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Rap Genius Explains Why Worse is Better Lyrics by Tom Lehman

2014

From http://firstround.com/article/Rap-Genius-Explains-Why-Worse-is-Better
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“The first version of Rap Genius was really bad — it sucked, and I’m glad it sucked,” he says. “Only in its sucking could it have taught me the secret of how to build things on the internet, and that secret is ‘worse is better.’”
What does this mean in practice? Lehman, like the website he co-founded five years ago, is only too happy to explain.
...Lehman doesn’t subscribe to the idea of prototyping on paper. “My approach is let’s do something shitty, see how people interact with something real — something functionally and immaturely designed. Once we know we want to do something, our goal is just to get it out there."
“You are the dumbest you'll ever be right now. And that's actually kind of inspiring.”
There's a reason you can’t do the perfect thing right now: You probably don’t even know what it looks like.
...“I had no idea what the right thing to spend my time on was.”
For example, it occurred to him that two users could very well be editing the same annotation on a song at the same time. So the site would need a conflict resolution mechanism.
“Without conflict resolution, two people making changes at the same time would clobber each other, and it would suck. But it wasn’t happening that often. So I just put in a comment saying ‘hey, we’ll have to fix this pretty soon.’ Four years later, that comment is still there and who cares? I thought it was going to be a problem, but it wasn’t. You can’t know what your biggest problems are going to be, so you can’t know what your features should be. Just do the shittiest thing you have to do.”
Credits

Tom Lehman

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