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The trends that Google has spearheaded have had a real effect on me over the years. I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. If I rea

The trends that Google has spearheaded have had a real effect on me over the years. I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. If I really dig I might be able to find out why, but I don't have the time, so I just accept it. Usually very small things that are barely noticeable. My Chromecast extension disappeared and was integrated into the browser. My brain could not help but notice this benign change, which caused a hard to place sense of unease. Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all. It has made me not trust my computer. I second guess myself much more. If some option no longer exists, I wonder if it was just my imagination or if it was quietly deprecated while I wasn't looking. Does it even matter? I think that we are being trained to see devices as ephemeral, and not to get too attached to them.

cortesoft 7y ago
You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast. For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something. So companies decided to make their software have fewer options, and do more things automatically, without asking the user to have to make a choice. They don't give the users an option to customize, so they don't have to worry about those customizations causing breakage. For advanced users this is crippling, but there are a lot more of them than there are of us, so they are going to be catered to.
- yesco 7y ago
  Ironically despite there being less choices in an effort to make it easier for that "90%", the amount of tech support friends and family request from me has only increased in the past years. Personally I don't buy the whole "removing choices to stop users from hurting themselves" excuse. To me it seems like over zealous designers trimming far more than necessary to make things look nicer at the cost of usability. But what do I know?
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Regarding the increase, I would argue that is less about increased device complexity but more about the increase in the amount of people who are using these devices on a daily basis. More they use, the more problems they encounter; I think the intersection between complexity and usage is determined moreso by the latter.
    - nvrspyx 7y ago
      I doubt the number of people using smartphones and computers has increased significantly in developed/first-world countries, especially when it comes to one’s family and friends. As anecdotal as it may be, my friends and family have used computers and smartphones for years, but I’ve experienced the same increase in requests for tech support as the parent comment. Further, no one said there’s increased complexity. The argument is that the oversimplification, the removal of features, and overzealous design assumptions have made UX go in the wrong direction. It’s also an argument I agree with. A lot of UX design today fails to recognize the spectrum of “tech literacy” and it should, ideally, accommodate all within that spectrum, rather than pander to the least “tech literate” end. It’s not always possible, but it should be strived towards. Instead, we have UX trending towards attempting to be so “intuitive” that it becomes counterproductive.
      - apostacy 7y ago
        I had an interesting incident recently, where I was with some relatives and we were trying to plan the next leg of our trip; what restaurants to go to and what directions to take, etc. Anyway, we had to start using a paper notepad and pens to keep track of the information! Even for people who just want to paste an address from a text message to look up in maps, and especially if you want to do anything with the calendar. I just remember 15 years ago on my Treo 650 never needing to do that, and having no problem copying text between different apps seamlessly, between calendar, email, text, maps, and other apps. Same with Blackberry. Using modern Android is as awkward as driving a car with a mouse. But I think there was an intentional push to minimize options for users, to make fewer pathways for things to go wrong. Forcing people to use pen and paper when they have a smartphone next to them is a UX success for them, because they don't have to improve handling text.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  > You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast. This is a weird claim here because this issue only appears if you made a conscious decision to disable a critical security of the operating system, something only possible because you have "options and user control in modern software".
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    That this conversation arose within this context is somewhat ironic, but not particularly weird. It’s great that Apple lets you disable SIP in macOS. It’s not great that Google frequently takes away user control. Different companies making different decisions in different situations is not contradictory, and outliers do not discount an overall trend.
- apostacy 7y ago
  > For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something. I have stubbornly resisted it, but I think I will go the way of all of my friends and just accept it soon. I now spend more time doing personal system administration than at any time in my life as a computer user. If you want to have control of your computing devices, you need to spend more time than in the age of five in floppy disks. Most updates are a one way trip now, and they aren't keep on publishing exactly what features they have removed, so a lot of time is spent disabling updates, firewalling, researching, jailbreaking, imaging, and backing up. My biggest liability now is not malware, but updates! I have to put all of my development toolchains in virtual machines, because they will break and I can not rely on being able to re-create them. Re-creating my modest workflow is a bi-annual affair, when it really shouldn't be. And there has been a cultural change in software development as well. Software like Firefox will clobber your data during an update, and when you file a bug report, it will be WONTFIX, and they will say that it is your fault for not using Time Machine and rolling back their changes. They did this awhile back with bookmarks, and they certainly do it with extensions. I had to spend an entire afternoon recovering annotations and citations that were destroyed by a Firefox update, and I was told it was essentially my fault for trusting Firefox and not having hourly backups. I hate to sound like a broken record, but there was a time when you could reasonably assume that if an update was making major changes, that it would give you the option to go back, or at least export your data if it didn't support it. I really wish the open source community would step up and be different, instead of embracing this.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  I think these "lower the ceiling rather than raise the floor" rationales are cop-outs. Yes, I get it, this reasoning does technically provide a justification for the design decisions made that will shut some people up. But that doesn't make the product or design decisions anything to be proud of. And, to take it a step further, I don't think UX is putting in honest effort to improve things for unskilled users. All the low barrier to entry stuff is superficially pleasant, but the number of common UI paradigms end users have to learn how to intuit their way around has exploded, while affordances and discoverability have plummeted. People who've spent their dayjobs in front of computers for years - if not decades - are assumed to categorically have bad, less-than-worthless, ideas about what might make interacting with those devices easier. All because "shut up, nerds. Nobody would ever like the things you like" was easier than listening and figuring out the how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
climb_stealth 7y ago
That is one thing I really appreciate about running lineageOS on Android. You can see every single code change that makes it into a given update [0]. [0] for example https://download.lineageos.org/beryllium/changes/ https://download.lineageos.org/beryllium/changes/
ratww 7y ago
I share your pain. Some time last week Youtube removed the publication date from videos. Apparently they restored it today. For a while it was super strange and I had to rely on comments to guess when the video was posted.
- hans1729 7y ago
  This was way more than a week ago, I remember installing an extension for exactly this months ago. Then it came back, then it disappeared again [...] - this might be betatesting though.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    I can’t speak authoritatively about this specific instance, but I use multiple unlinked google products across multiple devices and they absolutely split test UI changes. It can be fairly nefarious on the advertiser/publisher side of things if you actually understand what their attempting to do. It’s really too bad, because Google traded their pristine reputation for possibly a slight boost in their near term earnings.
- pishpash 7y ago
  You have to make the window larger (than "mobile-sized") to see it.
dantondwa 7y ago
I feel the same. That's why I appreciate a lot Free Software and I try to never have essential parts of my workflow depend on proprietary software; because it doesn't change condtantly, it doesn't run away from me, it is always available. It really takes a lot of stress away. If only I could replace every tool with a free alternative...
0xdeadb00f 7y ago
> It has made me not trust my computer. I second guess myself much more. If some option no longer exists, I wonder if it was just my imagination or if it was quietly deprecated while I wasn't looking. Does it even matter? Reminds me of 1984.
- apostacy 7y ago
  It's fascinating, because whatever thing was silently deprecated, there will be hoards of defenders in comments insisting that the thing never existed, and it was just your imagination. Even on sites like Stackoverflow! Part of this is because release notes no longer most things removed (they are just covered under "other interface enhancements"). I did track down the home screen rotation change but it was very obscure. In one thread a user had to post actual video of two different Nexus One devices and prove that the update removed landscape homescreen mode. This is the world we live in, where this is a massive cloud of uncertainty over what our devices are even capable of doing!
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  A software changing some minor feature reminds you of a world-wide plunge into fascist dystopia?
fishnchips 7y ago
My wife stopped using Android for that very reason. She’s not much into tech and complained that every time Android updates to a new major version, she needs to learn it from scratch, while iOS changes are noticeable but rarely touch user interaction fundamentals.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I am into tech and I stopped using Android for the same reason. UX is what keeps or alienates users.
- inapis 7y ago
  My mother had that exact same experience with her Nexus 5x. Things kept on shuffling every 6 months. Ever since I’ve got her on iOS, she’s been happy and I’ve been happy. I don’t even have to ask her to update to the latest iOS. She does it automatically and generally is able to find her way through. Never so on Android. Apple wins in that regard - stability, consistency and reliability in daily use. It’s boring in a way for tech enthusiasts but wins in the eyes of people for whom their phone is just another tool which needs to work when they need it. They’ve no inclination to fiddle around with things nor a desire for a changing UI.
pishpash 7y ago
History observers will know that Google started the forced auto-update and permanent beta culture. "We know better than users". When all is said and done, Google can die off or fail as a business, but this and persistent data collection as a norm will remain its most lasting "contributions".
- Crinus 7y ago
  I absolutely hate auto-updates on anything. Of course this is always met with "but security issues..." YOU BROUGHT SECURITY ISSUES BY MAKING EVERYTHING NETWORKED AND IN A PERPETUALLY UNFINISHED STATE!!! And of course since everything is in a constantly broken state, it is also in a need of constant auto-updates that both break and unnecessarily change stuff without my knowledge or permission.
jraph 7y ago
> Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all. For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen. I've always assumed they know what they are doing (Android UX seems quite good, despite what my three years younger self would think), but I don't get this. Is it because you can mess up your home screen by adding or moving icons when rotated?
- apostacy 7y ago
  > For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen. I think it is either because iOS doesn't rotate the home screen on phones, or because they introduced this simplified car interface that did rotate, and they wanted to differentiate. But like so many design choices, it was not due to technical reasons, but marketing or political reasons. It's funny, when I used Windows 10 for the first time recently, Ubuntu's unintuitive lock screen finally made sense, since they copied it. Whenever open source software starts doing something strange with their interface, I only have to look at proprietary software to see what interface they cargo-culted, going back to Pidgin copying iChat. I would love to see the discussions where they make these decisions. I imagine someone bursting into a meeting "You guys, Microsoft did a thing with their interface, we have to put everything else on hold to copy them!"
- disjhshava 7y ago
  When I used versions of android with home screen roatation, I remember it would completely jack up most of my widgets. They were designed to be displayed at some aspect ratio and that aspect ratio would change after rotation. Maybe they got rid of the feature because it wasn't worth it to herd developers of widgets into fixing this issue.
Crontab 7y ago
> I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. I sometimes feel like companies have used the guise of "protecting novice users" as a means to take away our freedoms and increase their power (e.g. Google forcing updates on Chrome; Microsoft forcing updates and telemetry on Windows; Apple prohibiting non-app store applications and iOS downgrades). Of course, Linux and BSD exist, but many people don't want to deal with them. The whole situation is just depressing to me.
donalhunt 7y ago
Re: chromecast extension: https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/7249696 https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/7249696 This actually bugged me a lot (I cast into meetings quite a bit) and your comment made me go find a solution... Turns out it's super easy!

cortesoft 7y ago

You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast. For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something. So companies decided to make their software have fewer options, and do more things automatically, without asking the user to have to make a choice. They don't give the users an option to customize, so they don't have to worry about those customizations causing breakage. For advanced users this is crippling, but there are a lot more of them than there are of us, so they are going to be catered to.

yesco 7y ago
Ironically despite there being less choices in an effort to make it easier for that "90%", the amount of tech support friends and family request from me has only increased in the past years. Personally I don't buy the whole "removing choices to stop users from hurting themselves" excuse. To me it seems like over zealous designers trimming far more than necessary to make things look nicer at the cost of usability. But what do I know?
- grenoire 7y ago
  Regarding the increase, I would argue that is less about increased device complexity but more about the increase in the amount of people who are using these devices on a daily basis. More they use, the more problems they encounter; I think the intersection between complexity and usage is determined moreso by the latter.
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    I doubt the number of people using smartphones and computers has increased significantly in developed/first-world countries, especially when it comes to one’s family and friends. As anecdotal as it may be, my friends and family have used computers and smartphones for years, but I’ve experienced the same increase in requests for tech support as the parent comment. Further, no one said there’s increased complexity. The argument is that the oversimplification, the removal of features, and overzealous design assumptions have made UX go in the wrong direction. It’s also an argument I agree with. A lot of UX design today fails to recognize the spectrum of “tech literacy” and it should, ideally, accommodate all within that spectrum, rather than pander to the least “tech literate” end. It’s not always possible, but it should be strived towards. Instead, we have UX trending towards attempting to be so “intuitive” that it becomes counterproductive.
    - apostacy 7y ago
      I had an interesting incident recently, where I was with some relatives and we were trying to plan the next leg of our trip; what restaurants to go to and what directions to take, etc. Anyway, we had to start using a paper notepad and pens to keep track of the information! Even for people who just want to paste an address from a text message to look up in maps, and especially if you want to do anything with the calendar. I just remember 15 years ago on my Treo 650 never needing to do that, and having no problem copying text between different apps seamlessly, between calendar, email, text, maps, and other apps. Same with Blackberry. Using modern Android is as awkward as driving a car with a mouse. But I think there was an intentional push to minimize options for users, to make fewer pathways for things to go wrong. Forcing people to use pen and paper when they have a smartphone next to them is a UX success for them, because they don't have to improve handling text.
madeofpalk 7y ago
> You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast. This is a weird claim here because this issue only appears if you made a conscious decision to disable a critical security of the operating system, something only possible because you have "options and user control in modern software".
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  That this conversation arose within this context is somewhat ironic, but not particularly weird. It’s great that Apple lets you disable SIP in macOS. It’s not great that Google frequently takes away user control. Different companies making different decisions in different situations is not contradictory, and outliers do not discount an overall trend.
apostacy 7y ago
> For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something. I have stubbornly resisted it, but I think I will go the way of all of my friends and just accept it soon. I now spend more time doing personal system administration than at any time in my life as a computer user. If you want to have control of your computing devices, you need to spend more time than in the age of five in floppy disks. Most updates are a one way trip now, and they aren't keep on publishing exactly what features they have removed, so a lot of time is spent disabling updates, firewalling, researching, jailbreaking, imaging, and backing up. My biggest liability now is not malware, but updates! I have to put all of my development toolchains in virtual machines, because they will break and I can not rely on being able to re-create them. Re-creating my modest workflow is a bi-annual affair, when it really shouldn't be. And there has been a cultural change in software development as well. Software like Firefox will clobber your data during an update, and when you file a bug report, it will be WONTFIX, and they will say that it is your fault for not using Time Machine and rolling back their changes. They did this awhile back with bookmarks, and they certainly do it with extensions. I had to spend an entire afternoon recovering annotations and citations that were destroyed by a Firefox update, and I was told it was essentially my fault for trusting Firefox and not having hourly backups. I hate to sound like a broken record, but there was a time when you could reasonably assume that if an update was making major changes, that it would give you the option to go back, or at least export your data if it didn't support it. I really wish the open source community would step up and be different, instead of embracing this.
forgottenpass 7y ago
I think these "lower the ceiling rather than raise the floor" rationales are cop-outs. Yes, I get it, this reasoning does technically provide a justification for the design decisions made that will shut some people up. But that doesn't make the product or design decisions anything to be proud of. And, to take it a step further, I don't think UX is putting in honest effort to improve things for unskilled users. All the low barrier to entry stuff is superficially pleasant, but the number of common UI paradigms end users have to learn how to intuit their way around has exploded, while affordances and discoverability have plummeted. People who've spent their dayjobs in front of computers for years - if not decades - are assumed to categorically have bad, less-than-worthless, ideas about what might make interacting with those devices easier. All because "shut up, nerds. Nobody would ever like the things you like" was easier than listening and figuring out the how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

climb_stealth 7y ago

That is one thing I really appreciate about running lineageOS on Android. You can see every single code change that makes it into a given update [0]. [0] for example https://download.lineageos.org/beryllium/changes/ https://download.lineageos.org/beryllium/changes/

ratww 7y ago

I share your pain. Some time last week Youtube removed the publication date from videos. Apparently they restored it today. For a while it was super strange and I had to rely on comments to guess when the video was posted.

hans1729 7y ago
This was way more than a week ago, I remember installing an extension for exactly this months ago. Then it came back, then it disappeared again [...] - this might be betatesting though.
- AJ007 7y ago
  I can’t speak authoritatively about this specific instance, but I use multiple unlinked google products across multiple devices and they absolutely split test UI changes. It can be fairly nefarious on the advertiser/publisher side of things if you actually understand what their attempting to do. It’s really too bad, because Google traded their pristine reputation for possibly a slight boost in their near term earnings.
pishpash 7y ago
You have to make the window larger (than "mobile-sized") to see it.

dantondwa 7y ago

I feel the same. That's why I appreciate a lot Free Software and I try to never have essential parts of my workflow depend on proprietary software; because it doesn't change condtantly, it doesn't run away from me, it is always available. It really takes a lot of stress away. If only I could replace every tool with a free alternative...

0xdeadb00f 7y ago

> It has made me not trust my computer. I second guess myself much more. If some option no longer exists, I wonder if it was just my imagination or if it was quietly deprecated while I wasn't looking. Does it even matter? Reminds me of 1984.

apostacy 7y ago
It's fascinating, because whatever thing was silently deprecated, there will be hoards of defenders in comments insisting that the thing never existed, and it was just your imagination. Even on sites like Stackoverflow! Part of this is because release notes no longer most things removed (they are just covered under "other interface enhancements"). I did track down the home screen rotation change but it was very obscure. In one thread a user had to post actual video of two different Nexus One devices and prove that the update removed landscape homescreen mode. This is the world we live in, where this is a massive cloud of uncertainty over what our devices are even capable of doing!
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
A software changing some minor feature reminds you of a world-wide plunge into fascist dystopia?

fishnchips 7y ago

My wife stopped using Android for that very reason. She’s not much into tech and complained that every time Android updates to a new major version, she needs to learn it from scratch, while iOS changes are noticeable but rarely touch user interaction fundamentals.

StreamBright 7y ago
I am into tech and I stopped using Android for the same reason. UX is what keeps or alienates users.
inapis 7y ago
My mother had that exact same experience with her Nexus 5x. Things kept on shuffling every 6 months. Ever since I’ve got her on iOS, she’s been happy and I’ve been happy. I don’t even have to ask her to update to the latest iOS. She does it automatically and generally is able to find her way through. Never so on Android. Apple wins in that regard - stability, consistency and reliability in daily use. It’s boring in a way for tech enthusiasts but wins in the eyes of people for whom their phone is just another tool which needs to work when they need it. They’ve no inclination to fiddle around with things nor a desire for a changing UI.

pishpash 7y ago

History observers will know that Google started the forced auto-update and permanent beta culture. "We know better than users". When all is said and done, Google can die off or fail as a business, but this and persistent data collection as a norm will remain its most lasting "contributions".

Crinus 7y ago
I absolutely hate auto-updates on anything. Of course this is always met with "but security issues..." YOU BROUGHT SECURITY ISSUES BY MAKING EVERYTHING NETWORKED AND IN A PERPETUALLY UNFINISHED STATE!!! And of course since everything is in a constantly broken state, it is also in a need of constant auto-updates that both break and unnecessarily change stuff without my knowledge or permission.

jraph 7y ago

> Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all. For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen. I've always assumed they know what they are doing (Android UX seems quite good, despite what my three years younger self would think), but I don't get this. Is it because you can mess up your home screen by adding or moving icons when rotated?

apostacy 7y ago
> For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen. I think it is either because iOS doesn't rotate the home screen on phones, or because they introduced this simplified car interface that did rotate, and they wanted to differentiate. But like so many design choices, it was not due to technical reasons, but marketing or political reasons. It's funny, when I used Windows 10 for the first time recently, Ubuntu's unintuitive lock screen finally made sense, since they copied it. Whenever open source software starts doing something strange with their interface, I only have to look at proprietary software to see what interface they cargo-culted, going back to Pidgin copying iChat. I would love to see the discussions where they make these decisions. I imagine someone bursting into a meeting "You guys, Microsoft did a thing with their interface, we have to put everything else on hold to copy them!"
disjhshava 7y ago
When I used versions of android with home screen roatation, I remember it would completely jack up most of my widgets. They were designed to be displayed at some aspect ratio and that aspect ratio would change after rotation. Maybe they got rid of the feature because it wasn't worth it to herd developers of widgets into fixing this issue.

Crontab 7y ago

> I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. I sometimes feel like companies have used the guise of "protecting novice users" as a means to take away our freedoms and increase their power (e.g. Google forcing updates on Chrome; Microsoft forcing updates and telemetry on Windows; Apple prohibiting non-app store applications and iOS downgrades). Of course, Linux and BSD exist, but many people don't want to deal with them. The whole situation is just depressing to me.

donalhunt 7y ago

Re: chromecast extension: https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/7249696 https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/7249696 This actually bugged me a lot (I cast into meetings quite a bit) and your comment made me go find a solution... Turns out it's super easy!