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Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?
323 points by julianpye on Jan 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 370 comments
Ever tried to help a relative over the holidays to set up their home-banking? Lost in the juggling of your multi-factor device garden? Tried to get useful search results from Google recently to find yourself in advert hell? Longing for the old Amazon experience when today's seems like running the gauntlet of grey-imports and scam-price offerings? Logged out of a site for 6 months and returning to a completely confusing new site where nothing is like it used to be? Today's Internet experience has become user-hostile and it almost calls out for returning to the 90s: walled gardens aka Compuserve experience, dedicated devices for home-banking and standalone cameras.

What has led to this experience? On the top of my head I can see the following reasons:

* Release Often as KPIs for developers

The release often KPI for promotion and bonuses has led to constant changes to 'systems that are working fine' to become ever-changing user experiences. While daily users can gradually phase-in changes, most sites that are casually used will confuse users with completely new error-prone experience.

* Payment Security and Financial Regulations

At least in the EU fraud has led to various tech-related regulation calling as an example for separate apps for IDs and for transaction verification. While it is well-meant, it leads people to check bank statements less often and anecdotally in my family confuses especially elderly users to the point of introducing more opportunity for scams and fraud.

* Patch-work nature of ID & Verification

Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules and Authentication Apps have been patched onto the original user/pass system. The experience has become truly annoying with some clear winners: anecdotally more and more people simply use Google/Facebook OAuth as logins to sites. This is fine from a UI perspective, but lacks consumer regulation - what happens if you lose your access and who can you contact if your accounts get compromised/scammed/blocked?

* KPI switch from customer first to business model first

Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.

What are other reasons?




I think the internet (and its tools) started off with the intention of making the lives of users easier as compared to the alternatives.

However, as the internet became mainstream and competitive, more successful players realized that they can employ dark patterns to increase their revenue by taking advantage of users (lock-in, difficulty unsubscribing, making cloud accounts mandatory, etc).

It's 2022 and I think all the companies everywhere feel like they have no choice but to learn from the best. The pricing tactics used by Apple, are now used by many other companies in different industries and even companies that were non-tech are now using tech with its dark patterns.

Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies. It's just the mindset of growth at all and any cost, that's what I'm seeing all around me on the internet and offline (by using the internet in some cases).


> growth at all and any cost

This is 100% the root cause.

Without exponential growth targets, almost all the ills mentioned wouldn't have been required.

And specifically, without exponential growth targets for companies with market cap already above $1T.

I'm convinced we'd be living in a better world if MAMAA would have said "Okay, our core business is mature. We're going to run it as a cash printing machine but with lower growth. If you want growth, here are companies we're spinning off."

Unfortunately, the reality of the software dev and infrastructure economies probably requires halo behemoths. For the former, so they can be compensated in equity, and the latter, because there's only enough demand for a few at minimal-cost-per-unit scale.


I hate it so much, it happened so many times that a nice medium to large company with an absolute epic product gets many millions of funding and everything turns to crap in pursuing return on that insane investment. It's sad really.


> Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies.

I'm not sure. It might also be the opposite: this might be the precise time for a new business that can cut out all the bullshit and give the users what they want. It's not just the HN crowd that is frustrated with Modern Tech.


Good luck getting the advertising bandwidth to grow...


TikTok didn't seem to have any problems.


Can there be a way for capitalism to work highly efficiently and not in a hostile, adversarial manner, in some post-scarcity environment? Or will it always require scarcity in order to function or develop things?


I believe if regulated, it can foster innovation, but the way it is now encourages blatant exploitation of unaware consumers, as we clearly see these days.

Case in point: Windows. requires an expensive license, but still pushes ads down your throat on every occasion, collects too much telemetry, and keeps nagging you after every update until you accept having your data collected.


Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.

Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content".

Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.


> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get"

In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person"

How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps.

She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.


Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns.

Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.


> Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns.

Dumbed down and user-hostile are independent things. Dark patterns are being introduced for nefarious purposes. No one is explaining away things like "click to subscribe, wait 3 hours in a phone queue to unsubscribe" as required for "grandmothers"

The software isn't stupid, it's intentionally and cleverly manipulative and user hostile.


> hard wait time to unsubscribe

It really is the grandmother excuse "you the user dont know what the unsubscribe button is doing, so we ask you to wait 3h and confirm 4 times because maybe you are clicking by mistake since you dont know where and what you are clicking".


No, it’s because it was A/B-tested with the result that the pattern retains more subscribers, which is good for KPI if not for the business.


This particular pattern is so dark that the FTC is cracking down on it[0]:

Under the enforcement policy statement issued today, businesses must follow three key requirements or be subject to law enforcement action, including potential civil penalties:

    Disclose clearly and conspicuously all material terms of the product or service, including how much it costs, deadlines by which the consumer must act to stop further charges, the amount and frequency of such charges, how to cancel, and information about the product or service itself that is needed to stop consumers from being deceived about the characteristics of the product or service. The statement provides detail on what clear and conspicuous means, particularly noting that the information must be provided upfront when the consumer first sees the offer and generally as prominent as the deal offer itself.

    Obtain the consumer’s express informed consent before charging them for a product or services. This includes obtaining the consumer’s acceptance of the negative option feature separately from other portions of the entire transaction, not including information that interferes with, detracts from, contradicts, or otherwise undermines the consumer’s ability to provide their express informed consent.

    Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...


Most of the dark patterns are not due to dumbing down UI. They're either because nothing better is available (security), income would be reduced (ads, cookie warnings, software is deliberately crippled for non-professional versions), development is done by lowest bidder.


Yeah. It would actually be pretty cool if web sites and apps were dumbed down for a few things: denying cookies, deleting accounts, contacting support, unsubscribing from spam.

With dark patterns those things actually become more complicated.


If your user base is large enough, some significant faction of your users are in fact “retarded un-learnable,” though I might have put it more delicately.

And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user.

I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.


I don't think anyone is directly blaming the users here.

It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.

However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness.

That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong incentives, not that users are stupid.


> I don't think anyone is directly blaming the users here.

The comment I'm replying to is LITERALLY blaming "normal users" for these problems.


Normal users, as they represent by definition the largest numbers, are necessary to enable the network effects on which the Internet companies rely, and as a result they also put other, reluctant users in a position of minority, the position of the 'unreasonable', the position of the grumpy old fart, the position of the burden to support.

The mass, thus the normal user, is indeed the enabler.


I fall in the "grumpy old fart" category.

But this isn't the fault of users, "normal" or otherwise; enablers don't make people abuse alcohol or whatever. Alcoholics who blame their enablers are deceiving themselves, and if designers try to blame users for their design errors, they are making the same mistake.

A lot of the crapness, AFAICS, is down to mobile. Mobile browsers and desktop/laptop browsers are different, and are used differently. And mobile browsers aren't all alike. Since most website hits are now from mobiles, designers are optimising for mobile, and then their employers stop the project before the desktop/laptop work is done. This really annoys me, because I'm too blind and fat-fingered to use a mobile as much more than a phone.

I think the crapness of the modern web[1] is going to eventually result in a rebellion. Like, the crapness seems to be snowballing. I mean, popups? What? I thought we got rid of them 15 years ago, because they were crap. How come people think they're now OK?

[1] The OP spoke of "todays's internet experience", but all he spoke of was the web. The rest of the internet seems to be working as well, or better, than it was working yesterday.


"Enabler" is a good term, as in psychology enablers can often be victims too.


It’s pointing out that it’s a side effect of user market forces. The point is that users keep using these sites despite all of these annoying patterns.


It's blaming users for market forces though. It's kind of a lazy invocation of the just world fallacy: the users must be ok with it because otherwise they would have revolted if they werent.

I've accepted many a dark pattern because of sunk costs and a lack of energy, time or options. I dont always have the energy to fight and punish.

Ultimately market forces are about collective power, not a collective representation of "what people want". A lot of people would like us to blur the two but they are distinct.


The challenge is, when no notable end user group is coordinate enough to havd significant market force/power to push back, what else do you call it but ‘users accept it’.

Everyone I know hates Comcast and the defacto monopolies in many areas with internet service. (Among many examples). But except in a few small areas, no one seems to even be effectively pushing back.

‘We’ve reached a hopefully temporary equilibrium point where corporate interests and ability to extract value vs user interests (and their lack of ability or interest in fighting for them) result in users hating life consistently’ isn’t any more explanatory I think, but says pretty much the same thing.

Users are relatively helpless/uneducated/captured and uncoordinated here at the moment, and the business interests are getting less pleasant as they fight each other in the absence of any other guidance/regulation as they try to grow and extract the maximum value they can.

At some point something with change and we’ll start shifting to another equilibrium point. Based on past experience I doubt it will be much friendlier to end users, but I have been surprised once or twice before.

And this isn’t (near as I can tell), ‘corporations bad’. Everyone always tries to get the maximum value they can get out of a system barring energy expended/concern about social judgement/blowback concerns.

From kids downloading warez to someone looking for maximum stimulation/emotional load from browsing instagram for free to a company getting the extra couple dollars from improving a signup flow.


Or because they have no other choice. It's mind-boggling that the very people responsible for creating this landscape have the audacity to throw up their hands and try to absolve themselves of responsibility for the things they built by saying "idk the users just love being screwed". We must do better.


> We must do better.

Meaning what? Name-and-shame clearly won't do the job. The only solution I can see is for there to be laws against dark patterns. The profit incentive for user-hostile design isn't going to go away.


I would absolutely support stronger regulation. Unfortunately, I don't believe the Overton window will be there in the United States for some time.


I said "directly" blaming, very important distinction.

The people making the garbage is still the ones to blame for the garbage itself. The reason people make such garbage is because a subset of people accept it. But nobody is saying the people accepting it are doing it out of an evilness (maybe they're saying it's out of "dumbness", but I would disagree with that too).


someone can say that people are allowing themselves to be victimized, without saying that the people doing the victimizing are in the right.

The comment however is wrong in that it is perhaps not possible for the users to keep themselves from being victimized, without some recourse to the law.


The whole point of dark patterns is the users don’t accept them , but are misled by them. That is what dark patterns are.


Don't know if you're agreeing or disagreeing, but: this is why I said "accept" in quotes.


> It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.

How many people installed a browser addon that just agrees to the GDPR popup just so they don't have to click on deny?


The root of the issue is they never complain, even when cornered into a shitty bank or govt app. Everything else just grows from this fact. They are used to commercials, spam, telemarketers, scammers, pre-checked boxes when the law allows to uncheck it and demand the same service. There is no revolt.

If you don’t take responsibility for change, it doesn’t happen.


Complain how? In older times we could just mail the company now the support page has stupid chat bots that do nothing, and you have to fight with it or the damn page for 5 mins before you can send a mail. Most of the times I just give up. And if we complain for every site takes too much time. And it will boil down to "sure sir, but thata how it is"


> Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.

We use WhatsApp groups for this now. It’s perfect, no ads, only the content from people I want content from. No slimy Facebook algorithm. Between tiktok Instagram and whatsapp how is Facebook.com even still a thing?


Yet, Whatsapp belongs to Facebook... And I won't hinge my bets on it staying better for the long run given the shittiness of the original product in so many ways.


> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.

While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice?

Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.


> Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.

I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.

Rather, I see the problem being that any time a viable competitor appears, it just gets acquired so there's no longer any need for the incumbent to compete. Case in point, Instagram actually became the next hot social network after Facebook, but Facebook the company retained relevance and market share by simply buying them rather than competing. Google has also acquired a bunch of more niche search engines over its lifetime (that's a little more subtle in that none of those alone were going to beat Google like Instagram did to Facebook, but by nipping niche search providers in the bud, Google consolidated the market share around its product).


> I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.

I think the second sentence contradicts the first. There's little capital being spent on building a Facebook or Google competitor. VCs are chasing "the next big thing" instead. The other reality is that VCs are going to want Google-like revenue and continuous growth from a Google replacement they fund - this means that eventually dark patterns will come into play to squeeze more money from existing customers.


> normal users have no choice on the matter.

The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause.

I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000.

It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall.

You do not have to accept that License.


Let's consider a basic example: How can you justify not using Microsoft Office? Yes LibreOffice is there and works 95% of the time, but the remaining 5% are not completely useless parts of the software.

It's same for most of the user-hostile software. Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find. Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack.

I use Linux, and free software to the most extent I can use, but there are some closed source stuff which is expensive but is soundly ahead when compared to open source alternatives. I can break the sweat and write a similar code, but how can I make sure that it's sustained when it has a A/GPLv3 license?


> How can you justify not using Microsoft Office?

I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office, they expected me to deliver a thesis or other document. When there was the "5% expectation", kindly decline, uninstall.

The road I picked, was not always success or easy, I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice. I refused to learn Office because I had already learned to produce documents and presentations (websites) with a computer using free open source software.

> Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find.

Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX. I literlaly cant even scroll or type on a collegues macbook or find my way around anything. Very hard to use, not intuitive.

The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent. If you accept the software will think for you, well it will. Now you dont have to think, youre not in control, just enjoy the UX dark patterns and ads.


> I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office...

You had it easy it seems. When someone sends you a document which contains convoluted structures and only renders in a very recent version of Microsoft Word, and you have to fill it for work purposes, you have no other choice (We're a Linux shop, but not everyone we interact uses Libre Office, so yeah).

> Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX.

I started with a C64 in 1989, jumped to a 486 some years later and installed Linux in 1998, when there was no documentation, and dial-up was kinda hard without any. So I double booted Linux and Windows for a lot of years, and despised Windows since Windows 95. However, I can use all three without problems, making all other ecosystems work with my Linux systems (I adapt them to talk with Linux, not vice versa).

> The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent.

No, it's not. Automatically adding another bullet point is not. Marking the center of a shape and snapping to it is not. Having sensible defaults and intuitive key bindings are not dark patterns. Also fixing bugs in two days, getting direct replies from developers, your feedback taken seriously are not dark patterns. The bitter part is they can be all done in FOSS, very easily (I've developed such software for some projects, and it's well loved), but developers are not motivated or bothered by it.


> you have no other choice

You always, always have a choice. Throw away the victim and obey mentality. Freedom is taken, not served to you.

When someone send you a trojan horse.virus.exe you do not have to open it. Neither do you have to open a convoluted proprietary binary format requiring you to buy a license to read said binary. Politely decline, reject. You have that power.


You are both right and wrong at the same time. You demonstrate it yourself.

You say how you've failed informatics classes for failing to pass MS Office test. If that's not "forced", I don't know what is.

There are many battles worth fighting when it comes to freedom, and choosing to fail a test to demonstrate freedom is quite admirable. And quite silly. I've done things like that too, and I am fully aware that they can be both. They make for good stories too.

Similarly, I could choose not to use Windows to file my taxes when the country has switched to obligatory online-filing and only provides Windows software: I am not "forced", but I could be liable for heavy tax fines if I don't do it. Or I could reverse engineer the code and develop tooling that works on free software. I could possibly even get that marked unconstitutional if I am willing to put a long fight in court (and spend a lot of money on legal representation too). Nowhere does it say in our constitution that I've got to use Windows to be a citizen.

Where we draw the line and what's the effort we are willing to expel to fight against the tide is each individual's prerogative.

We do need people to fight against the tide. But it's not wrong for anyone not to, because there are other things worth fighting for too! And some simply need to survive.


Tips hat, good sir.


>nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office

>I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice

How curious.


The first part should be suffixed with "at any workplace".


Many workplaces, especially those that deal heavily in Word and other Office software, heavily restrict work machines so that no un-approved software can be installed. Your experience, though very real, may not reflect that of a majority of others.


If you dont consider most Linux software user hostile in it's own ways then their really isn't much to discuss here. You've just accepted its series of failures, rather than the failures associated with commercial software.


What? How is grep "user hostile"? How is ls user hostile?


Knowledge is user hostile, I guess?!


By being named after "global regular expression print" a hilarious in-joke that normies won't get. Everything a normal person deals with uses * for a wildcard search, especially shell globbing does. That means in

    grep .* .*
those are two different behaviours of .* that's pretty hostile, don't you think? Certainly doesn't go with the law of least surprise. Regex itself isn't particularly user friendly but if you know it exists and want to use it, you're not going to guess the tool to use it is "grep". On whatever this Linux is[1] (Debian stretch/sid) I "apropos regex" to work out what tool to use, oh "regex: nothing appropriate", how friendly. [edit: "apropos search" has nothing, "apropos count" has nothing. I'm beginning to suspect it's not working but hasn't noticed that it's not working. Typical user-unfriendly computer behaviour.]

By having a "--help" which tells you about the four different kinds of regular expression it can accept, and nothing about what regular expressions are. By saying "basic regular expression (BRE)." as if someone read somewhere in a textbook that they should explain an acronym before using it. Then never uses the acronym again except where to repeat "basic regular expression (BRE)", sounding like an alien trying to imitate good documentation.

By refusing (unless forced) to list files which exist and do important-to-the-user things like control settings I care about, because said filenames begin with a dot. Arguing that this is helpful to the user to hide information, but at the same time defaulting to showing file sizes in bytes and only showing human readable filenames when poked. By defaulting to showing files in columns which is better for a human to read and only showing file-per-line when asked. These are a mess of defaults - for a human, show files in columns, hide files, show sizes in human readable. For a machine, show file-per-line, size in bytes, all files. And if hiding files for user friendliness, don't hide my config files, hide OS files I never use.

By having so many options for controlling output formatting because the system refuses to do anything helpful (like have/enforce/encourage some platform standard structured format) such that every tool has to have this, and every tool does it differently. That's incredibly user-hostile. The idea that you have to learn something, isn't. The idea that no tool respects what you've learned and makes you learn a different way to do the same things over and over and over, is.

By refusing to match text case insensitively unless specifically told to; that default is the wrong way round for user friendliness, it's the one geeks want to be technically correct, not the one normal English-using people want to get tasks done conveniently.

Like the rejection of video and whining "Ugh is there a transcript anywhere, only normies watch video, I'm a superior text reader so I need a transcript" and willfully "not understanding" that looking at human faces and hearing voices has meaning to people, to demonstrate membership of the "I don't have a TV" superior group. And the related rejection of GUIs, the way GUIs seem to have come out of Xerox Parc, to macOS and Windows, then Linux gets GUIs which are cargo-cult copies of Windows and macOS designs. There's probably a reason why pinch-to-zoom started and got popular at Apple before being aped into Windows, when you'd naively assume that Linux with more ways to connect weird hardware to it, more access to source code, more culture of customisation, would have come up with all kinds of things like that earlier. I'm going to suggest that reason is the embarassment of using something a normie would use, with the forgivable exception of a tiling window manager for laying out terminal windows.

You're presumably going to argue that being hyperliteral is user friendly because that's what geeks want, but being a precision tool for someone in-the-know to use for advanced use cases and scripting is exactly what user friendliness isn't. You might then quip "it's just selective about who its friends are ;)" and guffaw to yourself about how superior you are to be a Friend Of Linux(tm); it's related to the way the "community" believes that easy to use software is for inferior people only, and that using harder to use software is a badge of honor. See also the other reply to your comment sneering "knowledge is user hostile, I guess?!" because the only reason you aren't using Linux is because you can't because you're a baby who doesn't know how, hurrr. It's cult heresy to suggest that the reason you aren't using it is because it's bad, you have to assume it's user friendly as a prior and then contort yourself around it[2].

Nobody feels superior for driving an automatic gearbox car. Gearboxes are a kludge necessary because engines don't have the same torque and efficiency at all speeds. Some people have uses where manual gearboxes are better for choice, cost, reliability, maintenance, other people drive a stop-start commute and making them use a manual gearbox is no overall benefit to them. Yet people do feel superior for driving a stick shift, then go around saying people who don't drive one can't drive, can't count to 6, are worse drivers. Offloading gearboxing to the machine is what you would do if you weren't attached to the identity of being a superior stick-shift driver. As soon as the machine was good-enough at it. The more you have to learn about it to use it, the more user-hostile it is. The more safety guard restrictions on behaviour that could exist but don't, the more user-hostile it is. Manual gearbox without clutch needs more skill, so is more user-hostile.

Also, love how it tells you

    Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
but if you type the suggested "grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]..." that just errors out. Presumably that's usage for people who already know how to use it. For everyone else, try 'grep --help' for more information. Information we could have shown you right here, but we don't really understand humans. Maybe you remember what grep is, and all the options, and regex language, and need information, but that single hint is enough. It could happen.

(Also, enjoy how "grep xyz" complains that there is no such file or directory as xyz, but "grep /etc" complains that "/etc: is a directory"). (Rust people spent a good deal of time on compiler error messages. Perhaps this is an underappreciated reason why Rust is dramatically more hyped than many other languages?)

[1] on windows I can run systeminfo or get-computerinfo to find out what OS I'm using, both reasonably named . Good thing I happen to know to poke at /etc/REDHAT_RELEASE or in this case /etc/debian_version. On Windows I can use type or get-content or notepad to read the file, two tools with names that hint at being relevant, one which isn't so far away. On Linux I can use cat for catenating files, less the in-joke named pager (because less is more! snerk snerk). "type" and "edit" both do something totally unrelated.

[2] You have to contort yourself around the computer on Windows and macOS and iOS as well; but at least they strived to have consistent platform UX guidelines which were pro-user at the cost of more work for the developers, for many years. I'm not arguing there are computers one never has to learn, although Brett Victor and Dynamicland might surpass everyone on that front, I'm more arguing that poorly named, inconsistent tools with text only, no GUI, no graphics, full of in-jokes, and beloved for their hyper-literal do-what-I-say scripting precision are absolutely not "user friendly".


How many people use that "remaining 5%"?

Most people I know still use spacebar to right aline the date in a word document.


For my case, if we're getting a Office document, it's almost guaranteed to break when opened with latest LibreOffice.

We don't handle these files everyday, but it's a necessity. If the data inside a file can be transported with something FOSS, it's already carried with that software.

So, in my case, at least; I'd rather do my research and create more GPL software rather than trying to convince established companies to switch to LibreOffice.


>For my case, if we're getting a Office document, it's almost guaranteed to break when opened with latest LibreOffice. That even could happen in MS Office. MS needed several major versions until they fully followed their own Office Open XML standard.


> Let's consider a basic example: How can you justify not using Microsoft Office?

Easy. I don’t want to give Microsoft money and libreoffice/notes are fine for all of the basic use cases.


> ...fine for all of the basic use cases.

What if some business partner sends you a completely loaded Office document to fill/work together/whatnot?


It has happened, I declined. Many worked with LibreOffice with me, those who did not, my career took a different route than working with them.


> Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack

Nor is commercial software. In fact it's more likely than free software to become abandonware.


I haven’t used Microsoft Office in a decade, at least. It’s totally possible.


I'm not using it either for personal purposes for more than a decade, but sometimes life gives you lemons at the office (the literal one), so you need to work with something you don't like for a bit.

The point I'm trying to make is, if you're exchanging files and doing collaborative work, you don't have all the freedom to do whatever you want to do.


Congratulations on making a decision long before it became a serious problem for users and developing the habit.

The vast majority of people are not like you. Most people succumbed to these practices over a gradual period of a decade and as such are locked-in habit-wise to this with an attention span that is hard-pressed not to focus on the matter.


Yeah, that's the thing.

You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys.

The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government.

Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.


We can look at earlier consumer-hostile experiences which were generally solved by consumer rights regulations.

You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc.

This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.


Yes, this is primarily a regulatory problem not a technical or design one. Most user hostile actions do work to bring in more users or make you more money. If they didn't then companies wouldn't be doing it would they? But just because something makes sense for a business does not mean it is ethical, moral or legal. Snake oil and counterfeit goods are solid examples. Things like auto charging, difficult to cancel subscriptions and the trade in user information should also be handled in a similar way.


A lot of this is also caused by following the leader. And the leaders are fueled by adtech or spyware...


100% - even annoying "promotional" email blasts. I've worked for companies where, when we did surveys, customers overwhelmingly said that we sent them too many emails or that the emails were not relevant. Yet time and time again we would do a bulk email send and watch in-store sales climb up proportionally. So naturally then we had to make email address a required field when making an account online. One more step for users, and specifically something that most users don't want to give...but the money says otherwise.


This reminds me of JC Penney's attempts to switch from bullshit discounts to "everyday low pricing"[1]. Sales dropped 20%.

I think the sad reality is that, despite how people like to think of themselves as rational actors who consider the pros and cons of each purchase, these tactics work. The only way to curtail stuff like this is by interfering in the free market - i.e. regulation.

[1] https://business.time.com/2014/01/31/j-c-penneys-pricing-is-...


> an email will give you lots of email

This is why I rarely use the same email address longer than 1 year now or try to manage different accounts for different spam. I just change the password to random crap and forget about that email account, while setting up a new one.


Users are the last ones to blame.

If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists.

If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….


I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).


More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.


That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.


Your government demands you own a smart phone?


You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA).

While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”.

Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.

1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.


“ Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.”

I think this just illustrates how much easier smart phones make things. If we didn’t have smart phones for example, all your interactions with the government would be as cumbersome and inconvenient as this fall back option.


For so many things. Need to scan a QR code to enter a building, or need to display Vaccine status. My bank now requires I run their mobile App to be able to log in, even if I'm on a PC. Most OTP authorisation requires you to receive an SMS code. Government departments are now only contactable via the Net, so a smart phone is the minimum unless you have a PC.


“For so many things. Need to scan a QR code to enter a building”

So there is a requirement to scan a QR code and there is no option to enter the building for people who don’t have a smart phone?

“or need to display Vaccine status.”

You can’t display your vaccine status without a smart phone?

“My bank now requires I run their mobile App to be able to log in, even if I'm on a PC.”

Is your bank run by the government?

“Most OTP authorisation requires you to receive an SMS code.”

SMS is available on any mobile phone, not just smart phones. Also many SMS OTP implementations include the option to receive a phone call.

“Government departments are now only contactable via the Net, so a smart phone is the minimum unless you have a PC.”

Okay so the government requires you have a computer and internet access, but not a smart phone.


> For so many things. Need to scan a QR code to enter a building, or need to display my Vaccine status.

In the EU this fortunately can be done trivially with a paper QR code as well.


For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too.

This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.

There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.


> Consolidation benefits users.

Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS.

Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.


> only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems

There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.


There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics.

Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.


Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile.

Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.

Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.

Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.


I don't have a smartphone, am I not participating in society?


What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days.

Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia.

So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all…

With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another

I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone


> I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone

Really? I wonder where you are.

I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.


I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table


Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.


The Indian vaccine certificate is digital and has a QR code.


It's getting harder and harder to manage without a smart phone. I was stuck overseas at the start of the Pandemic because I couldn't buy a plane ticket as I couldn't receive an SMS for OTP authorisation. Had a shouting match with my bank when I finally did return as they now want me to use an App, which I couldn't get while I was overseas.


So I’d say you are less able to participate in society.


but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).


The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all.

Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy.

In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture.

Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above.

Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.


Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone.

How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone?

(Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).


I agree.

I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app.

It's android OR ios.

What choices do I have here?


Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?!

What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone?

Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.


You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code.

This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.


Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company.

Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.


I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you (although your question sounds a bit rhetorical), and that's part of the problem in my opinion.

It's so ubiquitous now that even if you want to get out of this duopoly, you can't really.


It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem.

Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else.

Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences.

Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010!

The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.


Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too.

Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).

We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago.

But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.


> Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).

Society has always been fast to embrace new technologies, particularly if profits were to be made or economies of scale made prior luxuries affordable for everyone. Industrialization, the advent of the rail age or air travel as mass transit, and now the Internet.

We're using CPUs with more processing power than multiple million dollar 70s-era mainframes in disposable pregnancy or covid tests, and a modern single (!) GPU can blast a 90s-era supercomputer to pieces with GFLOP/s performance.


Don't worry, the tax men will find you and force you to file the taxes on paper. Or maybe even electronically.

I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.


On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.


What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.


> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

Come on. This is bullshit.

https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-do...

"When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."


There is also ever-increasing ubiquitous digitalization of many aspects of our life. In a lot of countries, you either spend minutes to hours online to do government-required paperwork or days "the old way", and the old way is mostly dwindling, catering mostly to elderly internet-inept citizens. There are services you're only going to get online.

And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding.

So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?"

So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.


> So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.

I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.


OK, let's say I won't tolerate it. What do I do?

crickets

And no, average users have never avoided scams, email spam is older than web.


I try to respond to dark patterns with a 1 star review on trustpilot and google maps making clear that it signaled a lack of trustworthiness.

The last time I ran into one (call to cancel for insurance) I also filed an official complaint and made it clear it was the sole reason I was dumping them in favor of a competitor.

It's not much of a punch back but it probably had an effect.


Then may the people follow your lead. Or not. Either way the market will follow the money.


the market might also follow regulation.

that's how we got clean air and water. Just saying.


I am not a cricket. I told you what to do, dont use that software, dont accept the license or terms, uninstall, deactivate, deny. Read a book, go hiking. You arent forced to use shit software.


Oh boy, tell me how you do tax reports with the amazing experience of pen, paper and standing in a window. I bet you're outsourcing misery rather than avoiding it.


Filing taxes by mail is trivial. I’m not sure your point is coming across here.


The government services dont show me any ads or dark patterns. How is it where you live? Does the IRS really try to trick you?


Heck yes they do!

Of course not “intentionally” but if you manage to have an even slightly complex tax situation and not get tricked and report something wrong, props to you!


Sure, but then they just send you a letter correcting your mistake, you OK it if it looks right, and either they send you a check or you send them a check. You don't have to pay a fine and you don't get audited.

(I am not a tax lawyer nor an accountant, but I have done this 4 out of the last 6 years.)


Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.


Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.


There is obviously no magical quick denoising solution. But we still can demand less noise and patronise providers that at least pretend to listen.


Voting with your dollars does cede a lot of power to the wealthy, since they have most of the money and represent a small portion of the population.


I think you have it backwards. Wealthy already have all the power they need. Everyone else has zero power, unless they organise, pool their resources or at least choose to move in same direction independently.


It’s a matter of phrasing. We all have power available to us if only we organize. If we choose not to organize we are letting the wealthy have the power.

But anyway I agree with you that we need to organize. Voting with our dollars as atomic individuals works in limited ways but won’t change things on a large scale.


> Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere,

If you have a phone with open-source firmware for the modem, I will buy it immediately. Who is taking my money?


Is modem firmware really the piece of software in you're more concerned about or at all? But still, if you want to see something changed on this front - give money to Purism or Pine64. Make sure to tell them that you'll continue your support if they continue moving in same direction.


Withing 15 years, there will be microchips in your seat, table, and the packaging of your bread. And your iToaster will not toast unauthorised bread.

I am concerned about firmware because it is being used to take ownership of our devices away from us.

Oh, you could fix your device by replacing the chip, but we own the firmware and it's a crime to copy it. Also we can uodate the device at any time and add or remove fubctionality without you even knowing.


try buying a ticket to a concert by avoiding ticketmaster and you’ll find yourself not going to concerts…

I can’t subscribe to any local newspaper without a digital opt-in and a phone opt-out…

…a bunch of these services are much harder to avoid than you think


I agree that most of the time with entrenched players it looks like there are no outs. But let's try to look at your example of ticketmaster. Your options depend on how much you are invested in concert-going as entertainment. If not much - stopping altogether might be preferable to further feeding the beast. If a lot - you can explore your local musical scene of amateur bands. The ones that play in bars and other venues that probably don't even sell tickets, or at least do it without relying on ticketmaster. Sure, you'll lose access to stadium-kind of experience, but there will be no change without at least some sacrifices.


I've never been to a stadium gig. I've been to concert-hall shows, with letter/number seating, and no grooving in the aisles; the ticketing experience was horrible. The shows were good, in a way; but I've always much preferred pub gigs and student-union gigs, where you just pay cash at the door.


I live in a major city and even the small and mid-sized venues use ticketmaster… I go to very small shows (basement shows, very small bars) which does sometimes avoid it, but if the band you like is even remotely successful you’re back in ticketmaster’s realm


> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show.

The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls.

20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple.

It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain.

The Internet adapted itself to the masses.

That'd be my rant.


I think that's a bit unfair.

It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web.

It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.


Is Apple's case really a dark pattern? I can start a software subscription trial and immediately cancel. Do that with a random third party and suddenly the cancellation page is "down for maintenance" and you have to call in for support where they try to sell you a discounted package (cough Adobe.)

Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?


> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software

Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money.

Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?


> even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests

Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.


[Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (2008)](https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/)

They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.


People only expect things to be free because they're not being told / educated on the actual cost of their "free" service.

I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world.

But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>.

This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".


> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account

Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!


> and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them

I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it.

But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”)

It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.


Yes, blame the one law that attempts to give people a modicum of privacy, and not the developers really wanting you to click through and press accept all for income.

The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...


> badly-written cookie banner laws

The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker.

I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls.

And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.


> It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.

Are you saying that EU cookie law is to blame for software being hostile to its users? I can't see how that can be.


> Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams

How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s.

Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.


> Morris worm was in the late 80s

To be fair, that wasn't any kind of scam; it was more like "I started a joke that started the whole world laughing".


I’m somewhat confused by your example here.

Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure.

The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)


Not sure why you brought Apple into this, while yes, their walled garden is very pretty, the experience of them extracting money out of your accounts is as friction free as it gets.


This must be the attitude that scammers adopt so they can sleep at night. It's like saying that fraud is okay as long as the victim is stupid enough.


we kind of are, because dark patterns get into regulation and become part of law


Unluckily providers clone each other, designers trying to prove their reason of existence pushing for new or modern approaches just for the sake of it, and technical writers in the fallacy of quantity write about anything different comes their way quickly, judging by first look not by sustainable usability consequently generating the appearance of trend without having any trend (not like a trend is a good measure, not at all! nevertheless, it is used as guideline by too many).

I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty.

I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all.

It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something.

Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies.

Same with music.

I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses.

Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there.

HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.


Victim blaming much?


Not a main factor but a factor is 'always the latest tech' issue. Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. This is not the fault of react but more of this idea of tech people that everything has to be new which means we don't have 10+ year experience in it and the results just take more work to get right (despite what everyone says here). My local bank did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react and it's just unusable now. Slow, buggy etc; I have to have my developer console open to see if a transaction actually worked... The site before this was instant loading and perfect; it was over 10 years old and worked fine. The new one doesn't look much better but is garbage. HSBC HK did something similar and the result is awful. I click things and see the console light up red with errors 'undefined' etc. Revolut business has more bugs (which I keep reporting but they don't fix them). And I know how to use developer tools; what do other people do when they click something over and over and nothing happens? Etc etc. Use tools you have experience with ; you don't need to use all this new crap; use it in 10-15 years if it is still around.

Edit; in the same vain: microservices etc are not helping either. When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith? Now you have brittle all over the place and devops with 247 stress.


>Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. This is not the fault of react but more of this idea of tech people that everything has to be new.

I doubt they rewrote it just for the sake of rewriting it in a new framework, it costs money for no benefit. What's more likely, which I have witnessed multiple times, is that the original codebase was an unmantainable mess, hard to support and extend, with abandoned/unmaintained third-party dependencies, and fewer and fewer developers on the market who know the stack. Sometimes it costs as much (or even less) to rewrite the whole thing than to refactor the original. And when the decision to rewrite the codebase is made, they choose the most popular tools/frameworks so that it was easier to find new developers, and today it happens to be react and the like.


Why does it seem (I'm not a backend engineer) that a company moves off of one technical-debt ridden backend to another, even bigger, more complex framework for their backend.

It's like we're in a downward tech-debt spiral.

Is it going to take an Ever-Given-like or Covid-like disruption of e-commerce that shuts down society to cause us to wake up and take this seriously? (Or have government step in and set standards and requirements for e-commerce.)


Presumably because they didn't fix the organisational issues that caused the first codebase to become a mess. If they had those sorted then they could most likely have stuck with the original codebase AND a rewrite would likely be succesful.


I really do not think so; the places I saw, just go from crap to crap because tech leads/new ctos need to put their mark on things. I consulted for clients in the past years who were told to dump react (in 1m$+ apps) for svelte because react is yesterday. That is insane.

One of the larger insurers is doing this now; I told them not to because it makes no sense. But they drank the koolaid and doing react to svelte rewrites for no reason besides a new cto.

The churn in companies is high and it is not good.


None of that matters to the customer if the new interface is completely different and much less functional. You should make sure there is an easy transition or you're going to lose a lot of business with your "improved interface".


I logged into British Gas yesterday to look at my account. It was painfully slow, wouldn't even load before I disabled ublock origin, and cpu shot up.

All to output something along the lines of

"select * from meter_readings where accountid = ?", $accountid "select * from bills where accountid = ?", $accountid

In the end I never actually got what I wanted.


My water bill page is the most over designed thing I've ever seen :( . It takes over 30 seconds to load with all these obviously widget based sections of the page to load. All I want is to log in and see my bill. I don't need to see the community water usage, or my usage for the last 6 months, or the weather for the next three days. I just want to see my bill and pay it. Have a button I can click for further details and load the rest of their stuff if something seems off. I don't need a "single page web app" to do that stuff.


This happened to me recently :( . My community bank upgraded their interface (probably been basically the same for 10 years+) that they've been using just fine and moved EVERYTHING around with their new app and web interface that is made to look like their app. I was so angry I switched banks (which is easier than you think these days). I sent them a letter letting them know the same. It looked "better" but is was also slower, less organized, broke their API for downloading stuff to import to gnucash, etc. It's all just such a waste.


> Not a main factor but a factor is 'always the latest tech' issue. Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck.

overusage of SPA of SPA framework (Next.js etc) has caused a lot of problem for users who are used using browser, which is most of web users. It breaks open the link in another tab, back/forward flow. It is not SPA is bad, however if you chose to go that route then design the app with screen size mind and you got think it as an Application instead of a web page.


From my experience its CTO/CIO's wanting better more stable and fest tech, but not willing to pay for good engineers

Next.js is amazing, and it could make any airline/bank website blazing fast. Are said banks hiring the same devs from Google that are building the newer version of Next? Nope, they're hiring 3rd party companies in Romania.

React et al is far from plug and play. Quality of implementation means a lot more than it used to in terms of performance


> microservices etc are not helping either. When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith? Now you have brittle all over the place and devops with 247 stress.

You could make a monolith where the UI keeps working even if some of the monolith's endpoints don't work, and you can make a microservices architecture where the UI still doesn't cope if a microservice is down.

I think the pros of microservices are: - deploy smaller - you only update the parts of the system you need to when you modify something. - different technologies - you can use Ruby here and Go there if you like; very un-locked-in and you can maximise the value of any libraries you have. E.g. if you have a number crunching bit of your app you could make a Python microservice with numpy etc installed. - independent data stores - pro and con, of course, but it's nice if you can decouple bits of your system and again use mongo here, postgres there if you need to - as an microservices-based application grows in scope, the number of engineers working on different bits of it can scale, as they can deliver independently. It's harder to scale engineers working on the same codebase


>When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith?

There are different kinds of microservices, some are infrastructure critical (for example, we have an auth service, if it goes down the whole thing goes down because users simply can't login anymore - and it doesn't matter if it's a microservice or a monolith, the end result is same), others are not so critical, for example we implement additional product modules (purchased separately) as microservices which have their own SPAs so if they go down basically only one page becomes unavailable and the system as a whole is unaffected.

Microservices aren't necessarily about 100% SLA, they help scale teams and deployment (however I'd say it only makes sense in larger organizations).


> always the latest tech' issue ... rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs ... we don't have 10+ year experience

React was open sourced in 2013. It's not that "new" - there are plenty of people who've been using it for 7+ years now.

> did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react

The problem isn't the rewrite from php to react (or any x to any y), but the management saying "ok, we need to rewrite this thing in 'y'. You have two days to learn it. And you'd better show 40 productive hours of work on your timesheets in the meanwhile."


> using it for 7+ years

That's not really very long, IMO. There's a huge amount of churn in programming systems these days. Once upon a time, writing compilers and designing languages was something that nerds did for fun and instruction, in their spare time. People didn't get paid to write compilers.

Incidentally, I've never heard of "svelte".


Sure, but when we have tech 20 years old we can assume you don't need two days to learn it. 7 years is not that young but it changes way, way too fast. So the react 7 years ago is not the same as today: hell I have nodejs and react stuff that simply doesn't work anymore and is only a few years old. While php/html/css/jquery code written 15+ years ago is fast and robust on the very latest versions.

I updated one of my oldest saas app written 17 years ago to the latest php version from apache to nginx and the latest php and it works 100%. That makes me sleep well at night.

It has 60000 active users and costs $4/mo to host and has not had downtime in over 10 years. How is this new stuff holding up?


> Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck.

Nostalgia might be staining your view here… I don’t remember any airline or banking apps that have ever been “perfectly fine and fast”.


I never had a problem with the website of my Finnish bank 20 years ago. And I could order my plane tickets too through the Web in the first half of the 2000s.

I cannot say the same of the website of my French bank and its multiple rewrite over the last 8 years, which still provides less features and make them harder to reach each time.

Or the website of the national lottery and its countless rewrites, each of them getting slower, more inconsistent, and displaying less information on each screen.

Or the website of the national weather forecast, which gets worse at each iteration: now there's a 'weekly' view that shows 5 days; and I cannot for the love of God find the curves of snow and other parameters from the automated altitude weather stations any more (at each iteration, they have become harder to find, but with last iteration there is no access any more; someone's got direct links to the pictures URL on a website, but for how long?). Each time they make an update, the site is completely broken for days or weeks, before they sort out their crap and return the new shit to a more functional state.

Or the website where I did put my bicycle recordings for years without a problem and without feeling the need for any extra feature, which all of a sudden cannot be displayed any more by my old browser.

In all those cases (except the last, which is probably more recent), the needed features have been implemented for at least 15 years. They were working 15 years ago. Yet they got rewritten multiple times, and not for the best. Oh yeah, sorry, for the weather forecast website (which is a public service belonging to the legal type which is the most integrated with the State), there is a new feature added at each iteration: more advertisement, and now more tracking too! The site has become unbrowsable without and ad blocker.

And BTW now, I am met more and more often with the infamous "your browser is not compatible with this site, please update to Chrome / Edge / ..." messages. I thought this kind of things were dead and buried. They were dead and buried, for 10 or 15 years, but now dreadful times are starting again and they rise from their grave.


FWIW, Dollar Bank had one of the earlier web banking sites and it was perfectly serviceable. I often wondered why larger banks couldn't do it as well. ING Direct (before it became CapitalOne 360) was pretty handy too, and while the CapitalOne site is slower and more SPA-like, it mostly does what I expect.

American Express, on the other hand, is the real WTF.


20-25 years ago there was at least lip service paid to the idea of "how do we improve software quality", but somewhere along the line that got lost under "move fast and break things", which paved the way for "as a service" madness. I don't want your half baked junk, I don't want constant updates, I don't want monthly fees for perpetually shifting, broken crap. I don't want any ongoing relationship with a team of "devs". I want to buy it once, and if it doesn't work I want my d### money back.


It's an interesting question, from a user perspective, would you prefer highly polishes feature rich yearly releases, or continuous feature release? Comes down to competition I guess, for web people can compete against you a lot quicker, if you think back to the 90s, Adobe could afford to take a year, no one was going to do better than Adobe anyways. Depends if the customer could understand/accept the value prop of "we're slow but good" - and if you just ship then get "good" in the wild.. well.. you may end up at the same level of baked when the other person released theirs.


Adobe could still afford to take a year or more. I pay for CC for a project I'm working on, and in spite of the monthly fees I disable automatic updates. I don't want shit to change or break arbitrarily, I want the tools I used yesterday to behave the same as today unless I make a decision to change something.


This position would make more sense if the browser and libraries and OS and hardware the users were running didn’t experience breaking changes every 6 months or have horrific vulnerabilities baked in.


Businesses deceive themselves when they think they measure user satisfaction.

There's a thing out there called "net promoter score." That's when somebody asks you "would you recommend our business to a friend?" It's based on a 2006 business book with the megalomaniacal title "The Ultimate Question." https://www.worldcat.org/title/ultimate-question-driving-goo...

In theory it's a great idea. In theory it effectively captures a user's attitude toward the businesss. Its inventor, Enterprise Rent A Car, used it to up their game in a competitive market requiring lots of personal service, and it worked brilliantly for them.

But, now the people deploying it in megacorps must have all gotten C- grades in business school. They use it to measure their SUPPORT REPS, not their BUSINESSES. They pretty much only ask it after a support call. So if you give a NO answer to the question because you're frustrated and needed support, the support rep gets dinged, not the product manager.

By the way, anything below a 9 on the 0 - 10 scale in the question means "NO, I would not recommend."

I once got one of those quizzes from my local ISP monopoly provider (Comcast) after somebody CALLED ME to try to sell me something. My answer: "Would I recommend you to a friend? You're a MONOPOLY! " Anyway, they punished the telesales guy for my NO answer. They should have punished the idiot who thought it was an appropriate way for a monopoly to measure customer satisfaction.

A plea to the people who run businesses: take those NO answers seriously. Use them to look for opportunities to improve, not opportunities to punish.


Celine's 2nd Law, a/k/a "shoot the messenger".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws

See also Hyman G. Rickover on Quaker Problem Solving:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28uxu6/more_hy...


People who are successful in business are busy running businesses. People who aren't successful in business write gimmicky books about the "one trick" you need to know to run a successful business. Most business books are garbage.


I think it's mainly your last reason. After the founders have cashed out, there's nobody left to care about user experience, because by then, most things are run by MBAs as dictated by shareholders.

And shareholders don't care who suffers. They care purely about profits.

The solution is to introduce laws to reign in "profits at the expense of others". When chemical companies were polluting the ground (superfund sites), we introduced laws to stop them for the good of society. In my opinion, Facebook is the new superfund site, it's just that this time, it is digital and psychological poison, not chemical. So we should just deny them the most user-hostile (e.g. most profitable) behavior through laws.


I'd say it is more because UX has shifted to acquiring customers at all costs, even if it means constantly annoying your current users.

Every time I have to hunt for the "log in with an existing account" button (after mistakenly trying to login to what turns out to be the sign-up form) I want to punch a "UX "expert" in the face so hard it knocks the shitty dye job off their side-shave hairdo.


UX experts don't want to acquire customers at all costs; those mandates come from management, whose requirements the UX experts are required to fulfil. You should be concerned about managers' haircuts instead.


Profits at the expense of others is more or less the driving force of our entire economy. Not sure how you're going to legislate that away.


> The solution is to introduce laws to reign in "profits at the expense of others".

Now you have two problems.


When something isn’t working, you don’t point at ideologies and say “if we followed this to the letter, things may get better”. You change something.

None of the changes so far seem to be catching industry wide. Perhaps it’s time for a change that comes with teeth.


I agree, but can our flavour of democracy actually(!) accomplish such things in a reliable manner?


I think we software developers tend to overstate the impact that the inner world of software developement has on this kind of thing. It wouldn't even occur to me that "release often KPIs" has anything to do with it.

The reason the web looks like it does today is because it mostly works, for the value of works that the people building the web care about. Most things on the web are there because someone wants to make money from them. And apparently they do. Things being "hostile" are a side effect of them being effective at making money. That's mostly the whole story.


Yours is a solid neo-liberal explanation that ignores one important fact: so much of what's online is not market-driven. It cannot survive in the steady-state on it's own. Much of it is investor funded. It's someone's best guess about what the public will find acceptable. And then, remarkably, these guesses are used by others to triangulate their own guesses, and you get something like a "UX bubble" divorced from economic reality.

(A variant: content tech enthusiasts create without profit motive (and therefore without market correction). OSS components being the preeminent example - although github has done a good job commoditizing the design around distributing such things. But these also create bubbles, of a different kind.)


I'm not sure about the impact of VCs here.

For all their power, I think most people's biggest interactions on the web are with Facebook, Youtube, Amazon and Google. Do you have any good examples of VC-funded UX experiences that fairly prevalent?


The OP is not a blog post, but an Ask HN participant. Most of the poeple on this site are building VC-funded UX, and are early-adopters of the same. My comment is addressed to them, not most people.

Additionally, it is beyond my ken to even begin to comment on the bigness of people's interactions with anything, in general.


> (A variant: content tech enthusiasts create without profit motive (and therefore without market correction)

I would not agree that the consequence of lacking a profit motive is an absence of corrective market forces. There are many kinds of markets out there, and many kinds of market forces that aren't related to monetary profit. For example, the marketplace of ideas is very powerful for people without a profit motive -- they toil in order to earn currency in their communities, which can be something as trivial as Github stars.


Very true, although it is an embarrassing thing to admit (for me, anyway).

Although, now that it comes to it I wonder: is it really something to be embarrassed about, to care about github stars more than zeroes in your bank account, and the wonderful things that gets you? Will not the stars really and truly affect more people more meaningfully than the zeroes?

I suppose in the end it's a struggle between pleasure and vanity, as always.


Tell me about it, I definitely look at my stars every day, and get overjoyed when even a single person stars one of my projects. I feel this is a little more justified than the dopamine rush caused by a like on a tweet, because I put so much effort into the underlying software project (as opposed to the thoughtless, throwaway effort spent on most tweets and fb posts).

That's why I think you shouldn't be embarrassed about putting weight on such a thing. I need food and electricity to power my body and computer. But I also need external validation to power my ego. The software doesn't get written if I don't think it's a good idea and worth doing, no matter how full my belly is.


>effective at making money

I think you hit the nail on the head. I also want to add that one of the arguments on moving everything to the web (applications I mean) was that the web interface was intuitive and didn't require documentation. That may have been true in many cases in 1999, but it certainly isn't now. That leaves users to click around to try to figure out how to use the web app through trial and error. Not a great user XP.

When apps were local, you could always hit F1 and get context sensitive documentation on the particular form you were on and it would (try) to explain what the app was looking for. Apps also had a conformity being all Windows apps using the Windows SDK. It certainly wasn't perfect, but at least it was something. That is mostly long gone and many developers just assume the users know how to use their interface, just because it's intuitive to the developer. Either that or companies don't want to spend the money or have the talent to make complex interactions simple.


> I also want to add that one of the arguments on moving everything to the web (applications I mean) was that the web interface was intuitive and didn't require documentation.

I strongly disagree with this. The reason most apps (or rather, most software) moved to the web is because of a few factors:

1. No installer necessary - this made getting people running much faster and more reliable.

2. You could monetize in a way you simply couldn't with offline software. Instead of selling it once, on the web you have myriad ways to finance software, e.g. SaaS, other forms of selling continued access, advertising, etc.

Note that point reason 2 is exactly my point - companies moved to the web in large part because it was far more profitable. (And I say this as someone who's been a developer during most of the time this shift was happening, and was part of companies making the business-model transition to subscription software.)

> When apps were local, you could always hit F1 and get context sensitive documentation on the particular form you were on and it would (try) to explain what the app was looking for. Apps also had a conformity being all Windows apps using the Windows SDK. It certainly wasn't perfect, but at least it was something.

And again I have to chime in here as a long-time computer veteran - if you think what most people do with computers today is harder than it was in the past, you are just plain wrong. Being able to hit F1 to get help was something that was done by maybe .1% of the population. Yes, desktop software supposedly enforcing UX conformity was an advantage, but not as crazy an advantage as you would think.

As someone who has been helping users out for years, I have no doubt at all that the average UX has gotten way better.

(Though side note, I don't think this is just the influence of the web... we've also just gotten better as an industry on making software, IMO)


I was mainly referring to intranet web apps created by businesses. Most of the big players in the 90s didn't port to web apps until fairly recently and I can only think of Microsoft Office, which I still prefer the app over the web experience.

>if you think what most people do with computers today is harder than it was in the past, you are just plain wrong.

Depends on what you mean by harder. Software certainly is more complex than in the 80s and 90s.

>Being able to hit F1 to get help was something that was done by maybe .1% of the population.

You just made that up. I wrote software in the 90s and still do. Context sensitive help was invaluable.

>we've also just gotten better as an industry on making software

Software certainly is more complex than it used to be. Sometimes it is necessarily so, most times it just seems like devs like to use the latest whiz-bang framework to pad their resume. I'm not sure I would call that better. In the 90s, we'd develop software expecting it to last at least 20 years. Today, it's "move fast and break things."


You hit the nail on the head -- repeatedly. Shit. I just bought my gf a Roku as a stocking stuffer. We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device. My own Roku from a couple years ago works great with no idea who I am, let alone my phone number.

Someone said users tolerate it. I think this has a lot to do with corporations getting out ahead of the law, doing diligence on their own just in case one government or another comes knocking. Yeah, in the case of a streaming device they probably gain a bit of extra intel to sell if they have a phone number to tie to your viewing habits. But it's not just that. Google just asked me on one of my fake accounts to tell them "Charlie's" birthday, just in case so they don't serve me any illegal material. This is to pre-comply with whatever data the government of any country they serve might want.

Now, the problem with Amazon's hostility toward customers of its marketplace is of a whole other order. That's truly a situation where it's cheaper for them to sell rotten garbage to everyone and take returns than it is to make a transparent marketplace, and that's down to the laws of physics. They just make more money being a shipping company than they do a retailer, and the arbitrage between Chinese factory sellers and American consumers is ridiculous. You could design countless better systems, but none of them will ship lead-coated childrens toys as quickly or for as much profit.

This here's the last of the free internet that isn't dumbed down for consumers. This and the retro BBS subculture, and gopher and IRC and other things of that ilk. We're much reduced.

Personally in my own code / administration and training for the company I work for, I really try to make sure that the user experience comes first and there is no daylight between what the customer expected and what they get. This, however, is a minority view.


> We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it!

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one still trying to fight this fight.

It’s really starting to be a problem with games. Buying games during the holiday Steam sales used to be a big part of my holiday break, something that was my way of winding down after a long year.

But I’ve made it a personal policy to refund any game that requires an account to play (I only play single player games, there’s no reason for games to have my email.)

Nowadays this means basically all AAA games are off limits to me. Gaming in general is becoming less and less of my life as a result. I had originally hoped that some PM somewhere would see refunds coming with “requires signup” as the reason, and would maybe second guess requiring signin for future games, but it just keeps getting more and more ubiquitous.

At this point I’m just saying farewell to gaming. It was once something that gave me a lot of pleasure, but I can’t participate in this industry any more. There’s other things I can do with my time.


Heh. We have a similar philosophy. And I'm always a fan of quitting gaming (like I'm a fan of quitting drinking; I'm pretty sure I could do it if I wanted to). I was a lucky foo who registered a lot of mail.yahoo and gmail accounts before they checked identity, but it's still totally possible to be semi-anonymous these days. I have a couple burner phones; once you bootstrap a google ID it's not that hard to move it around. But also, buy a bunch of cheap ass domains, you can get all the inbound mail you want. Outbound is a little trickier, but who fucking cares. Highly recommend just for your sanity that you invest the time to set up a few fake identities while you're refusing to game... it's not going to get any easier in 2023.

[edit] I should clarify that I'm probably such an asshole, I didn't even suggest letting my gf use one of my fake accounts to set up the Roku. Not that she gave me a chance; she was already done with the verification email by the time I started decrypting my list of them.


It's even worse with games. If you buy a game on steam, steam has an account api that is completely usable for online play, but the game companies want more data so they force you to make an account with them.

I have a stadia account and I've taken to doing the same thing. If i go to play a game and the first thing it wants me to do is create an account, I'm not playing that game, and I'm telling support about it.


Why not just set up a throwaway email for all of it? =\


For me, it's the principal of the thing. It's not that it's such a terrible thing for a company to know my email address (especially when apple makes it trivial to create throwaway ones for your iCloud account, their "hide my email" feature has improved so that now you can just make bespoke randomly generated email addresses that look exactly like an unassuming iCloud account, but forward to yours.)

The reason I do this is because I am so fundamentally against the concept of a gaming company harvesting personal information about its users, that I feel like a shitty person for being complicit in it. I'd rather miss out on the occasional good game than be "part of the problem".


> But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device.

Apple did not remove the Youtube app. Youtube made changes that caused their app to no longer work on older Apple TVs. The Apple TV that are no longer compatible with YouTube’s app (and CBS and MLB) were released before 2015.

It is reasonable that an Apple TV released in 2012 to not have the technical specifications to be compatible with other providers after Mar 2021 due to rapid changes in technology and software.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/older-apple-tv-will-require-a...

https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/02/apple-tv-3-losing-signal/


> It is reasonable that an Apple TV released in 2012

Respectfully, I disagree. To the point where I want to yell at the screen. If the appliance still works, don’t stop supporting it. 9 years is not that long of a time.

I don’t care that it means more work for the development team. They had software working for it, and at its core YouTube is just displaying streaming video. If it can work on a $15 Roku stick, it can run on an Apple TV of any flavor.

Please stop perpetuating all this BS that we should be replacing our perfectly functional hardware every 5 years and keep software working.


Apple does still support it. Apple’s own shows work on it.

> They had software working for it, and at its core YouTube is just displaying streaming video.

Who is they? It takes 2 to tango. What is Apple supposed to do if YouTube/CBS/MLB decide to stop sending MP4 video and the device they started designing 10+ years ago was only designed to play that (or not play what ended up being the winning format)?


This rant wasn't aimed at Apple - sorry if that was unclear. It's aimed at YouTube devs (and developers in general) - the ones who stopped their support.


> I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it!

I was in Las Vegas with family a couple of years ago and there's a zipline over Fremont street that my kids wanted to do. They wouldn't let us do the fucking zipline until I gave them my email address.


Heh. I grew up in Vegas. I mean, it's full of surprises. I always watched those people going down the zipline on Fremont and thought they were pretty silly, but I never realized they had to give their email address. Meanwhile around the corner behind the Heart Attack Grill, there's a man who will hand you an axe and let you throw it at targets for a few bucks, no questions axed. I miss the old America sometimes.


Roku is now publicly traded so its beholden to getting quarterly value for shareholder. Investors have deemed all of this data collecting valuable. Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.


Me neither in the long run, but it definitely surprised me on Christmas Day how much data they wanted to collect. One bit at a time I've been offended and shocked by it since I came back to this country in 2015 but I gotta say, watching how totally docile and copacetic my girlfriend was about this boot-up experience was more interesting than any of what they were trying to collect. It was totally weird to her that I was telling her not to put in any of this info and that I would return it for her. She was done entering her data before I could mount a full argument why she shouldn't. I know, I'm just a hideous boyfriend. That's not the point though. I was really offended and I tried several ways to get around the boot process without verifying by email. This only succeeded in delaying our HBO show by 20 minutes. She was just like, let me do this. Ok no problem, she said, I verified it.

Now how are gonna expect companies to act civilized when almost everyone's already conditioned to hand over their life every time they're asked?


> Roku is now publicly traded so its beholden to getting quarterly value for shareholder. Investors have deemed all of this data collecting valuable

This is not at all now decision making works in publicly traded companies. The feedback loop is much tighter and private companies are just as susceptible to making these decisions.


> Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.

What is this weird fascination with capitalism on HN? If a socialist government thought collecting data was a good idea and directed its resources that way, would that okay?

My read is (rightly or wrongly) they want to have cloud services, and cloud services require identification.


No they don't. You could and should provide a baseline experience with no account. The account could be used for extra, like say sharing favorites across devices.

Even storing payment details or favorites on the device is trivial. It's not done because it's not trackable and the user data sellable.


It's the global economic system, and it's incentives and structures drive decisions that individuals and companies make. Seems pretty relevant to this discussion, and most discussions since many if not most of our choices are economic ones.


> My read is (rightly or wrongly) they want to have cloud services, and cloud services require identification.

On this, no one ever bought a Roku because they expected it to upload something.


> > Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.

> What is this weird fascination with capitalism on HN?

"Comments on the internet" make a lot more sense to me now that I've started reading "capitalism" as "unbridled pursuit of profit". It's a shame that the general internet population seems to think those concepts are one and the same but I'm not sure I have the energy to try to do anything about it.


Makes sense, but even then, not much. An unbridled pursuit of profit would mean quite a few business owners would be having their competitors killed and forcing people to work at gunpoint, with no repercussions.


> What is this weird fascination with capitalism on HN?

It's the one doing the data collecting in our lives.


Parent's point is that you'd be a lot less likely complain about even worse data collection if you lived in China, and it was done in the name of the "people" - but you wouldn't be quieter because you really believed it was for the people. You'd be quieter because you were scared to say things about the System.

You're lucky to live in a System that pays you to have a public opinion about it.


The alternatives being worse doesn't make a critique of a system less valid. Yes, it's good that we have free political speech and yes, it's true that capitalism's incentives drive decisions like invasive data collection.


Breath of fresh air to read that in one perfect paragraph.

I only set up straw men when I'm bored. So ok. It's interesting how capitalist and authoritarian motives converge when it comes to violating individuals' privacy. You're leaving me hanging. Under the current system in America I can use VPNs and all kinds of ways to hide my identity, even if it does get harder to buy a Roku. There's no such ability in China, let alone a right to pursue your ability to protect your identity. Identity and individuality are simply not a thing.

Capitalism does, because is sells individualism (Chevy trucks, Coors Beer, the Green Bay Packers) - it does have to grudgingly allow individual people to, you know, act as individuals. From time to time.

This is a difference that a lot of people gloss over, but it's the reason all those assholes voted for Trump, which just proves that it can be harnessed. But moreover, rank obstinacy isn't necessarily a bad thing when the alternative is totalitarianism.


All incentives are the same in that regard - wanting to have and know more things. That's nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism lives within that desire, as does socialism.

Capitalism and socialism (excluding others for time) only differ on who gets to allocate resources. Do independent parties allocate their resources based on mutual agreements, within a legal framework run by a central authority? Or does a central authority allocate resources, within a legal framework run by that central authority?


Its mostly the KPIs. They just follow the A/B test that says people spend more time on the site without asking why the people spend more time on the site, when the answer is that the people are extremely frustrated.


That answer is unfortunately irrelevant to a lot of business models, and sometimes part of it. E.g., Pinterest (and many others) making use of their site frustrating if you don't submit and make an account, while being hard to avoid if you search for certain types of images.

(Another example I ran into was Instructables (this one specifically: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-REFLOW-OVEN/), where you can see and enlarge four photos submitted by people who followed the instructions, but have to create an account for the remaining two.)


Rotten business goals without care for ethics or people.


I've recently been travelling to some fam in Europe and the entire COVID experience is so convoluted and obscene I feel a moral obligation to defraud the private services profiting off of it.


Paying 100 euro for a test at the airport in Dublin when you depart so you can prove you didn't get COVID in the UK when you come back into Ireland 2 days later.

No logic or reasoning.


In Hong Kong it's simpler: 3-week hotel quarantine when you enter and no guarantee that if you leave your airline will be allowed back in.

I havent moved for the last 2 years and my daughter has grown her first years by seeing her grandparents on Skype. Im not risking what a friend lived through, stuck 6 months in Europe unable to come back.

New people entering these days do so without their family and with the clear understanding they re stuck here for a while. 0-case policy is not even working so well, since the last week we had an "explosive" cluster of 5 cases (so far) because a now fired freight airline employee went out sick everywhere ...

The only potential exit will be China, maybe, if they dont get scared by our recent uptick, if you like to install their gps-based tracking system. And you better not be foreign-looking and sick while in China, you're never coming back :D

The best story was when they still allowed exceptions for diplomatic staff and families and the kids of a Saudi official decided they were too good for self isolation and created a mini cluster isolating entire buildings for re-test. Or the Dubai IT guy who's now in jail after he forced the city to retest 800k philipinos helpers because he lied and contaminated some going to a party (and slowed down tracking since he lied to protect his friends from quarantine) before leaving his 1-week long (+short quarantine at the time, he's the reason we have 3 weeks now) vacation...

So your 100 euros wasted, Im not crying for them :p


Heavily off-topic but I think he means that you pay and get the test _before_ actually making the trip on which you might actually get the virus. Which indeed makes no sense other than making Dublin airport richer. OTOH if you spend some time in Dublin I'm afraid you get used to burning money for no good reason as the city has become absurdly expensive in recent years.


The logic is "let's milk these sheep for every penny we can while the scare tactics still work"


€35 private antigen test in the UK[0], taken within 48 hours of your planned return, would have done it. You paid €100 because you didn't read the guidance and prepare.

[0] https://fly.randox.com/


The fact that you're expected to pay some private company 35 quid for a test the NHS will send you for free is laughable and demands subversion.


Disagree. The nhs doesn’t provide it for free, but it’s paid by everyone. international tourism is not really a necessity, if you can afford that, you should be able to afford a test too. There are many test providers, but they are all in high demand right now, so it’s expected that the prices and waiting times are higher than they used to be. The cost of travel during the pandemic has certainly increased, specially when going through the peak of a huge wave as we are right now. I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

I do get the complaint regarding going back and forth from Ireland. The transit between NI and Ireland should be smoother and not require you to pay extra. However, if you’re coming from Portugal, the US, etc I think it’s entirely reasonable,


You want the taxpayer to pay for the test so you can go on holiday?


I am the taxpayer.


Sure, but in a healthy society taxes are used for basic necessities (such as health, education and infrastructure). International holidays are not usually seen as such.


some countries had an exception to testing for short trips (when only essential travel was allowed)


Last time I entered the EU (fully vaxxed) I had to pay $375 for a 24h PCR test in San Francisco because Portugal, unlike most EU countries, was not yet accepting US proof of vaccination.

I was pretty happy to pay “only” 100 EUR for the next one, which was to go between two Schengen countries in August, yay borderless Europe!


FWIW I've been re-using the same test number on all my trips and no one ever stops me. I've saved hundreds of pounds doing this and I just have the NHS send me the same test for free.


[flagged]


With respect to the private testing entities with buddies in parliament that make it mandatory for us to pay businesses like Randox, I entirely agree.


I don't see the scam nor a conspiracy.

First of all, private COVID test producing corporations are prolonging the pandemic by suggesting to gov't that testing be done to a higher degree than necessary? Why would governments fall for that? Oh, you mean they're all corrupt. Well, then you should call all government procurements corrupt, not just this one.


It is good to see on the London underground that the adverts for these COVID-test scammers are routinely daubed as such.


I think the test requirements are a scam. The most dangerous thing I did on my trip last week to the UK was have to wait on line in a stuffy crowded room for over an hour to take my post-landing PCR test.

It would have been safer for people to take a rapid test outdoors.


Most people aren't good with logistics. This procedure might have been called a "well it's better than nothing" solution, because of the logistics, instead of it being a scam. Just saying.


I agree with most everything you have said but wonder if it is just the internet or everywhere these days.

I recently went through a McDonalds drive thru for the first time in a very long time and felt a longing for the old menu boards that had items and prices clearly listed instead of these TV screens with all the items and prices scattered about like a teenage girls dream collage.

I walked into a new BestBuy store picked up an item and could not find where to pay, apparently checkouts and queues for customers no longer make sense to their business model. I had three people walk past me before one finally asked if I needed help, I said "yes I would like to buy this" they told me they were going on break but directed me over to what looked like a 1980s nightclub coat check counter, where I waited another 10 minutes before leaving the item on the counter and walking out.

The busses no longer accept cash in my city, you need to buy a prepaid card from a transit hub or from one of their partner retailers. So I need to get a ride to the store to get a bus pass?!?

Everyone knows about self checkouts at grocery stores but now with online shopping services, it is like running through a gauntlet with gig workers blasting their way up and down the isles with no patients for us analog shoppers that don't know exactly where our items are located on the shelves.

At the risk of sounding even more like a crotchety old man, people in public these days spend most of their time with their heads down looking at their phones. I took a couple friends out for lunch and was unable to have a meaningful conversation as they felt whatever was on their phones was more interesting than conversing with the sucker buying them lunch.

There was a movie where a guy got out of prison after a lengthy sentence and his words seem to ring more true to me each and every day: "The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me"

*Regarding Your comment about 2FA I recently purchased a hard to find item from a website that only accepted ShopPay, they required 2FA through my phone which was fine but now every time I load a checkout page that does accept other methods, ShopPay hammers out another text message and has managed to become my default method of payment, it now takes me extra effort to change my payment method back to what I want.


> was unable to have a meaningful conversation as they felt whatever was on their phones was more interesting

I hate that. If you're expecting something important - fine, take a quick glance to check, if it vibrates. But don't start scrolling while I'm trying to have a conversation with you. Put it down for 20 minutes, you'll be ok - it will still be on there.

> The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me

The Shawshank Redemption


For many this has become a habit. Sometimes it is worth raising it as an issue Ind the particular situation.


Meh. Whenever I see such things, it's usually because their interlocutor is boring.

People aren't interesting just because they are people. In fact, most people are boring as hell.

There is such a thing as manners, of course. But that's a two-way street. The other party also has to make an effort to not be boring, and that effort is rarely made either.


>>> The other party also has to make an effort not to be boring, and that effort is rarely made either.

Would you please elaborate what you mean by this?

I am familiar with how conversations work or at least how they used to...

This looking at your phone and tuning out of a conversation seems to be somethin new and lacking as you said, manners.


It's just that demanding someone's attention without expending the effort to be interesting to them is quite rude as well. If someone's constantly on their phone while you're speaking to them, your conversation is clearly not very interesting to them so you should do better.

I find demanding someone's attention more rude than not giving attention that's requested. Someone's attention is theirs to give, not something for others to demand.

As for how conversations used to work... When people were boring or uninteresting people would zone out and just uh-hu away. Just smile and nod. It may give the other the illusion that they're not being ignored, but they are.


Well I did not demand their attention so I suppose that is a different thing, in fact I did attempt to engage them with questions but after a few "Huh What?" when they look up from their phones, then a one word answer and back to their phones...I just ate my meal in silence.

I agree no one wants to listen to someone drone on and on, or brag about themselves but that is not what was going on in this specific case.

The truth is it was only a lunch and now that I know how going to lunch with these guys works, I just wont bother inviting them again. I just needed to vent a bit I suppose, and you are correct it would be rude to make my opinion of their conduct known to them and would have come across as a demand for their attention.


Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply anything about your specific situation or any other specific situation. There's absolutely room in the world for both situations to happen. (And I certainly didn't mean to imply you were boring. You've held my attention long enough :-) )

It's just that I see the sentiment repeated online rather a lot, while whenever I see the situation crop up offline, it's usually someone zoning out of an uninteresting conversation. I felt that observation and viewpoint needed some representation online.


>The busses no longer accept cash in my city, you need to buy a prepaid card from a transit hub or from one of their partner retailers. So I need to get a ride to the store to get a bus pass?!?

Damn, I hate this too


For some time this was the case in Sydney. Now you can tap on and off with any credit/debit card. Very convenient. Maybe worthwhile checking with you transport provider


Why is there a Google captcha in increasingly more checkout pages? This is the _only_ place a shop makes money.


Mostly because of credit card fraud.

Credit card numbers are constantly being leaked like crazy, and criminals have a hard time testing them by hand. So they rely on automating fake purchases on small shops so they can verify the number is correct.

Another common thing is criminals selling products via non-legitimate shops for very little to "launder" those card numbers. After a customer pays, they buy the proper product on a proper shop with another stolen credit card number. Any investigation takes long enough for those people to just disappear and get away with it.

We gotta fix credit cards as much as we need to fix the web.


> There was a movie where a guy got out of prison after a lengthy sentence and his words seem to ring more true to me each and every day: "The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me"

Shawshank?


Yeah I think that might be the one, it has been a while since I watched it.


Yup: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/quotes/qt0470737


If you ask me it's due to a confluence of:

- People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free;

- The companies who produce this stuff have shareholders who want to see their squiggly lines go up.

Honourable mention: Because cybersecurity is hard and involves saving users from themselves.

That's my oversimplified take, anyways.


> - People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free;

God damn. The race to the bottom where users are now unwilling to even pay 99 cents for an app on iOS is what kept many of us working for our Corporate Overlords instead of ushering in a new golden age for the indie developer.

I'm so sad now. That would have been Easy Street; we're left now to find the niches I guess — as is usually the case with powerful corporations running the show.


Also when phones started becoming able to work with the Internet in the 00's, cell phone companies (namely Qualcomm) did not repeat the same mistakes IBM made in the early 80's that gave consumers an open, standardized computing platform.


I think a lot of people are willing to pay for a lot of things, as long as it's a low-friction affair. Which payments on the intertubez are not. As an example, I recently wanted to read a newspaper article that was paywalled; so I figured I'd just pay. I ended up noping out after being presented with a form that wanted so much PII that it basically reeked of identity theft. This was Belgium's largest news site. If they'd have just given me an option to pay a one time fee of €0.50, no questions asked, no fuss, no PII, then I would have paid it in a heartbeat.

Online payments suck and need to be addressed (way beyond what Stripe is doing). But many companies are basically gaming this broken system to force people into hard-to-cancel subscriptions, or are profiteering off of outrageous transaction fees (looking at you, PayPal).


It really feels like internet infrastructure has been growing more unstable. More outages, feels like way more bugs happening on my apple products as well.

I believe this is the result of the same thing that causes all the chaos in all human fields, lack of consciousness. We live in a very distracted time, COVID is still one more stressor on top of all the other things we have to manage in the world we've built to be inhospitable to mental health.

There's a shift happening in certain areas, but I think the old guard of tech is due for a revolution of some kind. My two cents, to start we need to stop building things with such low-level tools.


> My two cents, to start we need to stop building things with such low-level tools.

Interesting -- my take is more that we should throw away the ever growing pile of high level tools and architecture and cruft and start all over again at the low level (I think accumulated complexity -- and accumulated expectations due to complexity -- cause a lot of issues). Heck maybe start by writing an OS and some useful applications that run on a $1 microcontroller that you can hand-solder on a cheap two-layer PCB. 256kB of SRAM and four megabytes of flash ought to be enough for quite a lot..

That said I don't necessarily mean we should abandon all progress e.g. in programming languages and revert to assembly and C'89.


A few very successful companies made unimaginable amounts of money early on and established de facto monopolies or close to them. As a result they now continue to make unimaginable amounts of money almost independent of their performance from a user's perspective.

That means they can also now spend unimaginable amounts of money hiring people, which distorts the natural relationships between performance and pay for people working in software development. Many people have come into this industry who are relatively young and inexperienced and don't really know what they're doing at all, yet expect to earn many times the average wage for someone in their demographic on day one and then to increase their income still further as they rapidly job-hop.

Neither those people nor most of their peers or even most of their management teams have ever had to bootstrap a software product where the continued success of their employer depended on making something that users actually wanted to use and customers actually wanted to pay for.

Many of them never work on the same software product for more than a year or two so they aren't evaluated on the long-term benefits of any work they do either. Instead the path to career success often involves high visibility, short-term projects. That brings to mind the old joke that something must always be done and this is something so we're doing it. Or some less flattering comments on modern corporate management and focussing on the next quarterly statement because that's what your astronomically large bonus depends on as CxO.

In short, the reason user satisfaction is often a secondary concern if it's a concern at all in modern software is that a lot of the tech firms seen as highly successful and desirable places to work made stupidly large amounts of money early on and now the incentives for both the tech firms and their employees are heavily distorted because normal financial incentives just don't apply in this crazy little corner of the world.


Humans are bad at understanding that infinite growth goes against the laws of nature. As numbers start to trail off, new ways have to be dreamed up whether it's a degration of offering to save money or new endeavours that have nothing to do with the core business.


Exponential growth, otoh, is quite a regular feature of nature. Rabbits boom and bust. Single cell algae transforms a newly formed pond within days, followed by exponential growth of organisms that like to feed on it.


Then our infinite growth economy is like an invasive species that has taken over the planet. Hunting resources to extinction, growing ever larger and all-encompassing, heating up our planet with its metabolic cycle of fossil fuel extraction and burning.


Interesting thing about exponential growth: it always comes to an end rather quickly. If it weren't so, the planet would be completely covered in rabbits.


Sounds like a good reason not to base a global economy on it, then.


I was guiding a relative with their 'new' Android tablet, the Youtube app goes either full of adverts or full screen. The latter hides the home button, because it's not a hardware one like the iPad.

So to stop playing a video you have to: 1. tap the screen to show controls 2. tap pause so you don't have to shout over them. 3. tap the icon which looks like a view finder but means exit full screen 4. swipe from the right to show the home button 5. press the home button

All of the above without pressing too softly or moving your fingers while tapping or swiping in a curve.

I understand now why iPads have a hardware home button.


* Metrics-driven product development which focuses on things like "engagement", so more popups and analytics shite.

* HIPPO or designer-driven requirements for "cool" (for various opinions on "cool") requiring large JS payloads, massive banner images and videos etc at the cost of accessibility and lighter page size (as well as larger surface area for UI bugs).

* Developers working with high-end machines and fast internet connections, so lack of empathy for users with neither.

* Scrum/agile hamster-wheel methodology so developers are focused on tiny atomized tasks, preventing holistic improvements.


I definitely agree some things have gotten quite bad, but at least for me there have been quite a lot of massive improvements.

Banking is a good example, it has significantly improved for me; Instead of having to use one of those 2nd factor dedicated devices that require my card and pin code, I can now use my phone with the app as second factor, it's way more convenient as I don't have to go search for the device and type in random numbers. Also checking my bank statements and saldo doesn't require a second factor so it's much easier now.

My impression is that for elderly people things have improved as well, although based on a small sample size. I have tried to learn elderly people how to use a laptop and the internet some years back, it was almost impossible. But, if you give them an iPad and some very basic instructions they just figure stuff out, do banking, messaging, gaming and what not. I have honestly been surprised.

When talking search and shopping I fully agree; I think the issue here is that not-very-ethical parties have actually succeeded quite well in gaming and flooding the system with the clickbaity low quality crap. It has become hard or impossible to distinguish real & quality vs fake/low quality/scam, manual and automated.

Multi factors do require some work, and captchas really suck (but those are not new!).

My point is that I think overall things have improved, there are exceptions, but the web and digital products in the past were really very bad.

It might not feel like it has improved because expectations rise with the base level, and our expectations are way higher now, so bad apples stand out.

Check out https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-gains-shrinking/ some strong pointers that at least the user experience situation has improved.


For decades my bank used a hardware security device that I kept on my keychain. It worked flawlessly and I loved it. Recently they changed to an "App" to be able to use my account. The first I heard about it, I was overseas trying to get back during the Pandemic, and couldn't buy a plane ticket as SMS wouldn't work (apparently it was because I hadn't authorised "Roaming" before I left). Whatever, I did enjoy cancelling all my bank accounts when I returned. I will never use a shitty smartphone App for anything which involves security.


Fair enough, a security device that can be on your keychain does sound convenient. I use hardware security keys these days, probably a similar experience.

SMS does sound proper annoying, not only delays/roaming issues, but also because you probably still have to manually type over numbers.

For most thing I just need to scan a QR code, then type in a pin or use face id to confirm, very quick and easy. For big transactions I still need the device, and that's when I realize how annoying it really is haha.

Anyway, hope you have found a better bank!


I think it is just part of the commercialization of the web, the same dynamics that happens everywhere where a firm with a good product/brand change it to increase cash flows or some other KPI. Though much more clear in consumer market, but also happen to rich, influential companies (think about the clients of Oracle).


This is very true, it reminds me of when Chip Wilson said LuLuLemon yoga pants are not meant for fat girls!

https://dietsinreview.com/diet_column/11/no-fat-girls-allowe...


Please explain why you think a company should provide goods for people outside their target market? Is market segmentation frowned upon these days?


ugg, unfortunately you are right I guess. I don't think a company should be forced to provide service or goods to anyone and has the right to refuse. I do however think they should also accept the social and economic consequences to come from making these decisions. Including as a consequence, the making people aware of the decisions and statements they make that result in the exclusion of a particular demographic.

I am trying to be more positive and feel it is important to remember every comment on a forum is also not an invitation to an argument.


Agreed. Capitalism is fueled by greed.


It's human behavior. Unfortunately.

What could we replace capitalism with? Won't underlying human behavior remain the same?


Human behavior tends to mutual aid if its doesnt have to live paycheck to paycheck. Something with less inquality. Something more cooperative perhaps?


I recently tried to backup my Google Authenticator setup from my smartphone. It's possible to export all secret keys to another smartphone using a QR code, however taking a screenshot is prevented. So how am I supposed to protect myself against device loss or corruption, if I don't have another smartphone to use for the backup (other than taking a picture of the QR code)?


This is something I don't understand about Google authenticator. I lost my device once and haven't used the app since, since I lost all of my otp keys.

Good alternatives include andOTP (json file backup, plain or encrypted with password / pgp key) and Aegis (json or txt)


I was able to take a screenshot of GAuth backups on iPhone using the button hotkeys(IE: Power+Volume up). I setup a container that runs a go version of GAuth and used a python script to decrypt the (decrypted QR code) backup keys. Then I backed up the encrypted keyfile to offline disk, encrypted the container backup and deleted it from the hypervisor.

https://github.com/pcarrier/gauth

https://github.com/scito/extract_otp_secret_keys


The asylum is being run by the inmates.

> constant changes to 'systems that are working fine'

This is the one that annoys me the most. Constantly breaking things that work. Windows 11 is a perfect example, can't think of even 1 compelling reason for it to exist.


Every organisation was once running there own email, web and other services on a real internet in new, interesting and innovative ways.

I find it really shocking that in 2022 something as simple as an email server has become too hard for close to 100% of organisations who rely on the crapfest that is gmail or 365.

It would be nice to see some innovation that isn't some cloud BS.


Something I've noticed as I've started to more actively try things with crypto wallets(which have made inroads on being identity/login solutions) is that there is a refreshing transparency and friction to the on-chain interactions. There are many things that cost a fee and make the wallet prompt for my password again when interacting with blockchains, but I haven't used Ethereum, so I've never seen a fee above a microscopic amount. And even given that the fees don't impact me, it throws the reality of what it costs to run the system in my face, making the low friction and opacity in big tech UX look shady by comparison, like, "well, why are you rushing me through this?"

Something significant happened to our trust model when we made that little leap from computer systems still "driven" by front office desk clerks and receptionists to fully automated ones - the ability for the intermediary to properly look out for you disappeared under the lens of KPI, as OP notes. So computing tech became more of a weapon for all sides - a thing to exploit or be exploited through at hyper speed. While the crypto way of doing it has a long way to improve still and also suffers frequent headliner exploitations, the core of it reminds me of the past in a good way; both "no questions asked" and "gets your permission". It just needs "smart enough to spot and correct grave errors".


Example: Registering an ENS domain theoretically costs $5 but you have to factor in $65 in ethereum gas fees. And it's not a good idea for privacy.

Typical use is: transfer funds from an exchange wallet to your metamask wallet -> use metamask to register your ENS name -> choose your twitter handle as your .eth name -> oops, you just very publicly and irreversibly told all the world about your exchange wallet history.


As far as user-hostility on the web and in consumer products and services goes: it's there because there is no good honest economic model.

Everything online has to be free, which means companies have to find some sneaky underhanded way to finance it. They have to find a way to monetize you since you won't pay, and in many cases you can't pay because there is no good mechanism.

People will retort by pointing out that many things you pay for have adopted user-hostile practices too. That's true. The problem is that without a simple honest economic model it is impossible to do business online in any other way. an honest straightforward economic model is necessary but not sufficient to create products and services that are not user-hostile.

The other ingredient that must be there is user preference. People have to vote with their wallets and go toward ecosystems that don't treat them this way. But if there are none to begin with because everything has to be "free," then people don't even have that option.

... and no, open source is not an option for non-technical users. If my time is valued at $80/hour and I have to spend two hours a month maintaining something, that thing costs $160/month. That's pricey.

Edit: The "constant release" pressure is a kind of SEO phenomenon. Searches tend to use liveness as a lazy metric of quality. People do this too. So something that's constantly pushing out trivial releases looks more alive.


I've seen instances where improvements and updates are made to existing systems that works just fine. The reason being optimization of resources like time, manpower and money.

But these improvements create new problems in the system that requires another iteration of improvements and updates.

It either that or the intuitive nature of the system is compromised. This creates a very unpleasant experiences that makes no sense.

Another important reason that comes to mind is unrealistic expectations from the IT industry. I've seen customers asking for features that adds no benefit to their business and they want it just because it's out there and they want in. Customers these days want everything. They want an amazing UI, light speed data transmission, quantum level security, and a sophisticated technology stack. They want all this in 1 month. The IT industry is so dense in countries like India that even though these people know this isn't possible, they still promise a product to the customer for fear of losing a valuable business venture.

This inturn results in a half cooked product that seems to have everything the customer requested but whose stability and usability isn't vouched for. More and more updates are promised to solve the issues with the product since "this is an iterative evolving solution".


I will probably attract a lot of downvotes for this, but are programmers really as innocent as to be not even mentioned among the possible culprits?

I suspect that there is some sort of short-circuit between the clients (those that ask for features) and the programmers (both the "software architects" and those that actually implement the apps/sites).

Speaking of Government issues (in these times of COVID-19) there are certain categories here in Italy (restaurants, hotels, cinemas and similar places) that have by Law the need to check customers' "green pass" (officially EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC)).

This can be done exclusively through an app (Apple or Android) written by what is loosely the IT branch of the government.

What the app does is simply scanning the QR code and check the validity of the pass (by some algorithmn and checking also a sort of blacklist).

There is no technical reason on earth why this could have not been made OS/device independent, or at least the Irish (EIRE) one is a "normal" site[1] that works on any recent browser.

Questions are:

1) was it the government asking for a dual (iOS/Android) app (and no site)?

2) or was the SOGEI (the government connected IT firm that wrote the apps[2]) to decide to NOT make such a site?

[1] https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/

[2] BTW the actual Android app at least - cannot say the iOS one - needs a relatively recent Android version, cannot remember exactly, probably 8, so that using your old phone wouldn't do.


Unregulated winner take all effects. Too many acquisitions - not enough competition. Giant companies providing market leading services at 3+ layers, increasing startup costs, enabling anti competitive behaviour.

However I believe the true reason is geopolitical. The entire digital market is simply the best espionage system. If the US govt had a better way to dominate other countries, they would use it instead, and the internet would improve.

Dark patterns in digital services are not just about greed. They give the US government greater power which translates to increased protection of its citizens.

What could be the solution? Tax loopholes to funnel money into open source code to compete at the govt's expense? Building a better geopolitical power system so they get off tech's lawn?

Realistically, it's probably to invest more in open source services and encryption tools, self hosting tools, proxies. Open source capital ownership governance model.


> Dark patterns in digital services are not just about greed. They give the US government greater power which translates to increased protection of its citizens.

What?


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29718254


A link without any context isn’t a helpful response.


The link is evidence that other people also see US tech as American global espionage system.

Do you have any thoughts about it?


Am I understanding correctly that you think that, for example, ‘sign up for our newsletter!’ modals exist to allow the US government to get more data on people?


How about KYC/AML (if you like cryptocurrencies)? And why it became so complicated to register an e-mail or account in messengers account or web-page in social networks without phone number? I have lost few really great friends because I've lost an access to my phone (literally burned in fire with a sim-card) bonded to the telegram account, for example. Also, I am really suffer for neediness to have a smartphone for daily needs like ordering a taxi instead of just to phone and to pay cash. These examples are just from top of my head, there are plenty more.


It's a side effect. Govt supported espionage monopolies (FB/Google) -> decreased competition and talent pool -> small services are worse for having less competition.


The internet you have in mind is from corporations for corporations.

Humans are the livestock.

And as the corpos are huge, Conway predicts so will be the webpages. (=> 'Website obesity crisis' https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)


One thing is IMO that internet became victim of its own success and grew too big. You don't have physical constraints in it and you can grow almost infinitely.

Previously you'd have a bunch of users and mostly somehow tech literate. Now ~everyone is on the net. Most successful companies grew too much and with 1B+ users, each company will have tens of millions of users who are tech illiterate / harmful / scammers. Designing for such a massive user base and dealing with all this requires either enormous fleet of support staff, or "works for 90%" attitude powered by shitty AI which is unfortunately what happens.

And then once you have 100k smart and motivated employees, everyone wants to move the needle a bit, hence everything changes ~weekly in every product. It's super easy to add new things and release in prod, much easier than before (better deploy monitoring tooling and practices etc.)


Firstly - software is too cheap to ship, and has removed the economic incentive for quality.

Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money. Broken software would be publicly embarrassing and long-lived. Some users might never update and just think your software sucked. So we had to try harder to get software right up front, to test in advance and write code that would make it function in difficult situations.

But with no marginal cost to shipping, businesses experiment with the question "how shoddy can our engineering be while still turning a profit?" and "what features can we add for our profit, even if it obstructs or hurts users?". They run those experiments daily now.

I believe this has successfully brought down quality norms in almost all categories of software: UIs respond in 100s or 1000s of ms as standard, not 10s. You lose your train of thought often with bad UIs, and they're all differently bad.

Secondly - a user in 2021 is less likely to be the person directly supporting the author of that software.

So the users' decision to use (or bin) the software for the long run doesn't need to be core of any software business' success. They can be compelled into using bad software by network effects (I know, pioneered by 90s Microsoft but the internet turbo-charged this). That's not just about evil business models; bad government or banking software has forced lots of people to bad software who never wanted a computer in the first place.

Thirdly - the other surprising evil from the network is the end of data ownership. After all the fuss 20 years ago about the politics of the MS Word file format, many users can't reliably separate data from the application that processes it any more. File format interoperability (whether reverse-engineered or open) used to be a smart way in for new competitors - do more things with your old data. Now that's impossible without continued cooperation of the companies producing the data. APIs to online data are treacherous and only kept around while they serve the business, not its users. So many "experience" apps aren't even clear what data they keep for you, and the law is still catching up.

Don't get me wrong, it's (maybe) a good thing that there are more people in 2022 doing things with software than there were in 2002. It's very often enabling. But the ideal of a computer being a tool or a "bicycle for the mind" is something you have to choose & fight for now.

(OS security & power management "innovation" is the other end of this rant, but for another day :) )


Incentive structure. There is no incentive to favor users. Engineers are measured by KPIs that are decoupled from user experience. Managers have similar measures. Investors are concerned with value measured by quantities unrelated to user experience, especially when they want fast returns regardless of how people experience the product. As far as I can tell, there is no incentive on any side that favors users: just incentives that favor developers, managers, and investors. Users grudgingly get dragged along because they need or want the product, and given no alternative, accept it. That acceptance is misconstrued as satisfaction.


Don’t forget those awful goddamn cookie banners, and the disable ad blocker pop ups. I hate even leaving the major platforms because my entire phone screen is covered up by these annoyances.


The ones that aren't required at all?


Fundamentally it is about GUI toolkits and design, and those get chucked for fashion yearly now.

It used to be five year cycles, but now with the web toolkit du jour and constant web "standards" churn, it happens even faster.

And that's without the hipster "design" fads like material design and flat design and all that jazz.

UIs are a variant of the halting problem: unlike a lot of fixed input/output systems like CLIs and other things that programmers love, any non-trivial UI will rapidly cycle out of control in terms of making a good testability, and that's for code that is fundamentally a lot more difficult to get up and running for even the base use cases.

HTML in the beginning attempted to solve that with its simple forms. Well, those got chucked out for ... whatever it is we have now. I'm not saying that the HTML basic form wasn't flawed, but for the standards bodies after five major revisions to the HTML standard to not do anything and basically just say "here's CSS and javascript if you want validation or multiple buttons or anything that powerbuilder had back in 1990" well, that's an industry failure too.

It seriously flabbergasts me that we had powerbuilder and a lot of the VB stuff cranking out pretty sophisticated interfaces on 486s and pentiums and we are still spinning our wheels 30 years later with 100-1000x the computational firepower.


Open source has been serving big tech for the past 15 years. Millions of man-hours to build better tools for the cloud overlords. Structure everything to fit the needs of amazon and apple, not the little guy who self-hosts a forum. Mozilla was abandoned. There is no open-source mobile phone. The web became a bad fascimile of mobile app platforms. Google doesn't care to integrate touch-interfaces and functionality in the browser. Academia jumped in the cloud as well.

Why do we even need the internet at this point? Google has stored all the content and amazon and cloudflare carry all the traffic. They 'd be far better off with optimized proprietary centralized protocols instead of the distributed mess that is tcp/ip.

Maybe that's what the internet needs, competition from another network

We also need to be able to pay for little stuff. Remember game arcades? All you needed to play a game was a coin, anonymous, impersonal, not-tracked, easily accessible and effortless to use, and it made them sustainable. Try to ask your users for $1, it's entirely impossible considering the fees and dangers involved. We need anonymous mini transactions like this for the internet. Browsers should implement it, and it can be secured with legal limitations (e.g. your wallet cannot spend more than $200/month on websites).


Greed and idiocy. Same as always. I think we were luckily sheltered from it for a long time in technology for many reasons - VC funding with long horizons meant no immediate pressure to monetize, lower revenues, salaries and higher entry bars kept greed and idiocy out. Now the VC funded businesses need to show returns and the $$$ is attracting all the wrong people.


I think it's mainly the last point. They got their marketshare, there's nothing more to gain. Any non-digital alternatives have dwindled. So they shift from attracting more customers to extracting more money from us. Tracking, targeted advertising etc on top of subscription plans. Double/Triple dipping to keep increasing their profits.


The main ones are adversarial space and the destruction of location.

- The Internet makes every location logically adjacent; if you know the domain name or IP, you can access it

- Some users are malicious and will leverage that logical adjacency to harm users

Every user is therefore stuck playing a measure / countermeasure game against a perpetual threat, no matter what they're trying to do.


A sort of “computer interface claustrophobia” felt when using mobile phones is part of the reason, I think.

Lack of space, like lack of time, is stressful.

Also, the web became a more professional and commercialized environment, which brings its own problems.

> Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and [sic] unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.

—Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore in The Medium Is the Massage - An Inventory of Effects


> Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

Because in the process of 'enhancing the experience' everybody forgot to ask the user.

Classical example - A/B testing.

In the ideal world it means what if some change is introduced then it would be tested on a small subset of users.

In our world A/B testing means what there would be two changes and one with less complaints would be chosen.

"But, but I did that the right way!" somebody would say? Well, if you did A/B testing right, that doesn't means you got the right conclusions from it: if you had only 2% (or even 0%) of complaints on some change that doesn't means you are needed to do that change.

It is sometimes so blunt and evident what you are at loss for words. Eg: the logon page of my bank. After a major redesign a couple of years ago (from a ~2008 style) it was a subject for at least 5 "improvements" since that, all accompanied with "for your experience we did blaablabla...". One time they even explicitly stated "we played with fonts". Imagine the audacity.

Do you know what functionally changed in all those minor "improvements"? Absolutely nothing.

Sometimes there was new fonts, sometimes the fonts got back, one time there showed up this stupid "You have 2 new messages!" notification (ON A LOGON SCREEN OF A BANK WEBSITE FFS!) and all other times I don't even know what (if anything) was changed, because my logon experience wasn't changed a bit. Btw, the colorful, giant photo of some mountains serving as the page wallpaper doesn't show up in the Firefox with a strict security settings, means it's get loaded from some unsecure/unapproved (CORS?) location (and what these idiots doesn't test their site in FF).

But both the PR dept and Web design team DOES THE THING for a couple years, both are running successful A/B tests, both are having good KPIs (selected by themselves I suppose) and both... forgot to ask the user if their changes are actually needed.


I would guess as:

1. For a lot of companies that have sites running the site is not their primary business. E.g. bank's business is not their site. Surely, their customers (maybe majority of them even) use the site, but that's not what they came to the bank for, that's something they are forced to endure to get their loan, access to their money, their credit card account, etc. Consequently, no motivation to improve UX.

2. A lot of companies that do run their business via the site, they are big enough so that losing any particular customer is below rounding error for them. If you're mad at Amazon for scammy products, what you're going to do, use... what exactly? Not many sites have as wide catalog as Amazon, and can seriously threaten to take their customers. Consequently, no incentive to improve. Also, automatic problem handling tool cost much less than live support (that would demand benefits, complain about working conditions, and generally cause headache) - and if that costs 1% of customers wrongly banned, the cost is acceptable. In any case, not a lot of people would abandon Amazon because there's 1% chance they'd be banned by mistake - and in fact, nobody even knows how big the chance is anyway.

3. A lot of seemingly independent sites are actually owned by the same company (travel industry is notorious for that). So, if you don't like the UX on the site A, and take your business to the site B, you're didn't take your business anywhere in reality, you're just moved to the next isle at the same store. Same consequences.

4. Scammers are much more motivated to scam than services are motivated to fight them. If a scammer scams Google, they get $$$BIG BUCKS$$$ (or at least make a living). If Google catches a scammer, practically nothing changes in anybody's bottom line. Consequently, you get scammy search results.

5. Not changing anything and just keeping everything worked as it worked before rarely gets people promoted. Reworking the whole site and successfully implementing a buzzword technology and completing a project with 100 people involved in time and under budget - just might. Consequently, unnecessary redesigns all around.


I've thought for a while that this kind of change for the sake of change is fuelled by the number of employees in the companies involved. The ratio of developers you need to build an application vs maintaining one is huge. That creates an incentive for companies to keep building.

Out of the perspective of Agencies (Outsourcing) each working developers generates revenue. Product companies can choose to either keep their employees and keep building, or simply let a huge chunk of them go. Letting a huge number of people go (mass layoffs) is generally seen as a bad thing. So they go the other route. Keep the employees around and have them working - building new stuff.


> Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.

At least for Google most of the time the end user is not the customer, the advertiser is.

This has various reasons, one of them being economics, another one being end user psychology.

Also for Amazon this is more and more becoming the case, as sellers and businesses using their services contribute much more to Amazons margin than an end user does.

The rest follows pretty much automatically from the internal incentive structures of those companies, which are dominated by share value increases.


The reason? Too many users.

If you don’t want to tolerate something there’s always another user who will. We think of users as more like cattle that have to be herded through various funnels and protected from wolves (hackers).


That's the way you make money on the internet. Count on slow frog boil syndrome and decreasing expectations of your clientale. For example there was an app I liked a lot (free game) . At first there were no ads, just a donate button in the settings. Then a sliver text ad. Then page ads between screen loads that were enforced at about 15 seconds each (or so). And then ads you had to click off randomly as the game would stop and pop them up seemingly randomly. Obviously I gave up the game.


Users are not prioritized, obscene wealth is (usually for founders, and less so for employees). What do investors want: warm fuzzies or cold, hard cash? Follow the incentives.


I think it's mostly which services you are choosing to use, a choice that may or may not be explicit. You don't have to put up with bullshit on the Internet. It's about drawing a line in terms of what you will allow, and saying no to the services that cross that line.

If someone offers a service that is useful, but does so in a way that is annoying, you can just say "thanks but no thanks" and be on your merry way. Few do, but again, it's a choice.


I think of the Internet as a subculture, like a music scene: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

It started with geeks working in labs doing cool shit with computers on government grants. They figured out the technical aspects. This is circa 1980 and earlier.

Then came the early adopters. They recognized the potential and wanted nothing more than to do cool shit with computers, and so they did. They used the technology invented by the geeks with the same spirit of the geeks, for they themselves were geeks. This was circa 1990.

Next came the mops. They saw early adopters and geeks doing cool shit, and wanted to do cool shit too, but they lacked the wherewithal to do it. But they stuck around because they were happy enough to watch others while they did cool shit. This was circa 2000.

Next came the sociopaths, who said things like "They trust me — dumb fucks". And that was it, that was the beginning of the end. Once the sociopaths came on the scene, everything good about the scene was done. No longer was the scene about doing and watching cool things; it was about sociopaths extracting value from "dumb fucks" who didn't know any better, and there were plenty of them at that point. The geeks were powerless to stop them - the technology was well thought-out and commoditized. Other geeks were then in the employ of sociopaths, executing their will. This was circa 2010.

And really, at this point the sociopaths control so much of the space (as they always end up doing, because that's what they aim to do and no one tries to stop them) that they can just pay geeks to reshape their creation in the sociopath's image (see Web 3.0). This is where we are now.

What usually happens at this point is a long, slow decline of the scene as the sociopaths take over and wage a scorched-earth campaign in search of profits. Everything is monetized to the hilt until there's nothing left. If at any point there is an aspect that remains unexploited, it will soon be exploited by a waiting sociopath. This is the future of the Internet.

That's my theory at least. The Internet is user hostile because the people who own the biggest chunks of the Internet really do view you as a "dumb fuck" that deserves to be exploited.


I'll suggest over reliance on dependencies on the frontend.

<BOX type="soap">

The thing about a dependency frontend module, is that it often brings in some really cool stuff, like animations and attractive design elements, but also introduces inflexibility. You have to use the supplied design elements, and you can't modify the animations.

This gets compounded, when you aggregate dependencies.

Dependencies aren't bad. They are how we get big stuff done, with small teams. Done right, they can also enforce UI consistency, and improve quality.

Done wrong ... well ... not so much.

It's possible to have UI suites that provide a lot of customization options, but the customization comes at the expense of increased implementation complexity. There's usually a fairly significant learning curve, which isn't popular, when your boss is breathing down your neck, so many developers opt for the defaults (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as that can enforce consistency). It means that they are often using standard tools for specialized tasks (think using an English wrench on a metric bolt).

Also, developers and designers tend to hate (I mean sticking-pins-in-voodoo-doll-hate) usability folks, like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman; which is too bad, because they have some great suggestions.

The backend can be a byzantine nightmare. Maybe it needs to be, but the frontend should be consistent, simple, and user-task-oriented.

That "user-task-oriented" is important. The deal is helping users to get stuff done. It isn't to impress them with eye-candy chrome, pretty design and fancy interaction. Good UI helps the user to get done what needs doing, and gets the hell out of the way.

The best user interface is the one you don't notice. That can be damn difficult to achieve.

This is often accomplished by doing rote, "cliché" UI. I write about that, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

I am a fan of good interpretive SDKs (ones that don't just present the raw substrate to the programmer), and native coding.

</BOX>


We used to present our designer with a particular webshop, when he asked what sites we frequently used and enjoyed. That site had made one change to their layout in 12 years, they added round corners. That site was easy to navigate, everything was a simple as you can imaging, no weird icons, just text that said: "In stock/out of stock". The thing is, the site looked old, and dated, so everything good was dismissed along with the styling.


Part of consistency, is being consistent with current standards. That generally means working on the code to keep it looking current.

But custom problems require custom solutions (for example, a Web shop for a customizable widget, that maybe also needs to have restrictions imposed by industry licensing standards), and that can be difficult to do, with standard stuff (I have had to do almost exactly that, and have the scars to prove it).


I feel like one reason might be prioritizing short term profit over long term profit. I read a lot that it's about profit maximization - but I think that's not necessarily true. Facebook for example, is likely hurting itself right now and will become irrelevant in the long term and loose their business. Execs care about quarterly growth more than growth over the next few years.


As a funny (to me at least) piece of anecdata:

I've never worked at a startup that wasn't either in the middle of or planning a UI redesign.


Because the AI is designed to maximise revenue and profit growth and is otherwise completely indifferent to societal consequences.


Software is never finished. There are always new features to be added, tech debt to be serviced, security and functionality updates to be put in place, new technologies to try out, to see if they help.

No UI is perfect. Even if it was, the perfect UI for today may be awful the day after tomorrow. Perfection is a moving target.


The rise of AB testing and releasing often is probably somewhat to blame. It turns out that if you have a good, popular product that you can push your users to their limits. I've seen so many tests that resulted in lower NPS scores but increased usage, revenue, and other metrics.


The primary reason - there is a lot more money in the system than in the 90s. As a consequence, there is a lot more scammers, spammers and hackers. As a consequence, companies built defences, inconvenient for the users. There is a never ending arms race, of which we are the victims.


Another reason is lack of creativity from smaller developers that copy the dark patterns that have become endemic of the larger websites like Amazon, Google, and AirBnb. Many smaller developers mistakenly look up to these “leaders” for guidance on how their software should work.


> * Release Often as KPIs for developers

Not likely. Release often as a KPI usually just means that a few more bugs get shipped and bugfixes get shipped faster. Poorly designed features are usually results of poor design and nothing else.

> Payment Security and Financial Regulations

Not really. Sure, opening a bank account is painful, but setting up the app shouldn't be. I've had three different experiences: Chase (easy), Huntington Bank (security theatre abusurdium), and a Credit Union (easy). It all comes down to 2FA implementation - Huntington has a poorly designed authenticator registration flow.

> Patch-work nature of ID & Verification... Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules and Authentication Apps have been patched onto the original user/pass system

Yes, and it mostly works pretty well. It is telling that no one way has really caught on as the way to do it, but there seems to be broad agreement that a click verified email address is an acceptable identity. I'm not sure there's much better. What does a store know about a buyer in the real world, anyway? Physically present, with cash in hand... good enough.

> KPI switch from customer first to business model first

When has it ever been anything other than business enablement? Ecommerce has always been "customer self service" and many a support site has been built to reduce headcount in customer service. Some companies are good at this stuff, and others are not. Just like in the real world. What is changing at Google and Amazon is the focus is now squarely on making money, so losing money for long periods of time is no longer acceptable. In fact, their focus on mining profit from their users is creating opportunities around the edges... which will give rise to some very capable competitors over time.


The business model is data/network lock-in. Everything is optimized to prevent users from switching, not solving users' problems.

I think it's because users don't pay for anything; it's valuations based on ad exposure, or expectations based on size of user base.


Great question! I was thinking about it lately a lot and what I realised is very simple: Developers can’t code great user experiences without an understanding of UX first. How many companies you know which invest in educating devs UX? I know one company from hundreds.


There are a lot of ways of defining each of these, and the number of hands-in-agreement will probably depend on the minutiae of each definition.

FWIW, I think your last point is the most relevant. It's hard to delve into this sort of thing without stepping into decades/centuries old rhetorical cliches but... let's anyway.

Industries, companies, markets and such go through eras. In the early 1920s, auto manufacturing was on a tear. 20th century factory efficiencies had matured, with prices dropping meaningfully every year. The market had matured. People learned to drive. Mechanics existed. Financing existed. Roads developed. Everyone wanted a car, but not everyone had one yet.

Possibly not without coincidence, the start of the great depression coincided with the end of this era. In this and later eras, everything was different. Margins were lower. Prices stopped dropping. Cars-as-fashion. Planned obsolescence, either mechanical or fashionable existed. International expansions became important. Etc.

Not everything about auto-manufacturing post 1927 was bad. But, a great many wonderful aspects of the youthful era were gone. "Consumer friendliness" is, perhaps, one of them.

TLDR, We probably wouldn't be wondering these things about pfizer, citibank or the Walgreens Boots Alliance.


Modern day internet is all about extracting value ($$$) from user for as long as possible and by all the means necessary.

If the company offering the product/service cannot extract value (again: $$$) from you, you're worthless.


Because dumb people (including me) click on ads and buy stupid shit.


but it’s not? do you actually remember 2005? Online shops, online banking, online food delivery, online payments, they ALL used to suck majorly.


Let's not forget the endless bloat. Multimegabyte sites, spinning loaders and that's before the 3rd party resources are loaded.


Money


For one thing, why is the text of posting light grey on greyish background? It's almost unreadable on a phone.


Because

a) the user is generally no longer also the customer.

b) quality of user experience is generally no longer the main driver for actual use


The web experience is hostile due to its capture by megacorps that are too powerful to be regulated.

The internet is a different issue. I have a great experience with my new fiber connection, SSH and Wireguard VPNs are all good. The persistence of smaller, calmer and noncommercial networks like Signal Messenger, XMPP, Matrix Mastodon and Gemini show that positive interactions on the 'net are possible when commercial imperatives are dampened or removed.

The Web, though, is a corporate capitalist dumpster fire.


1. Maximization of profits.

2. Attempts to regulate and attempts comply with regulations.

The rest are just forms of these phenomena.


I think it's because we were never human here. Meaning we were never embodied.

Walk into a store or a house in the natural world, and people there know you're human, because you're embodied. We aren't online.

Here we are "users," "clients," "visitors," "the audience," "eyeballs" "data subjects" (GDPR) or "consumers" (CCPA). Entities embodied as servers are lords of their castles on the Web. We're just serfs, with no more rights or abilities than each of those grants separately.

The best we become instantiated (though only by implication human) is when we get "accounts" with server operators. Yet, with every account we add, we lose a little more of the agency that arises from autonomy and independence. We have measures of both those graces in the natural world, where we are embodied. But we don't here. And, as others in this thread point out, it is extremely easy to take boundless advantage of our structural vulnerabilities. And to normalize that in the extreme as well.

Of course the wizards among us can spin up personal servers, "own" (actually, rent) personal domains, and stuff like that; but the old client-server model is stacked against the world's muggles and only a bit less so against the wizards, since wizards also need their accounts with the networked world's alpha operators.

The best way to solve this, IMHO, is by developing business and technical solutions that can only come from our side, the human side. I list fourteen of those here https://customercommons.org/solutions/ .


I live in Russia and internet services are pretty solid that ever. Online banking is prevalent, secure and feature full. Booking tickets or shopping online is seamless. Web search is of decent quality. Everybody has set on SMS as second factor and that is a good match WRT security/ease of use.

So maybe it's mostly the USA.


I moved to Russia years ago from the US so I can confirm that the experience is worlds better and that many US institutions never really "modernized". When I left in 2016, I still only had the option to pay my rent with a physical check on my most recent place, and the previous had a "convenience charge" for paying with card, which had to be done in the rental office since their payment site never stayed up.

Some of it has gotten better I'm told by friends and colleagues, but for my bank, there's still no built-in money transfer option between the same banks or others, there's a requirement to us some third party service (with a non-trivial transaction fee) Card to Card transfers aren't really a thing, again relying on third party services to do the transfers (at cost).

It's not so much that the US can't do good things, but a lot of infrastructure/convenience that the non-US world enjoys is certainly possible, but the way that a lot of the infrastructure is built up and supported simply is because of a preference to offload such services to third party providers that just introduce an extra signup/process/fee.

I don't know the full details of payment processing and why it seems like the card to card transfers within the bank app isn't really widely done, or why the confirmation codes for online purchases isn't a thing or even why contactless was such a struggle for the US for so long (when I visited in 2019, I think only at the Apple store did they have a reader that worked with contactless pay...)


I’m in Bangkok and it seems like contactless payment is way ahead of Europe, which in turn is way ahead of the US. If you have a Thai bank account (I don’t yet) you can pay for street food using a QR code and your banking app. Not all vendors have the code set up but more and more do, also market stalls and of course people pay by app in stores everywhere.


When you’re paying rooms full of developers top 1% salaries, something’s gotta give.


Overuse of jargon? WTF is KPI?


Key performance indicators


Laissez faire capitalism, basically.

The idea that in a free market products work for consumers instead of for the corporations selling them is completely flawed.


That statement is flawed, yes.

The laissez faire argument is that everyone wins, as everyone does what they're good at and/or they like, and buys what they're bad at and/or they dislike.

You can disagree with that if you like, but there's no point creating a false "instead of" straw man.


Some of these are strong, unpopular opinions.

My question in return would be, name me a single company other than Apple ( I am no longer a fan of Apple, but credit where credit's due ) that has a user or product mindset in Silicon Valley, or even border terms, in Tech ( or even non tech )? Excluding startups or companies that are still run by founders.

And so most CEOs are either tech oriented, or business oriented, i.e sales and marketing people. Where are the product people?

> "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

>So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product." - Steve Jobs

The first part isn't easy to understand by non-product people. If a company is making record profits. Why are they not successful? What are the inventive to further improve user experience? Or creating a better product? At the expense of additional R&D for zero bottom line benefits.

Here is another Steve Jobs quote.

>"Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.”

>"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Most business have their eyes on their bottom line, they forgot their culture, their product, and only cares about profits and revenue. It is the moment you start designing a product for your bottom line and not because you want to build a better product which may or may not be successful. ( There are plenty of flops at Apple )

The leadership, direction and strategy has to come from the Top. Which is contrary to popular belief that "execution eats strategy for breakfast". The original quote from Peter Drunker was “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but Silicon Valley and VCs in the early 10s only wants their startup to execute.

Finally, something I have suspected for long but recently became my conclusion in the past 5-6 years. Relating to the last part of the first quote

>"Have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

Or Taste. Something Silicon Valley, Tech or VC refuse to admit, and PG made a somewhat rebuttal of his past self in recent blog post.

I call these the Pepla people. Who cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola. Then there are people who can taste the difference but cant tell which one is which, and at the very top end is someone can taste the difference between Coca Cola from different part of the world and bottling technique.

There are plenty of people wearing a product person badge, but Good taste is rarely a common thing among them. It can not be accurately measured, and hence its unpopularity in Tech. You cant do A/B testing. You have to somewhat rely on your intuition.

>"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion". - Steve Jobs


“it almost calls out for returning to the 90s: walled gardens aka Compuserve experience, dedicated devices for home-banking and standalone cameras.”

Were you actually around in the 90s? The internet was not easier to use then.


Shit leadership setting wrong incentives is the reason


Because human nature is hostile and self-destructive.


What is the best way to monetize user-friendliness?


I think there is a market, and it is a lot of how disruption happens. Google was very user friendly in the beginning. Twitter too. Of course they broke that.

This might be controversial, but Apple also did it to perfection for a long time, and they still partially do, to the chagrin of all the developers in their ecosystem. But they have also succumbed to dark patterns lately too (advertisements inside the preferences app, wtf).


After regulatory constraint, this is probably the key to the problem.

Excellent question.


The only thing anyone who controls websites cares about is profit. Nothing other than money matters in our capitalistic society. No human virtue. No social virtue. Nothing beyond money.

As some have said here, the dark patterns are thought to produce better results. Those results are profits and nothing else. Negative consequences that do not reduce profit are never considered.

Until we change to a social compact based on something more kind than the love of money, we will see nothing but evil.


donotreply@... emails, anyone?


>Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules

What would replace those?

Abusive/Maniac users are the problem too


Monopolies.


Greed


$$$


My perspective as someone running a small content website:

* Most users are freeloaders. Some websites are fine with offending those users to get more paying users.

* Blogspam works well enough. Few writers have the patience to do in-depth research on vacuum cleaners, so most content is poorly written or plagiarised from a better source. Most content is written by copywriters to rank a website on Google, not to spread good information.

* Stats are valuable, or at least perceived as such. This calls for tracking, and thus for somewhat compliant cookie banners. The person or department who is responsible for tracking things will necessarily want more tracking to occur.

* There is a financial incentive to recommend specific products with high commissions. It's hard to ignore how much money you're not making because of your honesty.




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