12 ms·

The Rise of User-Hostile Software (2021)

269 points by rolph 4y ago

mlpinit 4y ago
thread in 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: The rise of user-hostile software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 - Aug 2021 (283 comments)
samarthr1 4y ago
> Be ethical. This is the most straightforward That is probably the hardest piece of advice to follow. The temptation to cut corners in subtle manners can get really strong.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Not to mention that it's not just "be ethical", it's "instill ethics in others, too", because you don't inherit clean software that you then ruin. You inherit ruined software that you can, at best, clean back up over the course of years.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > instill ethics in others Yes very much. Bare ethics, like monatomic hydrogen, doesn't exist in "room temperature" reality. It's relational. There have to be two of you. Technologies that destroy the relational undermine ethics because all consequences are divided through by infinity.
- godelski 4y ago
  Not just that, but there can be lots of unintended consequences. I think mistakes are okay, but handwaving this away as simple does more harm. It gives us a false sense of security when the "be ethical" advice really means that we need to constantly be asking ourselves various questions.
m463 4y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Should be permanently stickied at the top of HN. I notice that we skirt a lot of issues around here that if followed to their logical conclusion would drastically undermine some salaries.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    This is a large part of the reason why I read the site and the comments. I want a finger on the pulse of population here. By this site's metrics I'm a bit outside the core population as a biologist. Rather luddite in how I approach tech. But at least if I have a computer problem, I backed up my work and tried turning it off and on again before bothering someone, and won't google-fu my way into a deeper mess for tech support.
the__alchemist 4y ago
I like how the article brings attention to this issue, and I especially like its list of examples of hostile behavior. The actionable-advice part it transitions to is a bit odd, culminating at the list of the bottom of what to do as an engineer and project manager. It reads to me something like: " Hey bandits! Do this: - Don't mug people - Be ethical - Treat people with respect - Threatening bodily injury and death is bad too! - Instead of robbing banks, earn money through an occupation "
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Yeah, really. That said, anything that advances cultural acknowledgement of banditry is a good thing. Right now people are walking around with titles like Senior Stagecoach Divestiture Specialist and everyone pretends that it's normal.
- alexhsamuel 4y ago
  Exactly this. It's now "industry standard" to mug people; why should I swear your Hippocratic oath when everyone else is getting rich? Instead of asking developers (the organizations, not the individuals) to mend their ways, we users need to take action to defend ourselves. - Education. People who didn't use computers in the earlier age of full user agency might not even imagine a world where they fully control their devices. - Advertising. One should not be allowed to advertise "selling" something without handing over full control. - Law. Shrink-wrap licenses should be neutered, software patents limited, DMCA abolished; these are legal moats around developers' power. - Technology. Open software, open hardware, open data, self-hostable services. - Platforms. It's time to treat software as hostile by default, the way an Internet connection is now de facto hostile. The OS needs to be hardened not only against hackers, but also against developers. These are vague generalities, not concrete suggestions, and there are huge obstacles to each. Perhaps others have useful suggestions.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    > why should I swear your Hippocratic oath when everyone else is getting rich? One must cultivate one's own garden.
ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
Should also mention online-only installers a la vs_buildtools from MS and a whole lot vendors more. Want an offline installer? Easy peasy, just - find one in a cobweb-covered thread in an obscure subforum on a vendor's site; - manually compile a list of thousands of workloads your build tools would need, including optional ones, and create an offline installer yourself - using another machine that still has to be online - which will fail anyway if your target machine happens to be really offline; - be told to basically GTFO for being an outmoded Luddite who opposes The Progress.
- dijit 4y ago
  as a person who worked a lot in isolated environments, this was really frustrating. from google chrome to visual studio: loads of software is extremely difficult to install offline
  - MarkSweep 4y ago
    I remember both of these programs you mention not being that hard to install offline. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346 https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-o... The main challenge with VS is trimming languages and features you don’t need. But if you don’t care about size you can just download everything. And it has support for incrementally updating the installer and pruning obsolete packages.
    - dijit 4y ago
      I remember searching the internet for 25 minutes for each of them after discovering (annoyingly) that the installer that is given is not actually going to work offline. The ones you link work, but you really must search for it; its not presented as an easy to find option at all. which is not my default expectation possibly because I was raised in the late 80s/early 90s.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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npilk 4y ago
I find this trend particularly ironic as it has come about at the same time as an explosion in the popularity of "user-centered design". It seems like, especially on the web, more and more companies are telling themselves they care about the needs of their users, while at the same time designing more and more user-hostile experiences. I wrote more about this here: https://notes.npilk.com/radically-user-centered https://notes.npilk.com/radically-user-centered
- barnabee 4y ago
  Strongly agree. A/B testing and equating time spent (“engagement”) and/or money spent with user happiness have a lot to answer for.
  - anankaie 4y ago
    One problem is that these techniques - as I have seen them applied - are terrible at analyzing multimodal distributions. They will fail to capture small detractors until they pile up into a feeling of the software being user-hostile, because until then the engagement is not dropping, even though its foundations are eroding.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Reading this again something new jumped out at me: > "I mean it as - software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer." No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work. Malware, in it's broadest sense, has become an industrial scale venture. Technological abuse exists at a system scale. In some ways that's positive, because developers and end-users, being much wiser in 2023 than in 1993 can unite against a common foe. But that won't be easy. The key lies in building relations between developers and end users that completely bypass the "at scale" bandits.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  This. None of this software is prioritizing the developer. It's prioritizing value extraction. It's capitalism in it's worst, most naked form. Advertising spend is worth more than a quality product - because we've inverted the classic information problem: Information is no longer scarce and valuable, it's flooding out everything and is mostly worthless noise. Making sensible, educated decisions becomes increasingly harder, and you're presented with an environment designed to cause choice paralysis until you finally cave and just buy the item at the top of list presented to you by Google/Amazon/Apple/Walmart/Etc. That item will be terrible, but it's paid the right protection money to the monopolies (sorry! advertising spend) to keep its spot. --- Can developers win in those situations? Sure - sometimes. But most times they're some poor contracting team paid literal peanuts to create this product, then immediately go through "staffing reductions" to the bare minimum needed for legally required product support. The developers are not the root cause of this - although they are also not absolved.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Most software written will not be used. Nobody will buy it, or even download it if it is free. (Or even FOSS free.) The stuff people complain about is all the rest. But maybe the reason they are complaining about it has to do with how the purveyors figured out how to get it into people's hands. Enough hands to sustain the product. We can almost entirely blame this on the end users. Users vote for software and hardware with their purchase and use decisions. Whenever you have a problem with anything, you're a victim of the poor decision making of a million unsophisticated consumers who voted for that piece of crap to have the revenue stream and funding so that it garnered your attention too. Consumer behavior itself basically creates a barrier of entry to the existence of viable alternatives.
haburka 4y ago
If your articles main solution is “just build what the user needs / asks for” then it comes off as incredibly juvenile and naïve. This is one of the hardest problems in product design. Also they seem fairly oblivious as to why these hardware apps are poorly made and require accounts. It’s because it’s expensive to write software and you already bought the product. Whatever keyboard light program you’re using costs real money for the company to make and maintain, and they’d like to keep costs down.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > This is one of the hardest problems in product design. True, but it is also one of the easiest. We have known for decades that you can get much better products with little effort. E.g., by doing basic user testing with 5 users and then iterating. We did that at a consumer-facing startup in 2010 by getting 5 people off Craigslist every Tuesday, and we learned useful stuff every week. By the following Tuesday, we'd have new things to try out. It worked great. And all of this was old knowledge even in 2010. Is it true that there are user problems and needs that can't be settled with a quick user test? Sure. There are all sorts of harder problems, with fancier research techniques to match. But given that so few places are even doing the basics, I say we should start there. Just build what (we think) the user needs, and then as soon as possible see if it worked.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > Whatever keyboard light program you’re using costs real money for the company to make and maintain, and they’d like to keep costs down. Then just release the hardware specs and let motivated users maintain it past it useful (to the manufacturer) life. Like, I have this Govee thermometer I bought to learn about Bluetooth that needs an app to read out the data stored in it. Last I looked nobody reverse engineered the protocol and they don’t have technical specifications because they want to keep you inside their ecosystem. Someday they will just give up the ghost and all these gadgets will be mostly useless (said thermometer transmits current readings so can always be read with a little work). Yet another of my “when I get motivated enough” projects… —edit— Counterpoint: I have a couple Bluetooth button things which did provide specs and it took me a couple hours of fiddling to get it to fully work with an example program, I push the button and the computer knows it, computer tells it to beep and it beeps, its built in “alert on dropping signal” (so you don’t lose your keys) just works, easy peasy.
doug_durham 4y ago
I think there are a couple of nuggets of useful information in this article, but most of it is asking more a more developer friendly future, not a user centered future. The reason there are apps to control your keyboard color is that's what people want. They don't want the specs of the SPI interface so that they can program their own daemon to talk to it. The reason that different HID device vendors don't share the same app is "why would they ever". Why would you go through the trouble to create the "Universal HID LED color Consortium" with the associated meetings and hack fests to insure interoperability?
scottLobster 4y ago
Fun piece of history regarding business ethics, the mass-unionization of West Virginia coal mines occurred after the mass-unionization of coal mines in other regions. Part of the reason the unionization effort in West Virginia was so fanatical was that part of the deal the unions struck with the mine owners in other regions was that they would unionize West Virginia as fast as possible, otherwise the newly unionized coal mines in other regions couldn't compete with cheaper, non-unionized West Virginia coal miners. Point being, the playing field must be level for ethical business to exist. If you try to act ethically on your own you will lose to a less ethical (but still legal) competitor. Sure if you're dominant enough or niche enough you can get away with being ethical, but if you have hard competition, good luck. You'll maintain your virtue, and they'll maintain their profits, and we'll see who's still around in 5 years. Granted it is possible to overstep and cause a customer revolt, but hoping your competition is that stupid is not an effective strategy.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  This was also a specific argument FDR made in the fireside chats against child labor: ethical business owners who try not to use child labor are being put out of business by those who do, so we need to step in and correct the market to allow for the ethical to compete with the unethical. Edit: As a brief aside the Fireside Chats are pretty remarkable pieces of public communication. I just can’t imagine a public leader speaking with such a blend of clarity, compassion, and force as what he did. They’re not particularly shallow or short on details, either! He spoke like an adult to a nation of adults - really refreshing.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    point beeing that self regulating markets are a lie
    - largepeepee 4y ago
      Another way to put it is, the endgame of unregulated markets are monopolies.
kazinator 4y ago
A lot of the bullet points actually revolve around hostile hardware.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Or just use open source software if you want developer incentives to be aligned with users instead of fruitlessly asking developers of proprietary software to go against their incentives.
- sneak 4y ago
  Sadly this is not sufficient. Tools like the Netlify CLI, Mattermost, Bitwarden, and NetData are all open source, but will all still spy on you. Good luck getting patches accepted upstream that remove such malware features.
  - twojacobtwo 4y ago
    Source on the bitwarden claim? I've been using it for a while and would like to know for sure if I should switch.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Probably referring to telemetry, the only thing I can find is an old, now resolved issue that was brought in thanks to a dependency on MS SQL on the server side: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/issues/286 https://github.com/bitwarden/server/issues/286
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    It is absolutely sufficient because open source provides a quick and easy remedy — fork. I use Vaultwarden. No spying.
    - sneak 4y ago
      I meant the client. Open source does not provide a remedy, as without an Apple Developer account I can't run a forked client easily.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
citizenpaul 4y ago
A huge number of those examples is for a reason that makes my skin crawl every time I think about it. Your privacy is simply too valuable to allow you to keep it.
- musicale 4y ago
  Companies are all too willing to trade user privacy for money. Users are all too willing to give up their privacy for cheaper products.
aiisahik 4y ago
There is always going to be financial incentives to do User-Hostile stuff. Collecting user data to market to them and increase LTV is a no brainer for most product / general managers. There is a market solution to counter the financial motive of making User-Hostile software: Make the lack User-Hostile software a MARKETED FEATURE. - It should be promoted on product description details - Hardware review sites should actively make note of it - There should be curated sites / lists that feature products that are not User-Hostile - There should be a certification body that has a logo that gets plastered on devices / software that has been certified. Don't blame the guys whose design products to maximize consumer LTV - they are just doing their jobs.
- alexhsamuel 4y ago
  > Don't blame the guys whose design products to maximize consumer LTV - they are just doing their jobs. Mmmmm... how about oil and tobacco CEOs? How about patent trolls? How about actual professional criminals? Where do you draw the line?
  - musicale 4y ago
    If ACM actually enforced its code of ethics[1], employees of privacy-violating companies would be banned from ACM conferences and journals. ACM doesn't seem to care though – they just want membership dues. [1] https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
- yunwal 4y ago
  > they are just doing their jobs Probably my least favorite phrase. If you help make a bad thing knowingly, you have done a bad thing. Period. There’s no 1 evil dictator CEO that deserves all the blame, devs have agency, product managers have agency.
shmerl 4y ago
I'd add to the point of respecting user choices a requirement to be able to update firmware in your piece of hardware without the need for using Windows. If vendors don't want to support every OS, let them make an UEFI bootable image for firmware updating that's not tied to any OS.
college_physics 4y ago
User-hostile software strategy #13 Force users to update apps even if they dont want to and with each update introduce hidden new privacy flags set at your desired default option, guessing correctly that the average user will likely miss it
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Don't forget (re)installing third party software which the user has explicitly uninstalled[1] and resetting default app configurations for no reason[2]. Windows is malware. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/s31m8o/microsoft_update_added_tiktok_to_my_pc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/s31m8o/micro... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055222
- ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
  Also never mention those flags anywhere in docs, which are shambles anyway in regard of everything beyond the "I'm a power user, I promise I know what I'm doing" banner.. And there are literally hundreds of such flags in e.g. every modern browser.
renjimen 4y ago
This is all a result of short termism. Short term profits from dark behaviours trump long term profits from satisfied customers. Why is this behaviour of publicly traded companies surprising to anyone? It’s not unique to software either. It’s the economic system that needs to change, not the devs.
- jacooper 4y ago
  100%, I think its really time for regulations. I applaud the EU's recent regulations for tech, especially the digital markets act.
  - holyknight 4y ago
    Yeah, EU is really a thriving market for tech and innovation right?
    - yunwal 4y ago
      I would personally give up the “thriving” market if it meant software was developed with users interests in mind. Much of the tech growth in the U.S. doesn’t actually result in higher quality of life in the long run
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      The point of these regulations is acknowledging and asserting that users (and people in general) matter more than a thriving market for tech and innovation - yes, user-hostile software benefits the market, but that's a cost we aren't willing to pay.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      As if that has to do with anything relating to regulation?
    - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      Why do you value tech and innovation over the actual customer experience?
bytesandwich 4y ago
If all these products are so low quality, why do they sell? Do all these businesses have monopolies? Is it possible that we on Hacker news are out of touch with regular users who _prefer_ cloud accounts because they can’t maintain a NAS array to store their own dashcam footage? Maybe people prefer low cost apps that include ads to higher cost apps without ads? That said, the subscription pricing thing IMHO is predatory, like gambling.
knolan 4y ago
Another form of user hostile software is software that is deliberately and inexplicably complex. I’m thinking specifically of ‘professional’ engineering tools. Simulation and CAD software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price, clunky user interfaces (often as a result of glueing together acquired software from a competitor) seemingly to up sell training, and awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!)
- plonk 4y ago
  > software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager. > awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!) For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.
  - knolan 4y ago
    Laziness is hostility for the user. They have a captive market and they see no need to make life easier. These companies have an effective monopoly so they don’t care. Companies like the MathWorks seem to make licensing straightforward. Even Adobe make it easy to push someone out of a session so you can get work done. Others make is a chore. Ansys, Solidworks etc have awful user experiences in comparison.
emodendroket 4y ago
These precepts don't do a whole lot to address the real reasons these things happen, which don't have a lot to do with "to hell with the customer -- we're deliberately going to do things that annoy them!"
trinsic2 4y ago
This is the reason why I switched to OSS[1] completely and only support (where I can) non-predatory SAAS. I'm not sure that its enough though... [1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
- jacooper 4y ago
  I try to do the same, but its simply not going to matter if the majority still uses big tech and falls for the dark patterns. thats why its really regulation who going to change this, and probably not any individual actions.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    If a large enough minority use FOSS-only systems, and support their development (with donations of money and/or effort) - that is enough to prop up sound and capable alternatives which gradually attract users. Twenty years ago, it was rather difficult to suggest to clueless users to use a FOSS-based system. Today, it's quite realistic. Not everything is in an ideal state, but still.
    - trinsic2 4y ago
      I was reading you comment and the obsidian note taking app came to mind in regards to how supporting foss makes an impact over time. Look at valve supporting Linux and look where we're at today with Linux gaming. I think you're right It makes a difference over time. Look at all the gamers using the steam deck. They don't even know the platform is based on foss. And that in and of it self has the impart to change where we are headed. The masses don't really need to know what is happening. They just benefit from the supports of foss
      - jacooper 4y ago
        Obsidian is not Foss, logseg is
frankohn 4y ago
The fault is to the users that are not able to say "no" to these bad practices. The author of the post seems to use Windows which is the worst in term of crap software and abusive practices. Just use Linux, you will have less but at least you will not be abused.
myth2018 4y ago
> “software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer.” Shall we not forget the software that only cares about aesthetic aspirations of its UX designers
- mianos 4y ago
  The growing use of light grey text on an off white background "for aesthetics" pretty much demonstrates the level of respect some have for users.
robertoandred 4y ago
DMGs are not binaries...
kmoser 4y ago
Flowchart says, "Did any user ask for this?" Even with an entire top-down team dedicated to serving the user and not corporate interests (which would be all but impossible, except in the world of open source), you'll always have a few stray users asking for features that not everybody wants, and there will be perpetual arguments about which features would benefit most users. At the end of the day, the problem isn't that software is user-hostile, or written for engineers or corporate surveillance, but that nobody will ever agree 100% on what features should go into any piece of software.
holyknight 4y ago
No, almost all users don't even know what they want. So sadly if you want to appeal to a large audience you need to put guardrails everywhere so user don't fck up and then sue you or make you a hell PR campaign. You can only have the luxury of giving user freedom when you appeal to a niche market, your userbase is savvy and they have ownership on what day do on your app (if they fck up they won't blame your for it)
sound1 4y ago
Lightly went through the article and i agree with the sentiments. We deserve a better desktop computing experience, and cross platform programs are preferred. Yes, but how about the software other people want to use or need? Can we make their effort easier with our software and make a business out of it adding value to both? I think it is one area everyone needs to think about. You help your social circle, try to understand their problems and think about solutions they need to make their business successful, and if you are capable of delivering that, then great. Else you become a consultant. I believe this is how the businesses were built in the early days.
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bhauer 4y ago
> Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. You need to install another app, that will be used just for this one device, to sync things. The app inconspicuously asks for location access while at it, and eats 85% of your CPU at all times, even when idle. This one has to be an iPhone and iTunes. Absolutely nonsensical levels of obfuscation to getting data on and off. iPhones can't connect to network disks on the local network, they don't appear as mass storage devices if connected via USB, and the software they require--iTunes--is an absolute cluster. If only Android weren't its own complete disaster for different reasons.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You can connect a phone to a server using the built in Files App https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devices-or-servers-iph8d8f0f1a0/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devi... I haven’t tried this https://helpdesk.macroplant.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019027213-Mount-your-iPhone-or-iPad-as-an-external-drive https://helpdesk.macroplant.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600190272...
- bspammer 4y ago
  I get that it’s only for Macs, but Airdrop has basically solved this for me. I’d never install iTunes.
b0rat 4y ago
[dead]
tomxor 4y ago
> "would any user benefit from this"? [yes, no] This doesn't work... Unnecessary user accounts, telemetry, inefficient electron app etc etc: It's possible to genuinely argue they all ultimately benefit the user (e.g market research, developer efficiency). Some people would use this to push their agenda. It's also not a good idea to reject ideas that do not directly benefit the user, because many of those are good. What's missing is quantitative and qualitative assessment. Sticking to the decision tree format, that node needs to be a continuum. e.g "does-it-benefit-the-user" changes to "cost-to-user/benefit-to-user > x". You can also distinguish between quality of benefits and costs by weighting the inputs... and while we are at it "cost-to-bottom-line/benefit-to-user > x" would remove a lot of busy work. But realistically this is reasoned about in non mathematical terms, effects are nuanced and the more you dig the more you find. The best approach is human and imperfect, but can at least be considerate of the user experience as a whole. This I believe is the heart of the problem: Decisions being made in the abstract when not appropriate, e.g a department only considering the direct effects to that department and ignoring effects to the ultimate purpose of the department->company->service/product. Perhaps it's just the result of over siloed workers without any empathy or concern beyond their short term personal benefit.
userbinator 4y ago
All those examples about hardware remind me of a few counterexamples. Want to use a dashcam for your car and sync the data to your local computer? You need to create an account and connect an app, even though you just want to do local sync. This seems to be a feature of the more expensive models only. All the cheap and generic ones just record to a memory card. Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. You need to install another app, that will be used just for this one device, to sync things. I think this started with Apple and the iPod. Meanwhile, all the other generic media players were indeed USB mass storage devices. I remember a friend choosing to get a cheaper lookalike clone of the iPod Shuffle specifically after reading that the real thing wouldn't just play files you copied to it, despite how it looked like a USB drive. As a bonus, the clone even had an FM radio. Another counterexample is my experience with an unbranded drawing tablet ---that even came with driver source code on the CD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060411 It seems that whenever companies grow big enough or get some sort of grand "vision" to "disrupt" or something similar, they become user-hostile. Those which just focus on making product and don't try to make a name for themselves, and possibly are so small they barely have resources to even do so, are not. They won't have the resources to spend on setting up and maintaining services to keep users on a leash. In the flow chart I would make the "Yes" of the "Would any user benefit from this?" question go to another question: "Are you sure users will benefit or are you just thinking that to justify it yourself?"
Nux 4y ago
I find it ironic that he's (very rightfully) complaining about all that stuff and arsehole designs and what not, but in the "about me" he's proudly working for Microsoft, the daddies of dark patterns and other shady stuff.
- sattoshi 4y ago
  What dark patterns do “Microsoft Identity Platform SDKs” have? Or do you expect him to go pick a fight with a random PM from the Windows team?
  - Nux 4y ago
    I don't expect anything, I just find it ironic.
_siis 4y ago
This article misses the point. Its not about the developers, its about the people driving the developers. If you take anti-trust, wiretapping, and other existing laws like the constitution and applied it rigorously you wouldn't have these issues. These companies have been allowed to spy on their customers as an indirect arm of government without being held to the same laws governments are held to, and worse to make a profit off it (i.e. 4th Amendment). If you take government money out of the monetization game, and enforce existing laws like anti-trust, this behavior goes away almost immediately because there is no financial incentive and many disincentives (i.e. prison and fines). Its not like this hasn't happened in the past. Read up on the Stasi, and other socialist systems. You see the same fundamental problems going back thousands of years on that side of the economic system. You either have one of two factors driving economies. The division of labor which historically protects and rewards people for being ingenuous with strong property rights, and Corruption which offers incentive to a small group of people to make a system work. The former is self-moderating as long you don't have a Ponzi or Fraud going on, and the latter is unstable over time because people get old, age and die eventually, and competence isn't rewarded.
0xedd 4y ago
Step 1: Don't use Windows, Mac or Android.
creatable 4y ago
dmg and deb files are not binaries, they just contain binaries.

269 points by rolph 4y ago

mlpinit 4y ago

thread in 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478

dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: The rise of user-hostile software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 - Aug 2021 (283 comments)

samarthr1 4y ago

> Be ethical. This is the most straightforward That is probably the hardest piece of advice to follow. The temptation to cut corners in subtle manners can get really strong.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
Not to mention that it's not just "be ethical", it's "instill ethics in others, too", because you don't inherit clean software that you then ruin. You inherit ruined software that you can, at best, clean back up over the course of years.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > instill ethics in others Yes very much. Bare ethics, like monatomic hydrogen, doesn't exist in "room temperature" reality. It's relational. There have to be two of you. Technologies that destroy the relational undermine ethics because all consequences are divided through by infinity.
godelski 4y ago
Not just that, but there can be lots of unintended consequences. I think mistakes are okay, but handwaving this away as simple does more harm. It gives us a false sense of security when the "be ethical" advice really means that we need to constantly be asking ourselves various questions.

m463 4y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Should be permanently stickied at the top of HN. I notice that we skirt a lot of issues around here that if followed to their logical conclusion would drastically undermine some salaries.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  This is a large part of the reason why I read the site and the comments. I want a finger on the pulse of population here. By this site's metrics I'm a bit outside the core population as a biologist. Rather luddite in how I approach tech. But at least if I have a computer problem, I backed up my work and tried turning it off and on again before bothering someone, and won't google-fu my way into a deeper mess for tech support.

the__alchemist 4y ago

I like how the article brings attention to this issue, and I especially like its list of examples of hostile behavior. The actionable-advice part it transitions to is a bit odd, culminating at the list of the bottom of what to do as an engineer and project manager. It reads to me something like: " Hey bandits! Do this: - Don't mug people - Be ethical - Treat people with respect - Threatening bodily injury and death is bad too! - Instead of robbing banks, earn money through an occupation "

revolvingocelot 4y ago
Yeah, really. That said, anything that advances cultural acknowledgement of banditry is a good thing. Right now people are walking around with titles like Senior Stagecoach Divestiture Specialist and everyone pretends that it's normal.
alexhsamuel 4y ago
Exactly this. It's now "industry standard" to mug people; why should I swear your Hippocratic oath when everyone else is getting rich? Instead of asking developers (the organizations, not the individuals) to mend their ways, we users need to take action to defend ourselves. - Education. People who didn't use computers in the earlier age of full user agency might not even imagine a world where they fully control their devices. - Advertising. One should not be allowed to advertise "selling" something without handing over full control. - Law. Shrink-wrap licenses should be neutered, software patents limited, DMCA abolished; these are legal moats around developers' power. - Technology. Open software, open hardware, open data, self-hostable services. - Platforms. It's time to treat software as hostile by default, the way an Internet connection is now de facto hostile. The OS needs to be hardened not only against hackers, but also against developers. These are vague generalities, not concrete suggestions, and there are huge obstacles to each. Perhaps others have useful suggestions.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > why should I swear your Hippocratic oath when everyone else is getting rich? One must cultivate one's own garden.

ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago

Should also mention online-only installers a la vs_buildtools from MS and a whole lot vendors more. Want an offline installer? Easy peasy, just - find one in a cobweb-covered thread in an obscure subforum on a vendor's site; - manually compile a list of thousands of workloads your build tools would need, including optional ones, and create an offline installer yourself - using another machine that still has to be online - which will fail anyway if your target machine happens to be really offline; - be told to basically GTFO for being an outmoded Luddite who opposes The Progress.

dijit 4y ago
as a person who worked a lot in isolated environments, this was really frustrating. from google chrome to visual studio: loads of software is extremely difficult to install offline
- MarkSweep 4y ago
  I remember both of these programs you mention not being that hard to install offline. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346 https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-o... The main challenge with VS is trimming languages and features you don’t need. But if you don’t care about size you can just download everything. And it has support for incrementally updating the installer and pruning obsolete packages.
  - dijit 4y ago
    I remember searching the internet for 25 minutes for each of them after discovering (annoyingly) that the installer that is given is not actually going to work offline. The ones you link work, but you really must search for it; its not presented as an easy to find option at all. which is not my default expectation possibly because I was raised in the late 80s/early 90s.
- einpoklum 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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npilk 4y ago

I find this trend particularly ironic as it has come about at the same time as an explosion in the popularity of "user-centered design". It seems like, especially on the web, more and more companies are telling themselves they care about the needs of their users, while at the same time designing more and more user-hostile experiences. I wrote more about this here: https://notes.npilk.com/radically-user-centered https://notes.npilk.com/radically-user-centered

barnabee 4y ago
Strongly agree. A/B testing and equating time spent (“engagement”) and/or money spent with user happiness have a lot to answer for.
- anankaie 4y ago
  One problem is that these techniques - as I have seen them applied - are terrible at analyzing multimodal distributions. They will fail to capture small detractors until they pile up into a feeling of the software being user-hostile, because until then the engagement is not dropping, even though its foundations are eroding.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Reading this again something new jumped out at me: > "I mean it as - software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer." No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work. Malware, in it's broadest sense, has become an industrial scale venture. Technological abuse exists at a system scale. In some ways that's positive, because developers and end-users, being much wiser in 2023 than in 1993 can unite against a common foe. But that won't be easy. The key lies in building relations between developers and end users that completely bypass the "at scale" bandits.

horsawlarway 4y ago
This. None of this software is prioritizing the developer. It's prioritizing value extraction. It's capitalism in it's worst, most naked form. Advertising spend is worth more than a quality product - because we've inverted the classic information problem: Information is no longer scarce and valuable, it's flooding out everything and is mostly worthless noise. Making sensible, educated decisions becomes increasingly harder, and you're presented with an environment designed to cause choice paralysis until you finally cave and just buy the item at the top of list presented to you by Google/Amazon/Apple/Walmart/Etc. That item will be terrible, but it's paid the right protection money to the monopolies (sorry! advertising spend) to keep its spot. --- Can developers win in those situations? Sure - sometimes. But most times they're some poor contracting team paid literal peanuts to create this product, then immediately go through "staffing reductions" to the bare minimum needed for legally required product support. The developers are not the root cause of this - although they are also not absolved.
- kazinator 4y ago
  Most software written will not be used. Nobody will buy it, or even download it if it is free. (Or even FOSS free.) The stuff people complain about is all the rest. But maybe the reason they are complaining about it has to do with how the purveyors figured out how to get it into people's hands. Enough hands to sustain the product. We can almost entirely blame this on the end users. Users vote for software and hardware with their purchase and use decisions. Whenever you have a problem with anything, you're a victim of the poor decision making of a million unsophisticated consumers who voted for that piece of crap to have the revenue stream and funding so that it garnered your attention too. Consumer behavior itself basically creates a barrier of entry to the existence of viable alternatives.

haburka 4y ago

If your articles main solution is “just build what the user needs / asks for” then it comes off as incredibly juvenile and naïve. This is one of the hardest problems in product design. Also they seem fairly oblivious as to why these hardware apps are poorly made and require accounts. It’s because it’s expensive to write software and you already bought the product. Whatever keyboard light program you’re using costs real money for the company to make and maintain, and they’d like to keep costs down.

wpietri 4y ago
> This is one of the hardest problems in product design. True, but it is also one of the easiest. We have known for decades that you can get much better products with little effort. E.g., by doing basic user testing with 5 users and then iterating. We did that at a consumer-facing startup in 2010 by getting 5 people off Craigslist every Tuesday, and we learned useful stuff every week. By the following Tuesday, we'd have new things to try out. It worked great. And all of this was old knowledge even in 2010. Is it true that there are user problems and needs that can't be settled with a quick user test? Sure. There are all sorts of harder problems, with fancier research techniques to match. But given that so few places are even doing the basics, I say we should start there. Just build what (we think) the user needs, and then as soon as possible see if it worked.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Whatever keyboard light program you’re using costs real money for the company to make and maintain, and they’d like to keep costs down. Then just release the hardware specs and let motivated users maintain it past it useful (to the manufacturer) life. Like, I have this Govee thermometer I bought to learn about Bluetooth that needs an app to read out the data stored in it. Last I looked nobody reverse engineered the protocol and they don’t have technical specifications because they want to keep you inside their ecosystem. Someday they will just give up the ghost and all these gadgets will be mostly useless (said thermometer transmits current readings so can always be read with a little work). Yet another of my “when I get motivated enough” projects… —edit— Counterpoint: I have a couple Bluetooth button things which did provide specs and it took me a couple hours of fiddling to get it to fully work with an example program, I push the button and the computer knows it, computer tells it to beep and it beeps, its built in “alert on dropping signal” (so you don’t lose your keys) just works, easy peasy.

doug_durham 4y ago

I think there are a couple of nuggets of useful information in this article, but most of it is asking more a more developer friendly future, not a user centered future. The reason there are apps to control your keyboard color is that's what people want. They don't want the specs of the SPI interface so that they can program their own daemon to talk to it. The reason that different HID device vendors don't share the same app is "why would they ever". Why would you go through the trouble to create the "Universal HID LED color Consortium" with the associated meetings and hack fests to insure interoperability?

scottLobster 4y ago

Fun piece of history regarding business ethics, the mass-unionization of West Virginia coal mines occurred after the mass-unionization of coal mines in other regions. Part of the reason the unionization effort in West Virginia was so fanatical was that part of the deal the unions struck with the mine owners in other regions was that they would unionize West Virginia as fast as possible, otherwise the newly unionized coal mines in other regions couldn't compete with cheaper, non-unionized West Virginia coal miners. Point being, the playing field must be level for ethical business to exist. If you try to act ethically on your own you will lose to a less ethical (but still legal) competitor. Sure if you're dominant enough or niche enough you can get away with being ethical, but if you have hard competition, good luck. You'll maintain your virtue, and they'll maintain their profits, and we'll see who's still around in 5 years. Granted it is possible to overstep and cause a customer revolt, but hoping your competition is that stupid is not an effective strategy.

ethanbond 4y ago
This was also a specific argument FDR made in the fireside chats against child labor: ethical business owners who try not to use child labor are being put out of business by those who do, so we need to step in and correct the market to allow for the ethical to compete with the unethical. Edit: As a brief aside the Fireside Chats are pretty remarkable pieces of public communication. I just can’t imagine a public leader speaking with such a blend of clarity, compassion, and force as what he did. They’re not particularly shallow or short on details, either! He spoke like an adult to a nation of adults - really refreshing.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  point beeing that self regulating markets are a lie
  - largepeepee 4y ago
    Another way to put it is, the endgame of unregulated markets are monopolies.

kazinator 4y ago

A lot of the bullet points actually revolve around hostile hardware.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Or just use open source software if you want developer incentives to be aligned with users instead of fruitlessly asking developers of proprietary software to go against their incentives.

sneak 4y ago
Sadly this is not sufficient. Tools like the Netlify CLI, Mattermost, Bitwarden, and NetData are all open source, but will all still spy on you. Good luck getting patches accepted upstream that remove such malware features.
- twojacobtwo 4y ago
  Source on the bitwarden claim? I've been using it for a while and would like to know for sure if I should switch.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Probably referring to telemetry, the only thing I can find is an old, now resolved issue that was brought in thanks to a dependency on MS SQL on the server side: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/issues/286 https://github.com/bitwarden/server/issues/286
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  It is absolutely sufficient because open source provides a quick and easy remedy — fork. I use Vaultwarden. No spying.
  - sneak 4y ago
    I meant the client. Open source does not provide a remedy, as without an Apple Developer account I can't run a forked client easily.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago

citizenpaul 4y ago

A huge number of those examples is for a reason that makes my skin crawl every time I think about it. Your privacy is simply too valuable to allow you to keep it.

musicale 4y ago
Companies are all too willing to trade user privacy for money. Users are all too willing to give up their privacy for cheaper products.

aiisahik 4y ago

There is always going to be financial incentives to do User-Hostile stuff. Collecting user data to market to them and increase LTV is a no brainer for most product / general managers. There is a market solution to counter the financial motive of making User-Hostile software: Make the lack User-Hostile software a MARKETED FEATURE. - It should be promoted on product description details - Hardware review sites should actively make note of it - There should be curated sites / lists that feature products that are not User-Hostile - There should be a certification body that has a logo that gets plastered on devices / software that has been certified. Don't blame the guys whose design products to maximize consumer LTV - they are just doing their jobs.

alexhsamuel 4y ago
> Don't blame the guys whose design products to maximize consumer LTV - they are just doing their jobs. Mmmmm... how about oil and tobacco CEOs? How about patent trolls? How about actual professional criminals? Where do you draw the line?
- musicale 4y ago
  If ACM actually enforced its code of ethics[1], employees of privacy-violating companies would be banned from ACM conferences and journals. ACM doesn't seem to care though – they just want membership dues. [1] https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
yunwal 4y ago
> they are just doing their jobs Probably my least favorite phrase. If you help make a bad thing knowingly, you have done a bad thing. Period. There’s no 1 evil dictator CEO that deserves all the blame, devs have agency, product managers have agency.

shmerl 4y ago

I'd add to the point of respecting user choices a requirement to be able to update firmware in your piece of hardware without the need for using Windows. If vendors don't want to support every OS, let them make an UEFI bootable image for firmware updating that's not tied to any OS.

college_physics 4y ago

User-hostile software strategy #13 Force users to update apps even if they dont want to and with each update introduce hidden new privacy flags set at your desired default option, guessing correctly that the average user will likely miss it

_Algernon_ 4y ago
Don't forget (re)installing third party software which the user has explicitly uninstalled[1] and resetting default app configurations for no reason[2]. Windows is malware. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/s31m8o/microsoft_update_added_tiktok_to_my_pc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/s31m8o/micro... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055222
ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
Also never mention those flags anywhere in docs, which are shambles anyway in regard of everything beyond the "I'm a power user, I promise I know what I'm doing" banner.. And there are literally hundreds of such flags in e.g. every modern browser.

renjimen 4y ago

This is all a result of short termism. Short term profits from dark behaviours trump long term profits from satisfied customers. Why is this behaviour of publicly traded companies surprising to anyone? It’s not unique to software either. It’s the economic system that needs to change, not the devs.

jacooper 4y ago
100%, I think its really time for regulations. I applaud the EU's recent regulations for tech, especially the digital markets act.
- holyknight 4y ago
  Yeah, EU is really a thriving market for tech and innovation right?
  - yunwal 4y ago
    I would personally give up the “thriving” market if it meant software was developed with users interests in mind. Much of the tech growth in the U.S. doesn’t actually result in higher quality of life in the long run
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    The point of these regulations is acknowledging and asserting that users (and people in general) matter more than a thriving market for tech and innovation - yes, user-hostile software benefits the market, but that's a cost we aren't willing to pay.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    As if that has to do with anything relating to regulation?
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Why do you value tech and innovation over the actual customer experience?

bytesandwich 4y ago

If all these products are so low quality, why do they sell? Do all these businesses have monopolies? Is it possible that we on Hacker news are out of touch with regular users who _prefer_ cloud accounts because they can’t maintain a NAS array to store their own dashcam footage? Maybe people prefer low cost apps that include ads to higher cost apps without ads? That said, the subscription pricing thing IMHO is predatory, like gambling.

knolan 4y ago

Another form of user hostile software is software that is deliberately and inexplicably complex. I’m thinking specifically of ‘professional’ engineering tools. Simulation and CAD software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price, clunky user interfaces (often as a result of glueing together acquired software from a competitor) seemingly to up sell training, and awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!)

plonk 4y ago
> software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager. > awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!) For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.
- knolan 4y ago
  Laziness is hostility for the user. They have a captive market and they see no need to make life easier. These companies have an effective monopoly so they don’t care. Companies like the MathWorks seem to make licensing straightforward. Even Adobe make it easy to push someone out of a session so you can get work done. Others make is a chore. Ansys, Solidworks etc have awful user experiences in comparison.

emodendroket 4y ago

These precepts don't do a whole lot to address the real reasons these things happen, which don't have a lot to do with "to hell with the customer -- we're deliberately going to do things that annoy them!"

trinsic2 4y ago

This is the reason why I switched to OSS[1] completely and only support (where I can) non-predatory SAAS. I'm not sure that its enough though... [1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

jacooper 4y ago
I try to do the same, but its simply not going to matter if the majority still uses big tech and falls for the dark patterns. thats why its really regulation who going to change this, and probably not any individual actions.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  If a large enough minority use FOSS-only systems, and support their development (with donations of money and/or effort) - that is enough to prop up sound and capable alternatives which gradually attract users. Twenty years ago, it was rather difficult to suggest to clueless users to use a FOSS-based system. Today, it's quite realistic. Not everything is in an ideal state, but still.
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    I was reading you comment and the obsidian note taking app came to mind in regards to how supporting foss makes an impact over time. Look at valve supporting Linux and look where we're at today with Linux gaming. I think you're right It makes a difference over time. Look at all the gamers using the steam deck. They don't even know the platform is based on foss. And that in and of it self has the impart to change where we are headed. The masses don't really need to know what is happening. They just benefit from the supports of foss
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Obsidian is not Foss, logseg is

frankohn 4y ago

The fault is to the users that are not able to say "no" to these bad practices. The author of the post seems to use Windows which is the worst in term of crap software and abusive practices. Just use Linux, you will have less but at least you will not be abused.

myth2018 4y ago

> “software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer.” Shall we not forget the software that only cares about aesthetic aspirations of its UX designers

mianos 4y ago
The growing use of light grey text on an off white background "for aesthetics" pretty much demonstrates the level of respect some have for users.

robertoandred 4y ago

DMGs are not binaries...

kmoser 4y ago

Flowchart says, "Did any user ask for this?" Even with an entire top-down team dedicated to serving the user and not corporate interests (which would be all but impossible, except in the world of open source), you'll always have a few stray users asking for features that not everybody wants, and there will be perpetual arguments about which features would benefit most users. At the end of the day, the problem isn't that software is user-hostile, or written for engineers or corporate surveillance, but that nobody will ever agree 100% on what features should go into any piece of software.

holyknight 4y ago

No, almost all users don't even know what they want. So sadly if you want to appeal to a large audience you need to put guardrails everywhere so user don't fck up and then sue you or make you a hell PR campaign. You can only have the luxury of giving user freedom when you appeal to a niche market, your userbase is savvy and they have ownership on what day do on your app (if they fck up they won't blame your for it)

sound1 4y ago

Lightly went through the article and i agree with the sentiments. We deserve a better desktop computing experience, and cross platform programs are preferred. Yes, but how about the software other people want to use or need? Can we make their effort easier with our software and make a business out of it adding value to both? I think it is one area everyone needs to think about. You help your social circle, try to understand their problems and think about solutions they need to make their business successful, and if you are capable of delivering that, then great. Else you become a consultant. I believe this is how the businesses were built in the early days.

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bhauer 4y ago

> Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. You need to install another app, that will be used just for this one device, to sync things. The app inconspicuously asks for location access while at it, and eats 85% of your CPU at all times, even when idle. This one has to be an iPhone and iTunes. Absolutely nonsensical levels of obfuscation to getting data on and off. iPhones can't connect to network disks on the local network, they don't appear as mass storage devices if connected via USB, and the software they require--iTunes--is an absolute cluster. If only Android weren't its own complete disaster for different reasons.

scarface74 4y ago
You can connect a phone to a server using the built in Files App https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devices-or-servers-iph8d8f0f1a0/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devi... I haven’t tried this https://helpdesk.macroplant.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019027213-Mount-your-iPhone-or-iPad-as-an-external-drive https://helpdesk.macroplant.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600190272...
bspammer 4y ago
I get that it’s only for Macs, but Airdrop has basically solved this for me. I’d never install iTunes.

b0rat 4y ago

[dead]

tomxor 4y ago

> "would any user benefit from this"? [yes, no] This doesn't work... Unnecessary user accounts, telemetry, inefficient electron app etc etc: It's possible to genuinely argue they all ultimately benefit the user (e.g market research, developer efficiency). Some people would use this to push their agenda. It's also not a good idea to reject ideas that do not directly benefit the user, because many of those are good. What's missing is quantitative and qualitative assessment. Sticking to the decision tree format, that node needs to be a continuum. e.g "does-it-benefit-the-user" changes to "cost-to-user/benefit-to-user > x". You can also distinguish between quality of benefits and costs by weighting the inputs... and while we are at it "cost-to-bottom-line/benefit-to-user > x" would remove a lot of busy work. But realistically this is reasoned about in non mathematical terms, effects are nuanced and the more you dig the more you find. The best approach is human and imperfect, but can at least be considerate of the user experience as a whole. This I believe is the heart of the problem: Decisions being made in the abstract when not appropriate, e.g a department only considering the direct effects to that department and ignoring effects to the ultimate purpose of the department->company->service/product. Perhaps it's just the result of over siloed workers without any empathy or concern beyond their short term personal benefit.

userbinator 4y ago

All those examples about hardware remind me of a few counterexamples. Want to use a dashcam for your car and sync the data to your local computer? You need to create an account and connect an app, even though you just want to do local sync. This seems to be a feature of the more expensive models only. All the cheap and generic ones just record to a memory card. Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. You need to install another app, that will be used just for this one device, to sync things. I think this started with Apple and the iPod. Meanwhile, all the other generic media players were indeed USB mass storage devices. I remember a friend choosing to get a cheaper lookalike clone of the iPod Shuffle specifically after reading that the real thing wouldn't just play files you copied to it, despite how it looked like a USB drive. As a bonus, the clone even had an FM radio. Another counterexample is my experience with an unbranded drawing tablet ---that even came with driver source code on the CD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060411 It seems that whenever companies grow big enough or get some sort of grand "vision" to "disrupt" or something similar, they become user-hostile. Those which just focus on making product and don't try to make a name for themselves, and possibly are so small they barely have resources to even do so, are not. They won't have the resources to spend on setting up and maintaining services to keep users on a leash. In the flow chart I would make the "Yes" of the "Would any user benefit from this?" question go to another question: "Are you sure users will benefit or are you just thinking that to justify it yourself?"

Nux 4y ago

I find it ironic that he's (very rightfully) complaining about all that stuff and arsehole designs and what not, but in the "about me" he's proudly working for Microsoft, the daddies of dark patterns and other shady stuff.

sattoshi 4y ago
What dark patterns do “Microsoft Identity Platform SDKs” have? Or do you expect him to go pick a fight with a random PM from the Windows team?
- Nux 4y ago
  I don't expect anything, I just find it ironic.

_siis 4y ago

This article misses the point. Its not about the developers, its about the people driving the developers. If you take anti-trust, wiretapping, and other existing laws like the constitution and applied it rigorously you wouldn't have these issues. These companies have been allowed to spy on their customers as an indirect arm of government without being held to the same laws governments are held to, and worse to make a profit off it (i.e. 4th Amendment). If you take government money out of the monetization game, and enforce existing laws like anti-trust, this behavior goes away almost immediately because there is no financial incentive and many disincentives (i.e. prison and fines). Its not like this hasn't happened in the past. Read up on the Stasi, and other socialist systems. You see the same fundamental problems going back thousands of years on that side of the economic system. You either have one of two factors driving economies. The division of labor which historically protects and rewards people for being ingenuous with strong property rights, and Corruption which offers incentive to a small group of people to make a system work. The former is self-moderating as long you don't have a Ponzi or Fraud going on, and the latter is unstable over time because people get old, age and die eventually, and competence isn't rewarded.

0xedd 4y ago

Step 1: Don't use Windows, Mac or Android.

creatable 4y ago

dmg and deb files are not binaries, they just contain binaries.