Jeremiah Tolbert

According to a new study, the intro­duc­tion of non-​​native snakes into south­ern Florida swamps has dev­as­tated the pop­u­la­tion of small mam­mals, almost com­pletely wip­ing out some vul­ner­a­ble species. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the num­ber rac­coon and pos­sums spot­ted in the Everglades has dropped more than 98%, bob­cat sight­ings are down 87%, and rab­bits and foxes have not been seen at all in years.

Next time you’re think­ing about buy­ing an exotic pet, just go look at the photo in that arti­cle.  That should dis­suade a good num­ber of you.

I can’t hon­estly think of an instance where intro­duc­ing an exotic species into an ecosys­tem resulted in strength­en­ing the native ecosystem.

Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it with­out “pay­ing any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s rep­u­ta­tion as a book col­lec­tor and library founder gave him a rep­u­ta­tion as a man of dis­cern­ing lit­er­ary tastes, so Franklin sent a let­ter to the hater ask­ing if he could bor­row a selec­tion from the his library, one which was a “very scarce and curi­ous book.” The rival, flat­tered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank you note. Mission accomplished.

The next time the leg­is­la­ture met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in per­son for the first time. Franklin said the hater “ever after man­i­fested a readi­ness to serve me on all occa­sions, so that we became great friends, and our friend­ship con­tin­ued to his death.”

I’ve been think­ing a lot about this Franklin anec­dote since I first heard it a cou­ple of years ago.  I’ve never put it into prac­tice, but I’ve been tempted.  I don’t have enough peo­ple who openly despise me, I guess?

Manipulation like this done delib­er­ately leaves a bad taste in my mouth usu­ally.  I can’t stand those “pickup artist” books and tapes that some of my sin­gle friends like.  I’ve lis­tened to some of them on car rides and they made me incred­i­bly uncom­fort­able for a lot of rea­sons, but mostly because they involve delib­er­ately mod­i­fy­ing behav­ior to try and manip­u­late some­one in a very crass way.  But is the Franklin Effect that dif­fer­ent, when applied?  It doesn’t bother me as much– maybe because try­ing to get some­one to go to bed with you and try­ing to get some­one to like you are dif­fer­ent enough that I can excuse the later but find the for­mer very distasteful.

If I ever ask you a favor out of the blue, you can assume I’m finally get­ting around to try­ing this out.

Things like this are why you have to be on your toes as a designer/​developer.  Subtle changes in user behav­ior can have huge con­se­quences on how you struc­ture a site.  I’ve noticed this trend towards more scrolling lately, and I am def­i­nitely for it as a user.  Now to take it into con­sid­er­a­tion as a designer.

There are only a cou­ple of these I would not watch dozens of times.