you deal with the so called "crap".

rlglwx• 9 years ago

I would say that this is another example of poor product name choice. Instead of calling the feature "Family Library" just call it something like digital sharing. The name choice implies certain features that are hard to implement or near impossible to restrict.

mikeash2• 9 years ago

Why does Google have such a narrow conception of what a "family" is?

Because "Family" is a way to group some people together to sort-of share an account, not intended to cover every single situation someone might use the term for.

This is a pretty ridiculous article. If you can't join a new "Family" for a year, that doesn't mean Google doesn't recognize your living situation, it just means Google doesn't feel like extending their sharing whatnot to you.

glangdale• 9 years ago

If Google (or whoever) decides to reinvent what the word "family" means in a way that doesn't type-check with what the person understands a family means, whose problem is that? The excess child in a 4-child family? Or Google's, when people decide to either start violating ToS and/or move to "Channel Bittorrent"? Maybe it's because I'm one of those Australians with our notorious national tendency towards online piracy I'm a bit biased but it does seem like Google might sensibly choose to err on the side on inclusiveness - just as a pragmatic consideration.

The intent is pretty clear - I'm sure there would be a rather suspicious number of "15 person families" that interlock, span 4 different countries, etc. etc. the minute Google relaxed their ToS. And I can't help but wonder how many really large families genuinely have members spanning an age range where the oldest kid is still at home and little Timmy actually needs his own Google account.

mikeash2• 9 years ago

It's pretty common to use words like this to indicate the approximate intent rather than a precise alignment with every possible thing the word could mean.

Just toss "family plan" into Google and look at the results that come up. It's a really common term and they pretty much all have arbitrary limits like this, because "family plan" means "plan that might be more suitable for families" not "plan that suits every single family ever."

It's common with other words too. Happy hour isn't limited to happy people, nor is it guaranteed to produce happiness. Kids meals have an arbitrary age cutoff even though "kid" is often more varied. Express lanes are sometimes slower than the regular ones. Hacker News is rarely about cutting things with rough or heavy blows, and often not about news.

You ask, "whose problem is that?" My answer would be, nobody's, because there isn't a problem for anyone to have in the first place.

huebnerob• 9 years ago

By the time I'm using a different credit card and living halfway across the world in a different region, I would feel disqualified for the kind of "family sharing" perks that this situation describes, even if I did have the blood relationship. I think that a more technically appropriate way to describe these things would be "household" plans, though I don't think there's anything wrong with the word 'family' unless you're looking hard for a semantic argument.

wmil• 9 years ago

They're using the term "family" but it's really loosely aimed at households. The restrictions seem more reasonable if you look at them in that context.

cestith• 9 years ago

"Google Household" sounds too much like "Google Home".

rabboRubble2• 9 years ago

Reason for some of these things...

Be 18 or older -> Minors can't enter into contracts to buy things.

Live in the same country -> Copyright is different in different countries. Media X may not be licensed for location Y.

wink• 9 years ago

Be 18 or older -> Minors can't enter into contracts to buy things.

Totally not true in some (many?) jurisdictions.

rabboRubble2• 9 years ago

US contract law isn't global obviously. Most US states, minors do not have capacity to contract, with some noted exceptions.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lack-capacity-to-cont...

ChristianGeek• 9 years ago

You don't have to wait 12 months to change families; you have to wait 12 months before you can change again.

wnevets• 9 years ago

What does this have to do with programmers? These are clearly restrictions for DRM purposes.

coldcode• 9 years ago

Even better work on something involving families, names and times and dates across the world. Prepare to go nuts. None of those concepts are easy to define. For example, if you cross time zones on a mobile app and offer services (such as a hotel room) wtf is tonight? How do you define a set of name fields for any country?

acuozzo• 9 years ago

How do you define a set of name fields for any country?

Perhaps the solution is to provide two options: either (1) the common (Western?) given|surname structure or (2) an Nx2 matrix in which the key is what the name part is called on legal documents in the region and the value is the corresponding name part.

An example…

Full name: "Hajji Halef Omar Ben Hajji Abul Abbas Ibn Hajji Dawud al-Gossarah"

Title: Hajji

Ism: Halef Omar

Nasab: Hajji Abul Abbas

Nasab: Hajji Dawud

Nisbah: al-Gossarah

A database for the keys can be maintained and suggestions can be offered to the user at submission time in order to keep things tidy. Additionally, per-region templates can be maintained in order to make the Nx2 approach less burdensome.

Users submitting names under #2 would be additionally required to select two name parts so that their name can be shoehorned into the Western model.

Continuing with our example…

Given Name: Halef Omar

Surname: al-Gossarah

(Here's a reward for putting up with my absurd example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3V-9Az5FUs)

twothamendment• 9 years ago

These aren't falsehoods that programmers believe. They are restrictions put in place by a business person and/or lawyer. What a horrible title.

nulagrithom• 9 years ago

From TFA:

A number of people on Twitter have taken the title literally. "This is about managers and lawyers!" they protest. But, of course!

All of the "Falsehoods" memes - including the original - are a shorthand for "Constraints placed upon a complex system by a mixture of ignorance, apathy, business requirements, or other legal constraints".

mjw1007• 9 years ago

If the article's author understands that it's often reasonable to use a shorthand which isn't supposed to be taken literally, it's hard to see why they're unhappy about Google's use of the term "Family" in this case.

shirro• 9 years ago

At least some companies offer services aimed at families. In an industry that seems to be driven by immature 20 something graduates, family oriented accounts and services are rare. I have dropped use of several very promising services because they don't allow easy sharing within the family. Companies like Y-combinator that focus their efforts disproportionately on young single males instead of people with life experience only contribute to the problem IMO.

CM30• 9 years ago

We're seeing so many of these lists that I'm half expecting to read a 'falsehoods programmers believe about other programmers list soon'!

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families

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