Feature Creep

While I generally like to consider myself a professional fanfiction writer, I also tend to add that I write code on the side. Because I do have to earn a living somehow, and writing fanfiction doesn’t actually earn me any money, because charging for fanfiction is one of the seven deadly sins.

And in my (actual) professional life, part of writing code involves discussing user requirements, agreeing using requirements and writing specifications around the user requirements before you start writing the code. It is one of the more important parts of the process, because otherwise you get customers who say “Oh wouldn’t it be nice if it could also do this as well?” or “Oh wouldn’t it be cool if it could do that as well?” and before long you are coding a simple calculator application that can bring down aeroplanes from 200 miles away and download comics from the future that haven’t been written yet.

This is what is known as “feature creep” and it is something that, unfortunately, happens a great deal, because as much as we want to deny it, most of the software industry is about keeping customers happy — especially if you are a small software house — and sometimes you have to balance rationality and the need to stick to what was agreed with financial need, the need to keep a customer and (for want of a better phrase) public relations need.

However I’m using this as an analogy, so I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of project management, and keeping customers happy, because I’m going to pivot to the upcoming government plans for social media and children in terms of “feature creep”, because it is yet another flaw in the plans they are making.

Just to be clear, I don’t know what plans they are making, but even without knowing the full ins and outs of their plans I can see that “feature creep” is going to be one of the problems they are going to face.

The initial announcement made by The Prime Minister listed a few sites — the sites seemed to be the most popular ones, the ones that the Under 16s are most likely to be found on. Facebook, Tiktok, YouTube (which I wasn’t aware classed as “social media” but I guess we live and learn) and, of course, Twitter.

It’s clear this isn’t an exhaustive list — it is just an illustrative one. When the bill is introduced in July then the list will become clearer, with — it is hoped — the full list of sites being included.

But however full this list is, there are good odds it won’t include every site that people consider “social media”, and it certainly won’t include every website on the web — that would be beyond reason and sanity and incredibly hard to put into a single bill.

And therein lies the problem. Whether a site is considered “social media” or not is, to some degree, a judgement call — a matter of perspective. And the decision of whether a site is popular or not is also, to some degree, a judgement call.

But what is almost certain — to the point of being entirely predictable — is that if the teenagers are banned from one site, and can’t find a way round the ban (which seems unlikely because teenagers are better than most at breaking rules and finding ways round things) then they will find another site to use. A site that hasn’t been classed as “social media”, or hasn’t been included in the list because it’s not popular.

The teenagers will spread across the web, using sites that are not controlled, not included in the ban, because (as Michael Crichton once said) life will find a way.

The government, of course, will not sit idly by while this happens — to sit and watch the teenagers essentially thumb their noses and laugh at the ban would be a challenge to their authority and their power, and make a mockery of them — so they will extend the ban to whatever sites the teenagers turn to.

This will lead to a vicious circle of the teenagers moving on and the government moving in and the teenagers moving on and the government moving in…….

And when i said that “the government can’t posibly include every siteon the web”? If the government stick to this there is every possibility that eventually they might — that they could just get tired of extending the ban again and again and eventually require every site to demand proof of age.

Which will bring this entire thing to a whole new level. Demanding every website on the internet implement age verification will cause chaos and mayhem, and the level of resistance to it will be far more than to this simple ban.

But that’s only a potential future. The actual future is that teenagers will be driven to unregulated sites — sites that are outside the scope of the bill. And when they are the government will be forced to extend the bill. Which is not going to end well.

Feature creep. It kills software and it will kill this bill, and the politicians that try to make it work.