So when you have a bad take machine, you get the following processes:
They make a bad take.
People are outraged and talk about it.
The bad take machine likes it and does more of that behaviour in future.
If, on the other hand, they make a take and nobody cares, they do not get reward and the behaviour is selected against.
The behaviours drove the spread of the outrage replicator, and the outrage replicator provides the selection mechanism for the behaviours. Thus, via the spread of our outrage on Twitter, we have operant conditioned the bad take machine into producing worse takes.
Which is to say, it's bad on purpose to make you replicate it.
Slack embodied the belief, so common in Silicon Valley, that the best product would win in the end. “Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” the company wrote in its open letter to Microsoft. “How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.”
And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s love got to do with it?