This post by Trent Walton struck a chord for me.

It got me thinking about how important respect for the user is to what we make and to the experience of using the web.

It’s easy to see when respect has gone:
Visually frantic sites bury useful content within mazes of dishonest advertising. When you do hunt out the scent of useful content, it’s spread over multiple pages to increase ad revenue. If you read anything for more than 20 seconds, you are asked to share it to your networks.

Popup surveys or mailing list sign up forms are batted away like hungry mosquitos. Paywalls, dead links, redirects, url shorteners all add to the weight and the noise.

We get tricked into being sent email we won’t read for stuff we don’t want by people we didn’t give permission to. We get bombarded by blunt instrument, poorly targeted ads trying to sell us stuff we don’t want based on non-existent information.

It’s no wonder things like Instapaper, Adblock, Read it later (and many more) exist. They are all designed to de-noise that tainted experience.

I think our devices (computers/mobiles/whatevers) and what we put on them should be seen more like personal space.

Let me explain:
These things are very personal. We don’t normally share them, we customise them, some of us fetishise them, protect them, dress them up in fancy clothes, buy them accessories, decorate them, imbue them with deeper qualities such as expressing personal taste, deeper values or reflecting our status. We identify with communities that surround different types of them. We judge others based on the device they choose to own, or not.

We weave our lives with these things and the software and services we use, we write letters that never get sent, share intimate moments with significant others, take photos of our kids, save our most treasured memories. We laugh together with friends we may never meet physically.

A connected device is our window to all that stuff.

It’s because of all those things, and because it’s usually an individual experience, The web is an intimate medium.

In an intimate medium, trust and respect is doubly important.

If someone has trusted our site/service enough to allow access to their attention by engaging with us, we abuse that at our peril.

If we disregard that trust, and choose to push stuff into that personal space in a naive, thoughtless or short-sighted way, we eat into the respect we’ve earned and it’s really hard to get it back once it’s gone.