6 ms·

I agree with this. The UI is moving more and more towards not showing URLs, emails, addresses, and other things that might clue a non-savvy user into being dupe

I agree with this. The UI is moving more and more towards not showing URLs, emails, addresses, and other things that might clue a non-savvy user into being duped. But who do we complain to? They (FAANG, etc) are doing this to increase usage and profits, right?

lynndotpy 4y ago
This reminds me of the baffling decision when Windows started hiding file extensions by default.
- Forge36 4y ago
  What year was that?
  - jml7c5 4y ago
    I believe it changed with Windows XP, so 2001. (Oh my, has it really been that long?)
    - timw4mail 4y ago
      It was earlier, ME or 90 SE.
      - jml7c5 4y ago
        You're right! My mistake.
      - userbinator 4y ago
        Windows 95.
- jwilk 4y ago
  Out of interest, do they still do that?
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Yes.
svachalek 4y ago
Would a non-savvy user realize "venmoforward@gmail.com" is not a reasonable source address for a message that otherwise looks like it comes from Venmo? I think the whole principle of "anyone who knows your email address / phone number can contact you" was already obsolete over 20 years ago. Access to my inbox and ringer should be by revocable invitation only.
- mulmen 4y ago
  I hate how hard Slack makes it to copy a damn username. I get messages from people and try to look them up in the corporate directory but at some point it is just easier to type it in.
  - delecti 4y ago
    I don't know if there's an equivalent on other OSs, but in most browsers in Windows if you hold down Alt you can select text in an otherwise clickable link.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      Ctrl-click on a mac at least gives the option. But this is what I hate most about Slack specifically and Electron in general. It’s so obviously a web app shoved into what kinda looks like a native window. But all the behavior is webpagey, except not in my browser, which I already know how to use. Here’s a fun one: Click in the conversation history panel. Use your “select all” shortcut. Despair.
      - delecti 4y ago
        Why not just use the webpage? I've only ever used Slack (and Mattermost, which my work uses) in my browser, and I'm not sure what reasons there could be to install the app when it's just a less convenient container for the same content.
        mulmen 4y ago
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> But who do we complain to? I mean, you don't. You stop using their company, and you let them and everyone else know why. Vote with your dollars or with your feet.
masswerk 4y ago
Especially in email, the clear name is rather a comment. Showing just the comment instead of the real data is negligent, at best. (It's actually quite the opposite of what is going on with URLs, where everything is suppressed but the core domain name. Here, the originating domain and user is suppressed. It's more like showing the document title in the location field.)
- masswerk 4y ago
  The preference for real names in email clients is actually quite annoying. E.g., some of my clients are using institutional email addresses, which are used and processed by multiple real-person users with associated clear names. Every time, I mail to one of these addresses (not addressing anyone in particular, but rather to whom these may concern, which is the expressed purpose of these addresses), I've to go back to the address and to discard the auto-filled, nonsensical clear name (which may be the person using that address, I received mail from last). In some email clients, this may involve multiple steps, as they really want to show a clear name and a clear name only.
donmcronald 4y ago
> They (FAANG, etc) are doing this to increase usage and profits, right? Yes. They're obfuscating the mechanisms that can be used to assess trustworthiness so they can sell it back to us as some kind of reputation or verification product. Email is a perfect example. If the from address wasn't moved around, hidden, and obfuscated, it would be easy to tell people "make sure Venmo emails are from @venmo.com" and that's the thing everyone would look for. Instead, there's an entire generation of people that don't know how to identify a from address and it opens the door to a paid verification platform instead.
dan-robertson 4y ago
The URL move is more nuanced than that, no? If you look at how modern browsers decide what to show you in the address bar, they often try to show you the hard-to-fake bit instead of the whole url, so you see notreallygoogle.com instead of google.com.search.q.notreallygoogle.com or notreallygoogle.com/http://google.com http://google.com and similarly you’ll see the punycode if the browser thinks the domain name may be trying to look like another one with confusables. I agree the email situation isn’t great but it is also more complicated: lots of legitimate companies send emails via third parties or otherwise want to put a name quite different from the email (e.g. mail chimp but also google docs comments appear to come from the commenter rather than some big id email address), so it isn‘t as simple as showing the full address only and users may learn to ignore the full address if it is fully of random-looking letters/digits. And email protocols complicate it further because there are ways in which the from field may not even match the actual sender, though that isn’t such a problem with gmail. I definitely do hope things will improve, however.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Domain names are just fundamentally displayed wrong - the left to right reading order doesn't prioritise the right information. "com.google" is what you need to see since it tells you who's really in charge of the content. Particularly on mobile where I'm writing this I currently can see at most "news.ycombinator.co..." in the address bar. Could be a lot after that, how would I know at a glance? Google and Mozilla could make substantial progress on this today by just showing an extra bit with the start of a domain name in right-to-left reading order.
  - navjack27 4y ago
    Edge seems to be doing things right in that department. On my phone I see the whole URL and the lock indicating https.
    - thiht 4y ago
      Same on Safari. If I add more subdomains, it still displays the label and the extension in priority, the additional subdomains are faded and hidden on the left. This seems sane to me.
nirui 4y ago
To me, Gmail these days feels more and more like it's been designed by somebody who don't actually use email. In this case, the top priority should be display name, (verified) source address and time of reception. The To and BCC line is not that important, thus can be folded under description such as "To you and another...". I hear that product design in Google is data driven, I'm not really sure what UX data Gmail team has been consuming.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  > The To and BCC line is not that important bcc in inbound mails?

lynndotpy 4y ago

This reminds me of the baffling decision when Windows started hiding file extensions by default.

Forge36 4y ago
What year was that?
- jml7c5 4y ago
  I believe it changed with Windows XP, so 2001. (Oh my, has it really been that long?)
  - timw4mail 4y ago
    It was earlier, ME or 90 SE.
    - jml7c5 4y ago
      You're right! My mistake.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      Windows 95.
jwilk 4y ago
Out of interest, do they still do that?
- userbinator 4y ago
  Yes.

svachalek 4y ago

Would a non-savvy user realize "venmoforward@gmail.com" is not a reasonable source address for a message that otherwise looks like it comes from Venmo? I think the whole principle of "anyone who knows your email address / phone number can contact you" was already obsolete over 20 years ago. Access to my inbox and ringer should be by revocable invitation only.

mulmen 4y ago
I hate how hard Slack makes it to copy a damn username. I get messages from people and try to look them up in the corporate directory but at some point it is just easier to type it in.
- delecti 4y ago
  I don't know if there's an equivalent on other OSs, but in most browsers in Windows if you hold down Alt you can select text in an otherwise clickable link.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Ctrl-click on a mac at least gives the option. But this is what I hate most about Slack specifically and Electron in general. It’s so obviously a web app shoved into what kinda looks like a native window. But all the behavior is webpagey, except not in my browser, which I already know how to use. Here’s a fun one: Click in the conversation history panel. Use your “select all” shortcut. Despair.
    - delecti 4y ago
      Why not just use the webpage? I've only ever used Slack (and Mattermost, which my work uses) in my browser, and I'm not sure what reasons there could be to install the app when it's just a less convenient container for the same content.
      - mulmen 4y ago

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> But who do we complain to? I mean, you don't. You stop using their company, and you let them and everyone else know why. Vote with your dollars or with your feet.

masswerk 4y ago

Especially in email, the clear name is rather a comment. Showing just the comment instead of the real data is negligent, at best. (It's actually quite the opposite of what is going on with URLs, where everything is suppressed but the core domain name. Here, the originating domain and user is suppressed. It's more like showing the document title in the location field.)

masswerk 4y ago
The preference for real names in email clients is actually quite annoying. E.g., some of my clients are using institutional email addresses, which are used and processed by multiple real-person users with associated clear names. Every time, I mail to one of these addresses (not addressing anyone in particular, but rather to whom these may concern, which is the expressed purpose of these addresses), I've to go back to the address and to discard the auto-filled, nonsensical clear name (which may be the person using that address, I received mail from last). In some email clients, this may involve multiple steps, as they really want to show a clear name and a clear name only.

donmcronald 4y ago

> They (FAANG, etc) are doing this to increase usage and profits, right? Yes. They're obfuscating the mechanisms that can be used to assess trustworthiness so they can sell it back to us as some kind of reputation or verification product. Email is a perfect example. If the from address wasn't moved around, hidden, and obfuscated, it would be easy to tell people "make sure Venmo emails are from @venmo.com" and that's the thing everyone would look for. Instead, there's an entire generation of people that don't know how to identify a from address and it opens the door to a paid verification platform instead.

dan-robertson 4y ago

The URL move is more nuanced than that, no? If you look at how modern browsers decide what to show you in the address bar, they often try to show you the hard-to-fake bit instead of the whole url, so you see notreallygoogle.com instead of google.com.search.q.notreallygoogle.com or notreallygoogle.com/http://google.com http://google.com and similarly you’ll see the punycode if the browser thinks the domain name may be trying to look like another one with confusables. I agree the email situation isn’t great but it is also more complicated: lots of legitimate companies send emails via third parties or otherwise want to put a name quite different from the email (e.g. mail chimp but also google docs comments appear to come from the commenter rather than some big id email address), so it isn‘t as simple as showing the full address only and users may learn to ignore the full address if it is fully of random-looking letters/digits. And email protocols complicate it further because there are ways in which the from field may not even match the actual sender, though that isn’t such a problem with gmail. I definitely do hope things will improve, however.

XorNot 4y ago
Domain names are just fundamentally displayed wrong - the left to right reading order doesn't prioritise the right information. "com.google" is what you need to see since it tells you who's really in charge of the content. Particularly on mobile where I'm writing this I currently can see at most "news.ycombinator.co..." in the address bar. Could be a lot after that, how would I know at a glance? Google and Mozilla could make substantial progress on this today by just showing an extra bit with the start of a domain name in right-to-left reading order.
- navjack27 4y ago
  Edge seems to be doing things right in that department. On my phone I see the whole URL and the lock indicating https.
  - thiht 4y ago
    Same on Safari. If I add more subdomains, it still displays the label and the extension in priority, the additional subdomains are faded and hidden on the left. This seems sane to me.

nirui 4y ago

To me, Gmail these days feels more and more like it's been designed by somebody who don't actually use email. In this case, the top priority should be display name, (verified) source address and time of reception. The To and BCC line is not that important, thus can be folded under description such as "To you and another...". I hear that product design in Google is data driven, I'm not really sure what UX data Gmail team has been consuming.

someweirdperson 4y ago
> The To and BCC line is not that important bcc in inbound mails?