Hendmade technology - how fashion for manual labor affects Internet services

Information technology was originally aimed at automating processes. Algorithms tell us products, music and content, based on the history of orders or activity in social networks. However, the personalization of recommendations does not mean that the client will feel special. He still knows that this soulless machine has calculated his preferences. Recently, Internet services providing semi-automated (or non-automated) processes are gaining increasing popularity. Let's look at several options for such services and how they give the customer a sense of warmth and care for themselves.

First of all, customer support comes to mind. To replace the sections of the FAQ and manuals came plugins for chat with a consultant. An excellent example of the further development of an individual approach to feedback is “call me back” services, when a potential buyer only needs to press a button and wait for a call. Naturally, a conversation with a real person will sell a product with a much higher probability.

Next, take a clear and familiar scenario - the search for something. We are used to the fact that you can always go to a search engine or use the form on the site and get a list of results. You may have to play around with the query a bit - it does not always work right away to get the right wording. But what if your request is received by a person who is well versed in search algorithms and knows how best to find what you need? Virtual assistant services like Operator do just that. It would seem that we are replacing the fast, low-cost machine algorithm with a slow and expensive person. But as a result, for the user in many cases it will work much better.

So, we went from a page with a description of the product to real-time assistance via chat or by phone to the opportunity to ask general advice from a real person. Let's go further - what if even the order itself will be made by someone else? Sounds weird? Nevertheless, we can observe the growing popularity of services for the delivery of products and recipes to them or a box of wine delivered to your door once a month by subscription. Users of these services do not even choose products - and there are several reasons for this. First, the credibility of the company - most likely they understand you better than wine and pick up really good bottles. Secondly, the element of surprise and no need to choose. But the basis of such trust is still the knowledge that the selection is carried out by a knowledgeable person, and not by an algorithm.
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Let's move from the goods of the physical world to virtual content. With the advent of the era of WEB2.0, the number of articles, videos and music began to increase exponentially. Finding useful information has become more difficult, so all sorts of aggregators and recommendation services began to appear. Since a full-fledged artificial intelligence has not yet been invented, the quality of the proposed content is determined by indirect quantitative characteristics - views, likes, and so on. Better than nothing, but far from ideal.

Actually, too much information and the resulting difficulty in choosing high-quality content is a problem that the Cupcamp helps to solve. Guys who are well versed in wine can send you a box of excellent wine. Someone else who understands, for example, in finance may recommend important and useful articles on this topic. The principle is the same as in the above services - a partial replacement of the automated process for the work of a real person. In this case, the person determines the relevance and quality of the content, and he does not need to count likes.

The digest of manually selected information, which comes out with a certain periodicity, allows the reader to save time on finding important information, while the author gives a much more interested audience. This is a great marketing tool for companies and an opportunity for anyone who understands a certain topic or simply reads a lot of people to create their own audience of subscribers. On the Cupcamp there are already mailings about survival , discounts on Steam , the LJ community “how it's done” and others.

The last 10 years of the development of the Internet have been focused on creating content by users, socialization and ease of use of services. It seems to me that the next round has already begun, and it is aimed not just at personalization, but rather at streamlining knowledge, at narrowly focused sources of information that provide really high-quality content. So far, the only way to ensure this is direct human participation in the service.