24 ms·

The rise of user-hostile software

• nicbou 5y ago
  With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses. I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services), but surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience? This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to last long.
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    > I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services) This is also the case in paid services, who are not known to be more user/privacy-friendly. > This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to last long. Same here. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly harder! Fortunately the second-hand market is inundated with hardware that has proved its reliability thus far... I feel definitely more at risk when i have to buy new hardware.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience? What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer. Quite a lot of those user-hostile choices - custom apps, SaaS-ification, focus on collaboration features - are attempts to prevent the product from being a commodity. For example, I can replace my current washing machine with any other model of any other brand. Independently, I can use any brand of detergent with my machine. Both the machine and the detergent are commodity products. They mostly compete on price and marketing bullshit, which offers very limited margins. Modern tech companies desperately want to avoid being in this situation. The most common - but by far not the only - approach of ensuring you can't be easily commoditized is through network effects. Not just "I can't switch from Facebook to Diaspora because all my friends are on Facebook", but also the weaker forms: "I can't stop using Teams because everyone at work uses Teams, and we can't switch because of SharePoint integration - which also incidentally means we have to use MS Office and Windows". Or, "I can't stop using Google Docs because a bunch of non-techies I have to deal with don't know how to (or don't want to) use anything else". This is why companies fight interoperability[0] tooth and nail - breaking lock-in for users threatens breaking the weak network effects they need. -- [0] - Except "API interoperability", which isn't really proper interoperability for users, as it's governed by business contracts between API providers and API consumers.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer. Every once in a while I day dream about starting a company[0] called something like "Generic Products" where all we do is make the most basic bog-standard things with no extra garbage or marketing bullshit, striving to have as few different models as possible. Amazon basics and https://xkcd.com/993/ https://xkcd.com/993/ are similar ideas. [0] Never let me start a company, I am not suited for this job.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
        We can do a joint venture with my occasional day-dream company, which would sell appliances designed for longevity - e.g. an electric kettle or hairdryer designed to last you a 100 years. Featuring generic packaging[0], lifetime warranty, and extreme repairability - with CAD and circuit diagrams in the box, and spare parts available for as long as they can be manufactured. If any substantial change happens over the years (e.g. we change AC frequencies or switch from AC to DC mains), the company would also sell conversion kits. -- [0] - Seriously, xkcd/993 is what I dream the shopping experience to look like.
        • slfnflctd 5y ago
          If we are ever able to significantly increase human lifespans and/or birth rates decline, I wouldn't be surprised to see a business model similar to this eventually outcompete all others. Even with the brief few decades of existence we might get (if we're lucky) now, the planned obsolescence and bullshit, mind-cluttering marketing gets really old for most of us well before we're halfway through it.
        • potta_coffee 5y ago
          I share this dream. I also dream of manufacturing a single model of automobile that lives forever and never changes.
      • makeitdouble 5y ago
        You are eyeing at Muji, or dare I say IKEA. In the software world, to me Apple was that, until they gave up to become the 21st century Sony.
  • mosselman 5y ago
    I hate my brother printer. Now I have to do some weird black magic that involves pulling out the power cable and paper tray and inserting the cable while holding some buttons in order for it to even turn on. A year earlier it suddenly stopped being able to print wirelessly and, as with all cartridge printers, the ink is crazy expensive. A month ago I bought an HP printer with an ink reservoir for my mother and it is great. You don't need apps to print and printing costs nothing compared to traditional printing. It comes with ink for about 10k pages and new ink costs around 10 euros. The best in class for ink-tank printers are supposedly Epson and instead of buying new ink for my own printer, I'll probably just buy one of those.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      Or just buy a laser printer and never have the issue again?
      • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        Better yet: get rid of all printers. Stop printing. I haven’t needed to print anything in the past 28 months. When I do need to print something it’s a 5 minute walk to the town library where I can print 100 sheets for free every month.
        • rlonstein 5y ago
          If your life aligns with it, great (I also like that you're using the public library, I'm on my local library board and we also have b/w and color printer/copiers for patrons)! To reduce my printing and improve my own convenience, I replaced my failing twelve year old Brother laser with a Brother laser multifunction. Now when I deal with paperwork for my accountant, lawyer, bank, etc. I scan and send them a PDF. I made a scan of my signature and apply it as needed. With a few exceptions this has been acceptable. The kitchen chromebook is still no substitute for printing out recipes, though :)
        • kayodelycaon 5y ago
          Some of us have use cases where this won’t work. :) I happen to like my photo printer. Ordering a hundred 13x19 prints would cost more than all that I spent on the printer, ink, and paper. I still use my ten-year-old laser printer several times per month. Usually for RPG character sheets or paper copies of notes. Sometimes I’ll print out a story I’m beta reading. If I need a printout at 7pm on a Monday, the library isn’t open. I have gone digital with a lot of things, for instance: all of my handwritten notes go on a reMarkable 2 now.
  • FranksTV 5y ago
    Printer companies make money band over fist. It's a razors-and-blades recurring revenue model.
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      I suspect one printer company is making money hand over fist. The rest look pretty sickly to me. They are all desperately trying to shift to services in an attempt to shore up their profits.
  • II2II 5y ago
    > With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses. Why does a company need an end game? That implies there are winners and losers, with the winner taking all. Shouldn't we be striving for a more diverse business environment, where there is credible competition to help keep the actions of businesses in check? Wouldn't this be a healthier environment for businesses as well, since they could focus upon long term sustainability?
    • burnished 5y ago
      Well, two thoughts. 1) long term sustainability matters more to stakeholders than it does to shareholders 2) you need an endgame because its compete or get out-competed, so a company that had better, more consumer focused practices holistically might close after a rough patch, leaving more competitively fit companies behind. Tragedy of the commons. Its why we need government that isn't business controlled, to care for the common good and help steer against problems where local incentives drive everyone to a stable but sort of terrible state.
  • lasereyes136 5y ago
    > I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses. The end game is often an annual bonus for a decision maker at the business that doesn't think they will be there in 2 years when there might be fallout. The incentive is short term gain for me, I wouldn't be here in the long run so whey should I care about the long run.
• southerntofu 5y ago
  Would be nice to have more communities dedicated to bloat-free, user-respecting UX... that are not complete pro-hitler neonazis like the suckless clique. I'm all ears for links and suggestions!
  • dekken_ 5y ago
    > pro-hitler neonazis hyperbole?
    • southerntofu 5y ago
      See my other comment where i dug very briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312725
    • baal80spam 5y ago
      Wow, it seems the discussion hit the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law really quick.
      • southerntofu 5y ago
        That's unrelated. Godwin's law state that you would call someone you disagree with a nazi in order to discredit them. In this case, i agree with the suckless arguments, but i'm considering serious evidence that key contributors to the suckless community are actual neonazis, and that the community at large seems ok with it because they claim to be non-political (see other comments).
        • pcdoodle 5y ago
          Whatever, Racist
  • raspyberr 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_4g2lqi https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_4g2lqi
• mikro2nd 5y ago
  I do think the flowchart needs one more diamond (if-statement): Between "Would any user benefit from this?" and "Build it" there's another state. "Would other users be harmed/disadvantaged by this?" (and draw the obvious lines out of that...)
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    "Would some users benefit from it?" -> build it and allow them to opt in if they like it.
• AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  Aaand if you follow the steps on the flow chart, your product will immediately be dead, forgotten; replaced by some competitor's product who, while being likely technically inferior to your product, did not hesitate to do all these types of shady things in order to gain that bit of extra market share. "Natural selection" at work. Sad, of course.
• flyinghamster 5y ago
  Hear, hear! My disillusionment with tech is at full boil at this point. It's gotten to the point where I trust tech products about as much as I'd trust a wild chimpanzee. Unfortunately, one person boycotting hostile tech is like one person trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    > one person boycotting hostile tech So I don't try to boycott; I assume I'm an outlier, and my choices won't make much difference to the supplier. I just stay away from stuff I don't like or disapprove of. Of course, I hope that others -ercing the supplier is a path to unhappiness.will share my views, and that the supplier will notice and change; but it doesn't usually seem to happen. But I'm not upset. I'm just exercising my preferences. Trying to use your preferences as a way of proving a point or coerce the supplier is a path to unhappiness. Exercise your preferences, and be happy that your preferences are satisfied. If your supplier receives a signal, so much the better - but that's the cherry on the cake.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    I don't boycott, I try to check out whenever I can. I've been running a libre stack on my desktop computer for over a decade.
• JimDabell 5y ago
  Almost all of the examples listed are in relation to hardware. As far as I can see, hardware vendors see software as a cost centre and at best don’t care about quality and more often than not try to make up for the cost by bundling crapware with the drivers. General purpose application software is leagues beyond the crap that hardware vendors pull off.
  • can16358p 5y ago
    Well, I'd want to see it only be hardware but sadly it's also common in software-only too: Adobe applications being extremely slow/inefficient/buggy (not even mentioning the creative cloud app which insists on working in BG even if no Adobe apps are open), want a monthly fee, or Microsoft bloating its own OSes UI with ad of its own services are just a few examples.
• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole software category was called by various pejorative names - "adware", "spyware", "malware". There was a whole ecosystem of tools and tricks to get rid of them, as well as preventing them from being installed in the first place. Something weird happened over the past decade. We find ourselves in times where most mainstream software from renowned companies should be, by the standards of the toolbar era, classified as malware.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    Precisely. The fact that most software these days can be called "spyware" and "adware" is very unsettling from the perspective of someone who got into computing at around the time of Windows 98.
  • zksmk 5y ago
    >Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do whatever they wanted with the user experience without repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into desktop apps or even Windows, and people just accepted it. What I think could reverse the user hostility trend would be competition which would require breaking the oligopolies/network effect which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible. And of course there are limits to how far they can degrade the user experience without starting to lose users so I don't think it can be a lot worse than now, but still we're stuck with the status quo.
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  Ultimately, a developer's or a company's objective is not to provide good software, but to succeed financially (or in some other metric). This is somewhat aligned with the user's needs - if a user wants a calculator app, it should do arithmetics. But beyond that, The Dev is not a benevolent entity, and users are a means to an end. It doesn't have to be cynical and exploitative, but when push comes to shove, The Dev will act in their own interest and not that of the users. Maybe sad, but really that's how everything works. Are energy companies interested in a world with plentiful green energy? No, they want to make money and pay dividends.
  • kevincox 5y ago
    Of course there are other motives. For most Free Software the motive is "Make something that is good for me." Still not optimal for other users but closer aligned.
    • rich_sasha 5y ago
      Sort of. As much as I like Linux, I don’t use it on my own kit. Linux is made for tinkerers, or people who know it’s internals well. For me Linux is always slightly broken. I guess that’s because the devs building it don’t care that much about 100% seamless work on all hardware; 95% is good enough. But that remaining 5% means I just can’t use it. By contrast, Mac is a non-free, limited walled garden (prison?), but doesn’t need the trackpad be debugged or kernel recompiled. So here, libre devs’ work is less aligned with my needs than the commercial operation, whose key selling point is seamless UX. (Not complaining, just saying)
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  This flowchart is true for many things... even webpages: How many users actually wanted to subrscribe to your newsletter the first time they visited your page, before they even read the first article there? How many first-time visitors actually want to donate money? ...
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    How many users want to have to have the inconvenience of paying for the software too!
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      If you want users to pay for your software, put a price on it, and stop pretending it's free. Nagging pop-ups -> Close tab.
    • thewebcount 5y ago
      I do. I would much rather pay than see ads or be required to give up personal information. I can understand that not everyone wants that, but I do. I also have been very disappointed with usability of FOSS to the point that I rarely consider using it anymore. So yeah, I'm happy to pay (once per version I actually use).
  • city41 5y ago
    I don't understand this. I visit a site I've never been to before and immediately a popup takes over along these lines. Do those really convert? I can't imagine they do, but they are also everywhere so they must be effective to some degree? I feel like The Guardian's approach is better, after a while they bring up a banner down at the bottom that says (paraphrased) "hey you've read x articles, we want to stay independent, can you help us?"
    • thewebcount 5y ago
      > they are also everywhere so they must be effective to some degree? I wouldn't assume that. I would bet most people enter a fake email address just to make the thing go away because they don't know you can just close most of them, or don't realize the passive aggressive "No I don't want great deals sent to my inbox every day because I hate great deals" text link is a button they can press to dismiss the dialog because they don't read it and it intentionally doesn't look like a button to discourage users from pressing (or reading) it.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  > At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with Google Analytics. Don’t want to send it? Have your browser send a Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work. How is this consistent with the message to not be hostile?
  • dend 5y ago
    OP here. You have an explicit option to opt out, no gimmicks.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Is this default ON designed for the users needs? Or the developers?
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      Few sites respect Do Not Track. Some even use it for tracking. So you force people to opt in to other tracking to opt out of yours.
• anovikov 5y ago
  Natural selection will quickly weed out everyone who tries to follow the suggested path. Simply due to cost of traffic becoming lower than revenue.
  • dvdkon 5y ago
    Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect example of why some things shouldn't be services, just plain old downloadable software.
    • AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally working and probably much more featureful calculator app. People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in this www query would be able to do hundreds of these simple multiplications _per nanosecond_. But no, people query google.
      • merpnderp 5y ago
        Convenience. You can google the answer faster than your calculator app can even open.
        • AshamedCaptain 5y ago
          If this was true for _any_ platform I would immediately throw it away. But the point is that there is, for some reason, a pressure for platforms to be this way; convenience is not the cause.
          • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
            Unfortunately it is true for almost any platform I've tried. Calculator applications have become as bloated as everything else.
• greatgib 5y ago
  This article is globally so true, but there is a major error: It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Like for telemetry, most of the time the business side "can", so they do. And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain and not like release such user-hostile software but they are forced by business to do it. Like this stupid project manager that thinks that his product/software is the most important in the world and there is no reason why a random user would not want to install it and also that the user computer belongs to him and to the company because he is using the product, without shame.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.
    • vbezhenar 5y ago
      What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks. And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.
      • loup-vaillant 5y ago
        How slim can you really be when your stack bundles an entire web browser so you can push pixels on the screen? Focusing on performance probably requires running away from such bloat. Remember: 25 years ago we were able to write relatively fast GUI applications. They may have gotten prettier, fancier, and screens have definitely grown larger. Still, computers are now much faster. And with M2 drives, starting a word processor or a drawing application should be instantaneous. Yet somehow it isn't. You're right, the main problem is the lack of focus on performance. Here's the thing though: if we did focus on performance, we wouldn't have tolerated such bloated stacks in the first place.
• jerome-jh 5y ago
  I wish the article would be a little more documented, however matching its definition of hostile SW those two examples come to my mind: - Origin, the game distribution system of EA, forgets the user's credential if she declines to upgrade - at work, a piece of software contracted from a well known three-letter German multinational always warns the user she may lose unsaved work when quitting, no matter she just clicked "save" a second ago.
• tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I suspect this is mostly driven by the economics of the software business. The cost of software is driven by fixed upfront costs. The marginal cost is now pretty close to zero. This means that unless you have some kind of lock in like Photoshop or Office then competitive pressures are going to drive your prices down towards zero. If you can't make any money selling your product then you will start looking elsewhere. That will include transactions that are against your customers interest like selling their profile to advertisers.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. MTP exists, Windows and Linux can use it... but OS X still doesn't have a native MTP client.
  • flyinghamster 5y ago
    Vendor lock-in absolutely figures into a hell of a lot of user-hostile tech. Even before Apple went full spyware, I refused to buy iThings on principle, just due to Apple's abuse of its customers and developers (ever-changing connectors, unrepairability, needing to get Apple's blessing, revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for them, etc.). Android is very far from perfect, but for now it's at least still usable, except that manufacturers have decided to follow Apple's lead on unrepairability. But at this point I'm preparing myself to do without, as I'm not optimistic about the future of smartphones. I was a holdout for a long time anyway, and the whole "Install our app! <small>which, by the way, also sucks down your contact list and mines cryptocoins</small>" thing has gotten out of hand.
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      > ever-changing connectors iDevices have had only two connectors over their life time - the bulky 30-pin lasted thirteen years (2001-2014), and the Lighting connector from 2014 to this day. The iPad Pro has USB-C, so I won't complain there. Macs also have only used standard connectors since the Intel era. > revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for them You don't need a paid certificate to write software for your own Mac/iDevices, you don't even need Xcode to create software for Macs (as evidenced by Homebrew/Macports). Fully agree with you on the rest, though.
• holri 5y ago
  Just use free software. Stallman was right.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Unfortunately: - A lot of free software either sucks or is entirely non-existent for many use cases - Free software is not entirely immune to this behavior either
    • thefr0g 5y ago
      The point is that with FLOSS you can fix both of these problems yourself.
      • joshuaissac 5y ago
        That is not the case for any software that is not trivial. Recompiling to remove ads from a free program may be achievable but something like adding the missing support for Excel VBA into LibreOffice Calc is beyond the capability of almost all users.
        • holri 5y ago
          You can also pay competent developers to add it: https://libreoffice.cib.de/ https://libreoffice.cib.de/ Even easier if almost all users unite in crowdfunding.
    • holri 5y ago
      I prefer to not use a feature instead of using a hostile one. In my more than 20 years of journey in the free software world, I never came across a user hostile free software. This is in stark contrast to proprietary software I tried.
  • thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    "Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the users": https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57 https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• literallyaduck 5y ago
  “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford If you have the users design a car you end up with a Homer bubble car. A better strategy is don't be an asshole. You know telemetry on by default is wrong. Putting sane defaults that the users must opt in instead of opt out is right. No one wants to make an account for your product, other login choices are usually available, but don't force it if you don't need it.
  • thewebcount 5y ago
    The author didn't say, "Let the user design the software." They said, "Would the user benefit from this feature?" That's a big difference.
• kstenerud 5y ago
  You'll notice that all of his examples of user-hostile software lack a universally accepted standard. This is not new. Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No - everyone follows the standard, so your OS just knows how to hook up your headset. With USB it's different, because the standards are insufficient for the gadgets that we use, resulting in specialized software for your extra buttons, light shows, sensitivity, etc. Two prime older examples are graphics cards and printers. There has never been a driver standard for either that was universally accepted (after VGA and VESA local bus), and so the only alternative is bespoke software. Remember when game controllers needed specialized drivers (Sound Blaster)? I do. And it's not like this is limited to software either. There are plenty of standards and lack-of-standards in construction, automotive, even electrical in some cases. One of the most expensive explosions in history was the result of a mismatch between metric and imperial measures. Want to get away from this nightmare of custom-implementations-for-everything? Push for sane and comprehensive standards.
  • danuker 5y ago
    > everyone follows the standard Try sharing a file via Bluetooth between an Apple and an Android device.
    • thefr0g 5y ago
      So everyone except Apple?
  • stronglikedan 5y ago
    > Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No Logitech and Samsung would like a word...
    • l0b0 5y ago
      Oh? The Logitech G613 Bluetooth keyboard and M510 Bluetooth mouse were plug and play on Windows, Arch Linux and NixOS. Back in the day, sure, but I don't think custom drivers are much needed for anything but GPUs by now.
• gwbas1c 5y ago
  > Would any user benefit from this? Corporate types will just self-delude themselves to always answer "yes" to this. Recently, a telemarketer called me to sell me solar panels. Initially I thought he was calling me about my existing solar panels, so I asked, "Are you trying to sell me something, or do I already have a relationship with you." His answer, "I'm not calling to sell you something. I'm calling to tell you about the blah blah blah."
• echopom 5y ago
  Nothing new here ! The vast majority of Today's software is built by "Corporate Developers" and "Corporate Business Owner". Generally these people don't have any background in UX or UI or simply commonsense about software ergonomics. An example would be Stripe , as an Architect in Banking I've spend years explaining to Executives and Business Owner to invest in "Partner Experience" and good "Developer Ecosystem" , something they've always refused because the current model "Answer the Need" This is the same problem , the people who are building are generally not using the product, the people in charge simply don't understand the "Added Value" of making a change to the current software so it's doesn't weight "150 MB" but rather "1MB" and has "auto installer" with it , "we have always done it this way , why change ?". Add to that software legacy you end up with mess like those which are obscenely hostile piece of software.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• avnigo 5y ago
  > However, the problem is becoming much more endemic lately, with everyone on the hunt for more data, more accounts, and a level of access to a computer that would make it seem like they’re using it as a giant bullseye for everyone on the Internet. And I would argue that the main driving force for that is for selling your data to advertisers on software that is free (and sometimes paid), and maybe to increase sales on software that is paid. All this, quite possibly, at a privacy detriment to the user. I don't think the fault lies directly and singly on developers, as mentioned in the article, but many are reacting to the way the software market currently works, and attempt to gain that edge. A lot of the big-name software may also likely be designed by committee, one of which may include the marketing department, growth analytics etc.
• jasonhansel 5y ago
  The issue is that there's a reason software is so user-hostile: it increases profits for the software's developers. If we want to get better software, we need an economic system that changes the incentives. One way to get there could be to encourage widespread adoption of copyleft licenses like the GPL, which would encourage more corporations to release their software as FOSS, thus exposing them to competition from more user-friendly forks.
  • kekeblom 5y ago
    One thing that could help, but obviously would not completely solve everything is some sort of "organic" label/certification for software. Basically have someone audit the software and check that it doesn't screw the user in any way. For many categories of software, if you could sell the software as not doing any of this or other bad stuff, it would make sense to stay within the bounds of the certification. Of course some business models are fundamentally toxic and they could never not break some of the rules. I wrote about the idea here https://keke.dev/blog/2020/11/29/organic-software.html https://keke.dev/blog/2020/11/29/organic-software.html
• bo1024 5y ago
  This strikes me as extremely generous. I agree that on an individual level, developers may be just following an industry-trend path of least resistance. The trend is putting the developer first. But as a general phenomenon, it's exploitative. The goal is to capture as much of the user's time, attention, and data as possible. Sometimes I feel silly for prioritizing FOSS highly, but sometimes not. At least I don't ever put up with this kind of stuff.
• city41 5y ago
  I am using Ubuntu 20 and as far as I know I don't encounter any of these issues. If anyone is aware of user hostile things in Ubuntu, I'd love to hear it.
• TheCapn 5y ago
  I think the entire argument falls apart at the Flowchart presented: "Would any user benefit from this?" Why? Because its trivially easy to say those shitty additions help a user, satisfying the check and throwing you into "Build It" territory. Do users know how to navigate their local network to upload data to a folder? Not all of them, hook it into a cloud service. Do all users know how to download the right BIOS for their mobo and execute the update? No, make an app. Do users even know what version of OS they're on? Nope, better make something platform agnostic so electron it is! I'm not all in on FOSS, but I do try to support them when appropriate. I think that ecosystem does a decent job of giving the user control over what's happening, but that comes with the obvious drawbacks of having a higher barrier to entry. I can figure these things out, but my wife can't... my mom can't. At the same time some of the examples given live in two different realms. A calculator accessing your contacts & location is a different case than your dashcam wanting to ease the backup process. A mobo bios update is different than ads in your video driver installer. I don't pretend to offer realistic solutions. I think I'm a bit pessimistic that our hacker culture will collectively decide we need to focus on user-first features and oust malicious developers looking to exploit the tech-illiterate. I've seen it too many times on hackernews that people will justify any action because it simplifies things now. I've never favored "move fast and break things" culture and butted heads with hackers who think regulation à la engineering code of ethics is detrimental to our profession.
  • thefr0g 5y ago
    > but that comes with the obvious drawbacks of having a higher barrier to entry. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many governments even raise the barrier of entry artificially for dangerous activitys by requiring licenses or training to operate heavy machinery, handle dangerous chemicals, install electricity etc. Using technology sometimes requires knowledge about the inner workings so users will not accidentally hurt others or themselves. Imo developers shouldn't infantilize users but give them tools to work with. Of course this naturally works better with FLOSS since there (more often than not) is no monetary incentive to get absolutely everyone on to use it.
  • thinkharderdev 5y ago
    Yeah, I had a broadly similar reaction. Some of the things the author points out seem like genuine attempts to make software less user hostile by adopting solutions that "just work" across all platforms even if the users have no technical knowledge. I think a lot of engineers think of user friendly as "I can configure it any way I want" whereas for the vast majority of people user-friendly means "just do what I think it should do and don't ask me any questions I don't understand".
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers I'm not sure what he means by "developers" - the people who actually wrote the code? This didn't come from them. Or the marketing people who create the JIRA tickets that the developers are supposed to "close" 10 of every "sprint"?
  • dend 5y ago
    OP here. I should've clarified in the article. "Developers" is not meant to single out engineers. It's the collective "people who build, promote, and maintain the software"
• wilde 5y ago
  But who will pay for this software? Not the author, they’ve made that very clear. The things they’re railing against fall into two categories: 1. The OS vendor hasn’t built it into the OS. 2. Cost saving measures. One the developer has little influence over. The other is business physics.
  • dend 5y ago
    OP here. Au contraire - I am happy to pay a bit extra for software that does its job and gets out of the way. With hardware, one could argue that can be made a part of the price for the device - if I buy a "premium" component, I prefer to have a clean user experience that does not create a hole in my network to manage RGB lights.
    • wilde 5y ago
      Thanks for responding! I guess I was mainly reacting to your claim about the move to subscriptions. It costs $10/mo to make software these days. $0.33/mo (your stated price) isn’t tenable. I expect the added costs apply similarly for other portions of the supply chain. Apple hardware provides similar quality to what you’re asking for. It is 2-4x more expensive and that’s with the advantage of scale.
      • dend 5y ago
        I think this can be taken on a case-by-case basis. With software, where I am looking is a place where I can buy a "snapshot" - the current release that time and effort was invested in, that I can compensate for. That's it. I am not asking for constant updates, as I would be perfectly content with the release I bought. That is, until it can't work for my needs, and I need to buy another version. But I do understand your point and I agree - it's not a cheap effort.
        • wilde 5y ago
          This is the perennial problem with pricing. You should pay for the value you get out of the software. At a fixed price, there’s a lot less flexibility. In this case that same software might decide to charge for 3y or 5y of value. Would you balk at paying $500-$700 for perpetual use? The subscription is more efficient in the sense that the folks getting more value pay more.
• dangisanazi 5y ago
  Once again the Nazi dang allows the left to say whatever they want regardless of the rules, yet one person mentions anything about curiosity towards a central neutral idea, fuck you! Banned. What a fucking fascist website. I hope dang's family gets raped
• abraxas 5y ago
  > they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers. Oh this kind of software takes care of the needs of customers alright. Except their true customers are advertisers not users. This adification of every single item we use every day is tiresome and will hopefully lead to a wide pendulum swing in the opposite direction once consumers truly have had enough. We're not there yet but I think it's coming.
  • danuker 5y ago
    > I think it's coming Unless you make it come to yourself by boycotting adware, the fact that adware is everywhere is proof to the contrary.
• rchaud 5y ago
  Increasingly I am looking at purchasing my software, instead of using freemium or subscription services that lock you in forever. Here's what I've bought since 2019. All of the below were one-time purchases: - Affinity Designer + Publisher (Photoshop + InDesign replacement, $35 each) - Tumult Hype (Adobe Animate replacement, $100) - SimpleMind (mindmapping tool, MacOS, around $40) - Bootstrap Studio (WYSIWIG site builder, $59) - YouCut (Android video editor, $11.99 full version) - Sketch ($99 for 1 year of updates; more than enough for storyboarding and basic prototyping)
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    When I was a kid, TV came for free over the air, and the TV stations made their money selling advertisements. Then came cable TV, which you had to pay extra money for, but which included lots of ad-free stations. But after a while, cable caught on and almost everybody was paying for it, and the cable stations realized they could double-dip and not only charge you to get cable TV, but start putting ads into their previously ad-free stations. After a while, the "included" cable stations had as many ads as the old broadcast stations. I suspect that the pay software products will follow a similar route and monetize every way they can.
    • rchaud 5y ago
      It already has. Which is why it's important to highlight the remaining few iconoclasts that stick to the tried and true method of "I provide a product, you buy that product". Not rent the product as you would with Spotify, but be able to buy it permanently.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  I notice someone else mentioned that software is a zero marginal cost product. This is an element that drives the cost down to zero when there is competition. But software is more than just zero marginal cost. An additional passenger on an airplane is zero marginal cost as well, but they can still charge for a ticket because it is trivial to keep someone off of an airplane. The bigger problem with software is its a public good. I don't mean that as some kind of normative statement saying it should be or deserves to be provided free of cost to all users of a particular state. I'm saying it is non-rivalrous (some sequence of bytes copied onto person A's disk does not prevent person B from copying the same sequence of bytes onto their disk) and non-excludable (due to the nature of disks and bytes, you can't prevent a person from doing it. Not all goods that are public goods by the economic definition need to be publicly provided. Media has this same characteristic, and they solve it by: 1) Making money off of live performances or theatrical experiences rather than the content 2) Selling ads There is an analogy to selling live performances in the software world. At the company I work for, every product we make is 100% free-to-use, open source, self-hostable, doesn't require an enterprise edition to unlock features, and doesn't include any kind of user-tracking to sell ads. Instead, we sell support, and also embed developers as consultants into client organizations. This is why I currently work for the Air Force. We're monetizing the developers rather than the software, the same way rock bands monetize live performance. The only other options are to either figure out some unnatural gating mechanism to prevent people from using your software without going through a payment gate (i.e. don't open-source it and only host it on your own servers, or distribute some of the software in encrypted form only and require a paid key to unlock it, or you sell ads. In traditional media, ads were fine. They were annoying, manipulative, I don't think anyone really liked them, but some were entertaining (arguably a draw of the Super Bowl), it was always easy to avoid them, and they were entirely targeted based on context. The problem with ads in the software world isn't the ads themselves. It's that companies relying on ads to monetize are never happy with the returns you can get purely from contextual ads. You can learn so much more about a consumer's purchasing behavior and preferences by installing spyware on every device they own and logging every action they ever take, all the better when most of them don't even know you're doing it. But this is the classic Jurassic Park dilemma. All of your machine learning researchers were so preoccupied with figuring out what human behaviors they could predict given enough data that they never stopped to consider whether they should collect all that data. Market research used to be conducted on paid volunteer focus groups and paid volunteer Nielsen families. They consented to it. They knew what data you were collecting and how you would use it. But not happy with the limits of profit margin imposed on what data can be voluntarily collected from consenting research subjects, we have instead built a panopticon to turn every single person in the world into an unknowing research subject.
• stadium 5y ago
  I saw my get kid prompted to pay $59.99 usd to buy in-game achievements for the hill climb racing game on Android. That's a f-ton of money to be soliciting from anyone, yet alone a kid. He's not quite at reading age and just clicks things. The game design and characters is clearly targeting kids. In my opinion, these aren't games any more, they are gambling.
  • benatkin 5y ago
    I've played Hill Climb Racing, and it's a pretty awesome game, even for an adult. The varying gravity, and inaccurate but fun physics, and the variety, are what made it fun for me. I haven't played it in years, and after that moved on to Geometry Dash, which I see myself wanting to play in the future more than Hill Climb Racing. I've scoffed at Candy Crush, but wondered if people who play that might feel the same way I did about Hill Climb Racing. I think the price is high, but not absurd. I don't know how you'd determine the maximum price in a way that was fair to everyone.
    • stadium 5y ago
      As a parent the volume of in-game purchase advertising and scarcity tactics are anxiety inducing for both myself and my kids. Every game on every platform should have a global opt-out for in-game purchases, just like do-not-track on iOS 14.
      • majani 5y ago
        Needing a password for every in-app purchase is the default on both Android and iOS, and only the password-holder can change that setting. Many change the setting because they get annoyed by the constant typing of passwords, and that's 100% on the user if they do that and their kid ends up buying the biggest coin package in their favorite game
        • stadium 5y ago
          Yep, I have passwords enabled. I don't want to see the in-game purchase features at all. The alternative right now is, don't install the game. Used to be, you could get the ad-free version of an app for a small price, or the ad-supported version for free. I'd happily pay money for an ad-less, in-game-purchase-less version. Instead I have to teach money management and de-escalate an upset kid explaining why they can't have this amazing in-game-purchase feature that is only available for the next 30, 29, 28.. minutes else it is gone forever. It's exhausting when it's supposed to be fun.
• yawboakye 5y ago
  It is a universal and fractal problem: toolmakers make tools they don't use. They include a manual in the box because your intuition alone won't be enough to understand and use the tool (see React, especially React hooks where several blog posts later no one is finding them easy to use). The unhappy users make even more bad tools they don't use (and, mind you, the badness is exponential from one layer to the next). The first toolmaker in the chain will be a user of the final product. They'll see all the badness in the product and rage about it. But they won't see their contribution. They don't make bad tools; it's their users who refuse to MTFM (master the [scrubbed] manual), they think. The reward of doing the job is the money. Ergo, focus on what brings more of it, as patio11 advised. This is the natural destination of the "Profit Center" advise. Bad experience for the user, yes, but Excel is having a great time.
• mrweasel 5y ago
  As someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality. The developers will try to “fix” or improve their work by bolting on things like ActiveMQ, Kafka, ElasticSearch, NoSQL and everything but the kitchen sink. They rarely give production deployment much though, and if they do it’s just a bunch of people yelling Kubernetes. The sad part is that many of these problems aren’t THAT hard. I’m really facinated by the lack of quality and that no one seems to care.
  • trutannus 5y ago
    > someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality. Not just you. Developer tools are slowly decaying into disasters also. Pretty much every enterprise development tool I've used is just... lacking basic QOL features. Or the workflows are strange to the point of being counter-productive. Atlassian and Microsoft are the biggest offenders. I actually spend more time fixing things that Visual Studio messed up (ie: removing dependencies but destroying a config file in the process, deletions creating phantom files, ect) than I do actually resolving bugs I created by being asleep at the keyboard.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    Working in security and seeing these systems just bolting boxes after boxes of various things sometimes I wonder what are we doing? Is all of this really needed? And how many messages etc. did we actually need to handle? How many resources we are allocating for all this?
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• zonabey 5y ago
  I couldn't stop laughing whilst reading the entire article. The one that really got me was the Electron-based “launcher”. I had to take a break for ten minutes.
  • dend 5y ago
    OP here. Sadly a true story with a "shall not be named" software for optical media management. I just want a Win32 binary that does it's job. Instead, I had to wait 45 seconds every launch until the server "spins up" from working in the background.
• fleddr 5y ago
  This article needs a part two. It does a good job of pointing out the misalignment between user needs and organization needs, but fails to address why this misalignment exists. The flow diagram assumes the naïve situation that this is a just a matter of awareness, education, or people becoming somehow a "better" person. Whilst I don't have all answers, it's a complex problem set, allow me to speculate. When you look at the type of products discussed, say a mouse, they are low margin products. Ultra quick time to market, yearly iterations, and hardly ever built to have a long time span. That's not us though. We're "Good Corp". We do it properly. The mouse comes with a basic driver, no app needed. We do build an optional app for the lights. It's a native app, built from scratch. Smooth and fast. We build this app for 2 or 3 operating systems, natively. And we respect standards, the app can also control lights of devices from other manufacturers. Our enormous test lab tests every possible combination across operating systems and competing mouses, and will keep doing this as these underlying systems are constantly updated. Finally, we build our mouse to last, from better materials, and also design for repairability. Our good corp mouse costs 120$. The evil corp mouse costs 50$. It has the exact same features, just a lot of cutting corners, but functionality is comparable. Which mouse will customers buy? Will they recognize quality? More importantly, will they pay for it? Or will they just go for the cheapest and tolerate the annoyances, and buy another one 3 years from now? I think you know the answer. When the market does not reward quality, quality will not be delivered. There will be no magical moment where developers turn "good", they cant do good, because good is expensive, and nobody buys it.
• lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  Not sure this author actually drinks their own medicine based on this comment. One would have thought that someone who just wrote what I read would not have tracking enabled _by default_ and everything would be _opt in_. > Respect user choices. If someone doesn’t want to send telemetry (or any data for that matter), give them the option to not do it. At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with Google Analytics. Don’t want to send it? Have your browser send a Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work. "Respect user choices (unless it's my blog and I want to collect metrics)"
• loxs 5y ago
  Is there a list of ethical software somewhere? It does not need to be free in any sense, just not implement the described asshole practices.
• RealPlastic 5y ago
  My favorite is being hit with a popup asking for me to sign up for a newsletter the moment I land on a website. I don't think one single page load is enough time for me to decide I want to sign up for a newsletter.
• Applejinx 5y ago
  One word that keeps coming up in all these objectionable scenarios is 'market'. One word you never see is 'standard'. All this isn't an exception, it's the rule. If you want stuff to not be wrecked by externalities, back away from free market concepts and look towards more centralized control from whatever source. No exceptions. We could probably shift towards a sort of managed capitalism model and be just fine. It's the free market absolutism that causes this. This is what you get out of that. It's not increasing the evilness in the world, it's just that without accounting for externalities competitive pressure will always push this direction no matter what. There are no rules in 'competitive' unless you put them there. Non-free-market systems don't naturally scale, while by definition free-market systems that ignore externalities can scale to unlimited extent, for 'free'. Again, this is what you get. Figuring out how to make capitalism be managed and still scale nearly as well as free-market capitalism is just a problem, nothing more. It is only an area of possible disruption, work to be done. It's not some tautology.
  • Tothegulag 5y ago
    This is retarded tankie bullshit. Centralization has been the problem, it isn't the answer.
  • lukifer 5y ago
    I'd take it one step further: every market is a managed market, and we're only haggling over details. While you could find exceptions (local babysitting clubs using hours as currency), the vast majority of Actually Existing Markets use state currency, and state contracts, and property rights defined and enforced by the state. Markets are merely one tool in a political toolbox, and the details matter. An excellent book on the history of property rights and policy (for good and ill), and which explores the tradeoffs between different forms of "ownership design": https://www.minethebook.com/ https://www.minethebook.com/
• comeonseriously 5y ago
  Isn't this a VC/investor problem? If you make a new device, say some GPS locator for hikers, isn't their very first question going to be, "Okay, this is cool hardware, but how are you going to generate MRR from each purchase?"
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• MatthiasWandel 5y ago
  This isn't new. I was annoyed enough to write a rant about it on my website back in 2004, 17 years ago. http://www.stentex.net/~mwandel/rants/hp_scanjet_4600.html http://www.stentex.net/~mwandel/rants/hp_scanjet_4600.html
• GuB-42 5y ago
  I think it is correlated to the rise of free (as in $0) software. People don't like to pay and developers want to make money. So the strategy is to make the initial cost low, preferably zero, and then make the user pay, directly or indirectly. It is not new, we had things like shareware in the past, but now, developers have more options, and they use them, because the most "user-hostile" thing is to ask for money, especially a large up-front payment. I know some people prefer to pay, but they are a minority, and therefore, it is not the most profitable way to monetize.
  • no_time 5y ago
    This argument falls apart if you look at windows. You are (supposed to) pay for it AND you get datamined until you are dry.
• mixmastamyk 5y ago
  This piece is a great idea, but I was disappointed at the execution. New, but doesn’t mention Apple’s photo scanning. Forced Windows upgrades and telemetry mentioned but buried. Focuses on keyboard lights, which is fine but not exactly near the top of my list of concerns. Doesn’t mention ads in the OS. Finally it blames “developers.” This phrase could include management from certain perspective. Honestly, I’m sure approximately zero engineers are pushing for this stuff.
  • Ensorceled 5y ago
    > New, but doesn’t mention Apple’s photo scanning. Forced Windows upgrades and telemetry buried. Those two things are different issues, the article is about software that makes it difficult to perform the actual task you are using the product for. Apple's photo scanning doesn't make my camera difficult to use. Windows telemetry doesn't make Windows difficult to use. Yes, they are user hostile, just not in the way you wish the article was written.
    • frickinLasers 5y ago
      > Disable telemetry? Not a chance - you better be ready to have seven layers of defense in /etc/hosts, Pi-Hole, and a custom-built DNS + firewall + URL filter + deep packet inspector inside a server rack in the basement. I am exaggerating, of course. You only need six layers of defense to make this all work. That's in the post (and, incidentally, it appears OP works for Microsoft)
    • mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Yes, I think it could be better, and these hostile practices do overlap. Author does mention telemetry, although the lede is buried.
• thewebcount 5y ago
  Oh man, I just ran into this. I work on a product that has a 3rd party API so other people can write plug-ins to extend the functionality of the app. It's great for users and developers. We received a bug report related to a particular plug-in, so I went to download their demo to see if the problem was on our end or theirs before contacting them. Here's how the process went: 1) Go to their website and click "Download" 2) Prompted to enter email address with no way to opt out. Shit. Go to mailinator.com and create a fake email address to enter. Enter it. 3) Wait for them to send the real download link to my fake email. 4) It came in almost instantly. Great! Click on the link. 5) Click to download the installer package. Wait a few minutes. 6) Run the installer package. 7) It needs the same email address and password so it knows I'm a "legitimate user" just to install the thing. 8) After entering it, it kicks me back to the web page for some reason. No idea what it's looking for or what I'm supposed to do on the web site, so I go back to the installer. Oh it's not an installer. It's an installer installer. It's going to download the installer I want from a list of dozens of possible installers. Download the real installer. 9) Run the real installer - It lists dozens of products. Find the one I want. Install it. 10) Prompted for email and password again. And keep in mind this is all before I'm actually a customer. I haven't paid anything and am trying to evaluate the software to determine if it fits my needs. (Or I would be if I were an end user.) Honestly, if this weren't for my job, I would have given up on step 2. Fuck these people. I'm trying to save them time by seeing whether the bug is ours or theirs, but they're actively wasting mine and everyone else's who downloads this crap.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    Do you work on the Lumberyard engine? lol
• dancemethis 5y ago
  Discord comes to mind.
• ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
  This is a really serious problem and a nice set of principles to go by. There's a big "but", however: Most of us here are hired employees and aren't really making the products for the end users. What really could be helpful are not some "oaths" but the strategies for dealing with our managers and employers and ways to uphold the ethics (and in some cases, aesthetics) of our work. The mere market clearly don't work here, as the demand for these values is overshadowed by user's convenience, network effect and marketing brainwash.
• xanaxagoras 5y ago
  I recently left iOS over the surveillance stuff and I was looking at a Nokia device to replace my Apple Watch. I read in the Amazon review that you had to create an account and their privacy policy explains that your location data will be synced with Nokia and you can't opt out, the device can't be configured without accepting that. Nope. I'm at my wit's end with ALL of this stuff. Most software, apps, digital life, everything related to technology or a computer or a phone - a good majority of it is frivolous. I will no longer exchange my privacy for these idle conveniences. > Browsing a site through the browser and not the app? Half of the functionality is not available, just to force the user into the app for no good reason. I just want to read a comment. reddit you absolute POS.
  • kibblesalad 5y ago
    That seems to be the end result of companies seeking untapped income from harvesting and selling customer data, besides offering everything as a subscription service without any kind of end-user ownership or guaranteed ongoing functionality. Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity? Most people don't think twice to hit that "Accept" button prompting for permissions, allowing the envelope to be pushed further and further. The increasing ease of processing huge data sets allows all of this information to be aggregated, sold and used for whatever purpose whoever is willing to pay for it sees fit.
    • xanaxagoras 5y ago
      Yeah, this whole thing has been a big eye opener for me and you've the nail on the head. Moving from iOS to Calyx involved reading up and a few things and that's a community that's much more disposed to discussing privacy related concerns that I simply haven't been aware of. It's a bitter pill to swallow and infuriating, the degree to which we're surveilled and manipulated. Went back and paid attention to the Prism disclosures. It's all just fucking mental. > Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity? This is the key issue, it absolutely makes sense for them to do it. I'm one of those people who just hit "accept" but no more. My new answer to any company that continues to ask that question is simply... because if you do that, you lose the sale. It's frustrating that basically amounts to spitting in the ocean but I simply can't participate any longer.
• zmix 5y ago
  So, who of you earns their money that way?
• deleted 5y ago
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• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  The medium to broadcast ads has simply shifted over time. It used to be expensive tv ads, billboards, and print. All very expensive and you could not target population segments precisely, it was limited to what time or during what tv show the ads were shown, or in print political leanings. Retargeting was almost impossible and expensive. Then people started watching less tv and reading less newspapers(or did so online). Then JS got mature enough to track users and then the marketing departments started instructing the devs for maximum efficiency. At the cost of user ui/ux. Almost every web page loads ads via ajax , consents popups, email list ctas with a lot of bloat. Nobody knows how to fix it, or the financial incentives are just not there.
• inshadows 5y ago
  > All of the examples above have one thing in common - they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers. Exactly. https://web.dev https://web.dev is prime example of that. Shiny new features for _developers_ all the time, as if any of that will make incompetent web developers write slick and fast applications.
• srdev 5y ago
  I've gotten a lot of flack for saying that advertising and marketing are terrible industries and need to be chopped down by 95% or more, but I think this only supports my point. They can't stop themselves from trying to hook into everything so that they can track and "engage" the user. I've gotten a lot of stink eye by strongly pointing out that the users don't want to be "engaged" with your brands and that people are creepy for having that expectation. They just want a product or service that works well. Somehow along the way we convinced ourselves that all of this is normal.
• nsm 5y ago
  Another example: Cue Health makes a rapid COVID19 test. They ship you a little box, and a set of wands to insert into the box. The box should literally be able to tell you whether the test passed or failed, like thermometers, and pregnancy tests. But no, the stupid thing requires you to install an app on your phone, create a cloud account (because we all know we can totally trust the cloud with personal data) and it will refuse to work without any of this.
• hamburgerwah 5y ago
  Closed source software has always been built on an extortion business model. As long as we permit math to be patented and copyrighted this will continue to be the case. The issue now is that each of us as individuals uses much more software than we did, 5, 10, or 20 years ago.
• _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Network effect. That is what I blame it on. Once people all have to go to the same place, they are trapped and the owner of that place can do what they like. And what is the network effect really? The fact that people can't find each other easily on the network. If we had an easy way to find each others devices directly I could send a "FB Post" directly to my friendship circle rather than via FB. Maybe instead of a DNS we need a PublicKey <-> IP address system.
• jmrm 5y ago
  I think the article is pretty kind and benevolent about what the companies do this kind of things. This isn't done simply because they don't care about users or care more about developers, they do it because they want to get more money after buying the product. Some spy their users to sell their information, others ask a lot of personal information to do that. Usually they give you some "poisoned apples" in the shape of software you don't need, and even they are some cheeky who try to sell you other things, in a more polite way[0] or using the "erosion method"[1]. More infuriating are those who doesn't want you to control them and the only thing you can do about this is uninstalling[2]. The worse thing about all of this is the difficulty about avoiding this kind of software, like some printer drivers[3]. [0] Sometimes, after opening or using the software, they show you some ads of the same company [1] The erosion method is what Avast do in their free software. Lots of pop-ups (yeah, in 2021) from the software asking you to buy some of their product until the users buy it to "shut it up". I don't think this works too much btw. [2] Have you used any PC with a paid McAffee antivirus installed? They don't let you ad some exceptions to analysis because they want it that way. So, if you have some old hardware, with unsigned drivers, you might won't be able to install it because the antivirus says that is malware. [3] When you buy an HP printer you have to install all of their software to have some kind of details, like reporting to you it doesn't have ink and that's why doesn't work, but to have that, you have to install a 500 MB package with a lot of things you don't need, a lot of ads about how HP original ink is the best, an HP Assistant icon in your task bar, and a lot of process, services, and programmed tasks who only make your PC slow. Meanwhile, Canon ones only need a 20 MB~50 MB installer who works fine without all the bloat.