If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
Taste is not synonymous with personal preferences, otherwise we wouldn't describe some taste as "bad taste" or "poor taste." Rather, to me, one's taste refers to one's power of discernment as to what is good.
We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.
It doesn't need to be able to be described in objective terms to be objective, or rather to matter.
Agreed. As someone who watches an embarrassingly large number of isekai, I'm not going to drink from a public water fountain and call it a pierian spring.
Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "Because most people don't like it, it shouldn't exist"?
Posting something to SHOW people without considering how people may want or need what you're showing is just bad etiquette anywhere frankly. If you're building for yourself that's great, maybe qualify it in your post because otherwise it's free game to judge poorly. Spam is inherently unwanted content, you don't get to decide what is wanted content the collective community does.
It's something many of us have learned building software for years that all the new people building are going to figure out for themselves. Just because you can build it doesn't mean anyone will care if you're trying to show it off and with the flood of new apps, it's fair game to discuss.
Edit: all of us -> many of us on the last paragraph
Right and my point is you (or i) will never be consulted, it happens emergently through community dynamics. No one sat in a group and decided this, Show HN in particular has always been selective. Different things are interesting to different sub groups and they select for different things. Show HN is not homogenous. My argument is not to not post, it's to post knowing who you hope to reach and why it would matter to them, don't just post to post, that is a large part of taste to me.
Second, I've founded several companies, had customers, put out products to be judged by the market and raised capital. I'm more than qualified to put out an opinion here. Been there done that.
Might be unintentional then, but the language in your post comes across as a textbook case of gatekeeping.
Gate keeping isn’t inherently good, but I think Trump is essentially the right wing outcome of zero gate keeping.
Similarly, I should have done more in the post to steer people way from the perception I'm shitting on them for building for themselves, that's great I have plenty of personal projects running at home that are just for me, if I ever decided to share them out I'd work to make sure its ready and valuable for people to receive.
"Things that don't consider their audience get ignored or are perceived poorly."
The only thing I stated was a simple thing which is almost immovable fact at this point, that someone posting should be considering that.
My opinions are actually a lot stronger than anything I've written here and if it was about them the post would have been radically different.
A feeling of self righteous indignation? (I joke)
Anyway, I appreciate your take, but yes I think we just take fully different sides. I really am having a hard time seeing it from your perspective, but I respect that we attempted to get through to each other. Cheers.
Seems to be what the essay implies.
It’s super easy to talk about who has taste or not in the abstract. A lot harder to tell someone straight up they have no taste because of some idea you have.
I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.
I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.
I would like to offer a counterexample: iPhone, when it first came out anyways. Tasteful design is rather so obvious that when you see it you'd say yes, this is what anyone would expect from a "phone". That doesn't seem to be so subjective.
Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.
According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.
More importantly, I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant on this matter. When he says the taste has no interest in something what he is really implicitly describing is that taste is the province of rich people. If one has to strive or worry or self promote or anything like that, with regard to an aesthetic decision, it is easy to mark as tasteless. In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich.
The main reason people drive themselves in circles, talking about taste and subjectivity, and college-educated words for subjectivity is because we don’t want to admit that it is bound up in class and upbringing. That and not the passage of time is why it is so hard to understand Kant on this matter. He’s describing a fiction that we agreed upon so that we didn’t have to talk about the influence of money.
This isn't true at all. There's a whole world of artisans and fine artists that range from middle class to broke, and they wouldn't be in that financial situation if they felt like compromising their point of view for money.
To be more blunt, you aren't saying anything at all. You are just posturing.
If I was to be charitable, I guess maybe their argument was that Kant only believed in subjective universality because he was rich, but that doesn't make any sense. Both Kant and Hume grew up middle class, and ended up in academia, and had very different conclusions about what "taste" is.
It's just a knee jerk reaction to dead white men philosophers and anyone who is interested in them as a bunch of elitists. That's not an argument, that's some kind of misplaced class resentment masquerading as an argument.
If someone likes what you make it doesn't matter where you come from.
Taste is often advanced as this subjective yet ultimately discriminating notion which refuses to be pinned down. Insistent but ineffable. This idea that you and I know what good software is due to having paid dues and they don’t, and the truth will out, is a common one!
My argument isn’t that it’s class. It’s that this framework of describing taste is PURPOSE BUILT to ignore questions like status, access, and money in favor of standing in judgment.
We are in the middle of an earthquake. The 90s was like this, but it’s bigger. Radical changes in what it means to build software are happening right now. That will without a hair of a doubt result in equally radical changes in what constitutes good and bad work.
Maybe, just maybe, the thing that seems really durable (taste) is already getting put into a blender that’s still running.
Here I don’t know what the trouble is. I’m sorry for calling your phrasing the equivalent of “hafalutin” (a word Marx has used more than twice—he’s dead and white), but what do you expect having come in to cloud the waters with 2 extra syllables to little end?
Whether or not economic capital is actually transferrable to cultural capital seems to be another debate, but as the old saying goes "money can't buy taste". In fact, a newly rich lower class person marrying a contemporarily poor higher class person seems more likely.
As the abstract states: "Because persons are taught their cultural tastes in childhood, a person's taste in culture is internalized to their personality, and identify his or her origin in a given social class, which might or might not impede upward social mobility." Money can't rebuild the personality that is internalized in youth, but marriage might give your kids a shot.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_(book)
edit: also to add, the relationship between these is the underlying theme of The Great Gatsby.
c'mon. Are you really going to tell me "ahem dear sir, I found out that this Mr Bourdieu likes him some nuance!" His most famous book is essentially an article ballooned into a monograph via nuance.
I disagree, it seems to me that most people are seeking validation. In that sense, we don't want some global consensus, but a consensus within a specifically chosen group that proves our membership.
> "that's just your opinion man"...But we don't believe that
Why not? Many people have opinions I strongly disagree with, but I don't question that they actually have the opinion.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like (good) taste to me!
Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.
But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.
It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".
Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!
The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.
OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.
There are so many problems that people have that have never been important enough to get solutions, that now can.
It's less about taste and more about experience and outcomes now.
The way we built software in the past, including the processes, ceremonies
No. Silence is better than noise.
HN is generally considered a filter in industry, or a place to launch and make a hot start. The author is making their comments from the context of Show HN, where we expect some self-filtering, for quality and appropriateness.
What we see in Show HN the last few weeks is slop, submissions where the time from first commit to posting on HN is less than an hour. I've been posting some selections to Bluesky. The fastest I've seen so far is 25m [1]
I fully agree with everything you said and everything the author said. The two are not mutually exclusive.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mf2hygnbkc2o