Morning gripe
Dec. 12th, 2003 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWhat is it with people using a system in ways it was not intended, and then griping at you when you make a use of it based on that in the way it was intended?
Amazon's wish list system was intended for you to make a list of things you wanted people to buy you. Then you could either tell them about it, or else someone could search on it, find your wish list by your personal information, and surprise you.
So, all of a sudden, as I'm buying Christmas gifts this year, I'm finding people making all sorts of oddball uses of the list function, and saying they don't want people to buy them things off of it. One of them says he uses it as a way to keep track of prices of a bunch of items all on one page. One of them says it's for family use only. How was I supposed to know that? Ask him? The whole point of a wish list is you're not supposed to have to ask, it lets you surprise them with something they wanted. There wasn't even anything in the "Unique Information" field to say "Please don't buy me anything off of this, thanks!"
If someone's going to make a nonstandard use of a standard public function like that, they should find some ways of telling other people about it right there on the page (like putting it in the "Unique Information" field). The onus shouldn't have to be on the other person to figure out psychically that they're not using it in the way it was intended.
Amazon's wish list system was intended for you to make a list of things you wanted people to buy you. Then you could either tell them about it, or else someone could search on it, find your wish list by your personal information, and surprise you.
So, all of a sudden, as I'm buying Christmas gifts this year, I'm finding people making all sorts of oddball uses of the list function, and saying they don't want people to buy them things off of it. One of them says he uses it as a way to keep track of prices of a bunch of items all on one page. One of them says it's for family use only. How was I supposed to know that? Ask him? The whole point of a wish list is you're not supposed to have to ask, it lets you surprise them with something they wanted. There wasn't even anything in the "Unique Information" field to say "Please don't buy me anything off of this, thanks!"
If someone's going to make a nonstandard use of a standard public function like that, they should find some ways of telling other people about it right there on the page (like putting it in the "Unique Information" field). The onus shouldn't have to be on the other person to figure out psychically that they're not using it in the way it was intended.
Fixed now
Date: 2003-12-15 02:08 pm (UTC)I figured anyone I knew would ask me first or see if I mentioned it before searching for a wishlist since that's what I'd do; you thought it would be better to surprise people since that's what you'd want other people to do for you. Oops. *heh*. Both of those viewpoints are well-represented in the general population, and certainly neither of them are wrong.
Anyway, it's marked private now so as not to confuse people, particularly since it's frequently out of date as I buy things from it from other sites and then don't get back to update it for a while.
eagle (http://journals.eyrie.org/eagle/)