The more friction existed, the higher the stakes felt to me, and the more it seemed like I needed to have something very important and worthwhile to say before I could (should) blog about it.

toil for the slaving classes,

If the link you are trying to send is just some kind of harmless confirmation link (e.g. subscribe/unsubscribe from a newsletter), then at least use a form inside the web page to do the actual confirmation through a POST request (possibly also using a CSRF token), otherwise you will unequivocally end up with false positives.

Confirmations are a little more difficult, as senders really do want to keep the transaction as low friction as possible. Adding a confirm button may result in people abandoning the confirmation process.

Speed and efficiency are, in my opinion, arbitrary gauges of success. The shear number of productivity czars prophesying about a "future without friction" are innumerable to be almost comical. In contrast to these efficiency futurists, when it comes to zettelkasten, I am pro-friction. But, not just any friction. Eufriction. Eufriction is good friction. Just as weight training, writing a book, and giving birth can all be considered a form of eustress[6], so too is folgezettel a form of eufriction.

After all, Luhmann himself didn’t have automatic backlinking. He had to manually add the cross-references to his analog notecards, and yet the system allowed him to write dozens of books and papers. Indeed, as Christian from Zettelkasten.de has said, automation might actually be an impediment to the cogitation and deep understanding the method seeks to engender.

sometimes I’m afraid I’m more fighting the tools than doing research. Sometimes it seems to me there’s too much friction, and not the productive kind.

Using an alphanumeric identification system for your notes is a workout. By having to situate new notes among previously imported ones, folgezettel forces at least one connection between ideas. It's mental calisthenics,8 acting as a check against capture bloat—that is, importing "all the things."

If you can’t talk yourself into using your energy to write or type something out, it’s probably not worth capturing.

A High-Density EEG Study Showing Advantages of Drawing Over Typing for Learning

And if you stumble upon one idea and think that it might connect toanother idea, what do you do when you employ all these differenttechniques? Go through all your books to find the right underlinedsentence? Reread all your journals and excerpts? And what do youdo then? Write an excerpt about it? Where do you save it and howdoes this help to make new connections? Every little step suddenly

We recommend handwriting your notes and only typing up the parts that become more valuable to you once digitised, for example, if you need them to be searchable. Even then, we only type up a few of the best highlights, key points, or insights that will help us achieve some study or work-related goal, as that justifies the time investment.

Everyone knows friction in software is harmful. But I think we all continually underestimate just how big an influence friction is on what people actually do and use. People don’t write long multi-tweet threads because it’s a good way to post a short essay, they do it because it’s so low friction.

But all of these attempts misunderstand why the Open Source ecosystem is successful as a whole. The ecosystem of fairly standard licenses provides a level playing field that allows collaboration with low friction, and produces massive value for everyone involved – both to those that contribute and to those that don't. It is not without problems (there are many essential but unsexy projects that are struggling with funding), but introducing more friction won't improve the success of this ecosystem – it will just lead to some parts of the ecosystem to break off.

I wanted to use GitHub Gists which are a wonderfully low friction way of sharing code

Everything Lives in GitWith a Jamstack project, anyone should be able to do a git clone, install any needed dependencies with a standard procedure (like npm install), and be ready to run the full project locally. No databases to clone, no complex installs. This reduces contributor friction, and also simplifies staging and testing workflows.

Preserving user privacy is difficult when detectingmore nuanced forms of censorshipSome forms of softcensorship might involve intentional performance degrada-tion or content manipulation. Detecting this type of behav-ior would require comparing performance or content acrossgroups of users, but such a comparison also implies thateach user must reveal their browsing history.

Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post something nasty online. Friction-positive design can help here, too. Civil Comments was an app you could apply to your comments section that forced commenters to rate three other comments before posting their own.

I think there is some interesting physics here. In particular, there is something curious about the difference between static and kinetic friction. First, let me make some observations and assumptions.

It would also reduce friction for new users, who would no longer have to learn a new syntax for each new framework.

There will be those within organisations that won't be too keen on the approaches above due to the friction it presents to some users.

Friction was typified by general criticism of an action without constructive suggestions to move forward, often causing negative emotions among participants.

Stalling and friction are linked: efforts stalled when friction accumulated or when the fear of criticism led to no activity. Likewise, avoiding stalling by making a decision could result in friction when others disagreed.