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This is a plague on the software industry. No one wants a new design language every two years, or all the buttons in the frontend to be moved to different place

This is a plague on the software industry. No one wants a new design language every two years, or all the buttons in the frontend to be moved to different places with different icons. It's not "innovative" or "exciting" or "friendly." It wastes whole lifetimes worth of time for the users. Whole cottage industries are devoted to retraining on the pointless changes. Yet it always happens anyway. I'm not sure how incentives could be restructured to stop this kind of churn, but if left unchecked it can kill whole companies.

hamburglar 3y ago
Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of complaining about how bandcamp’s UI is “stale” or “outdated” and as far as I can tell, what that means is it still works and does all the stuff it needs to do, but it would look different if it was built today and that bothers people. I don’t really get it, but then again, I still use Craigslist and old.reddit. Edit: although, full disclosure, I haven’t looked at Reddit in months so if they shut down the old interface as part of the recent fit of user-hostility, I haven’t noticed.
- WCSTombs 3y ago
  old.reddit.com still works.
gspencley 3y ago
As a user who absolutely hates un-requested change being shoved down my throat: I can actually see it from both sides. Innovation almost always looks like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to "break" things to figure out what can be improved. The problem is that we've gone all in on SaaS and pushed updates. Pushed updates were a huge win for security, and SaaS has some pros for some users and certain niches. But long gone are the days where a company would invest time and money into beta test periods where they'd try out new features on focus groups who would give feedback and then the rest of us would wait for reviews from the early adopters before deciding if the upgrade costs and risks were worth it. These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time. That has been the real plague on the software industry IMO. At least, it has ruined my enjoyment of computers and tech for the most part, and further driven to me towards native open source software (which I already used anyway, I just cling to it harder now because I feel like it is under threat). Now get off my lawn.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time. This is exactly why I don't use SaaS stuff, nor software that forces updates.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
That hasn't happened at BC. What has happened, for example: listening parties. Not a massive feature, but no doubt something that required a few person-years of effort to get right (and they did). What hasn't happened but should: "buy my wishlist, now" (again, not crazy hard, but probably a good few person-months to get right. BC's basic page layout and page flow have not changed noticeably in years. Thankfully!

hamburglar 3y ago

Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of complaining about how bandcamp’s UI is “stale” or “outdated” and as far as I can tell, what that means is it still works and does all the stuff it needs to do, but it would look different if it was built today and that bothers people. I don’t really get it, but then again, I still use Craigslist and old.reddit. Edit: although, full disclosure, I haven’t looked at Reddit in months so if they shut down the old interface as part of the recent fit of user-hostility, I haven’t noticed.

WCSTombs 3y ago
old.reddit.com still works.

gspencley 3y ago

As a user who absolutely hates un-requested change being shoved down my throat: I can actually see it from both sides. Innovation almost always looks like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to "break" things to figure out what can be improved. The problem is that we've gone all in on SaaS and pushed updates. Pushed updates were a huge win for security, and SaaS has some pros for some users and certain niches. But long gone are the days where a company would invest time and money into beta test periods where they'd try out new features on focus groups who would give feedback and then the rest of us would wait for reviews from the early adopters before deciding if the upgrade costs and risks were worth it. These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time. That has been the real plague on the software industry IMO. At least, it has ruined my enjoyment of computers and tech for the most part, and further driven to me towards native open source software (which I already used anyway, I just cling to it harder now because I feel like it is under threat). Now get off my lawn.

JohnFen 3y ago
> These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time. This is exactly why I don't use SaaS stuff, nor software that forces updates.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

That hasn't happened at BC. What has happened, for example: listening parties. Not a massive feature, but no doubt something that required a few person-years of effort to get right (and they did). What hasn't happened but should: "buy my wishlist, now" (again, not crazy hard, but probably a good few person-months to get right. BC's basic page layout and page flow have not changed noticeably in years. Thankfully!