8 ms·

Kill the "user": Musings of a disillusioned technologist

176 points by tobr 2y ago

kevingadd 2y ago
I think this string of questions from the middle of the post really gets to the heart of it: ⁃ Does the “user” feel respected by the software? ⁃ How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”? ⁃ How does the software fit into the rest of the “users” lifestyle? ⁃ Does this software help the “user” perform a task/entertain them without coercion? A lot of modern software looks really bad if evaluated through the lens of these four questions.
- dartos 2y ago
  Yeah… it’s awful. The user is often not the end customer of any software, so it’s not optimized for their benefit.
  - amelius 2y ago
    So, kill the advertising monetization scheme.
    - andrepd 2y ago
      The more I think of it the more I conclude that advertisement truly is the root of so much that is rotten in the modern world.
      - Dansvidania 2y ago
        advertising is a necessity, IMO. The problem is the adversarial way it is done. How would you exercise your free choice of products, if you don't know about them? Selling and advertising could be and has been done in a "positive-sum" way, it's just not as effective. I would point to the _under-regulated_ stock market as the problem, causing short term profit being highly incentivised... but then again that's a slippery slope too and I don't have the macro-economics chops to propose where exactly is the problem and how to fix it :/
        amelius 2y ago
        > How would you exercise your free choice of products, if you don't know about them? The problem is that advertising does two things: 1. inform people of the availability of the product/service 2. persuade people to buy said product Point 2 is the evil part. Note however that we can easily remove 2 but still have 1. For example, show the information when the user wants to see it, as opposed to shoving it in their face (distraction) when they were doing something else. We could bring back yellow pages. Or have dedicated websites where users can search for products and services. It is not rocket science.
        Dansvidania 2y ago
        I don't disagree, but I would still argue that it would not work as well. The only way I'd see this working would be with heavy government intervention, and I think the british figure of speech for that is "fat chance".
        amelius 2y ago
        Yes, government should intervene here. But there is another figure of speech that goes like "don't let good be the enemy of perfect" ...
        Dansvidania 2y ago
        what would be the "good-not-perfect" solution?
        card_zero 2y ago
        Keeping it in a designated place, where you have to go to look for it deliberately? Like yellow pages, as suggested? Sounds good to me. When advertising was new, people really liked it. It sold newspapers, it was the thing people wanted before news.
        amelius 2y ago
        It probably needs more thought but fines for anyone who does not comply. You will still get ads that slip through, but it can be a good start. I'd also like to point at tobacco commercials which are banned in many countries now. This ban works (it's probably not perfect but I cannot remember seeing such an ad recently, even online).
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  > How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”? We need to talk about Jira...
atoav 2y ago
This is why I predominantly use CLI tools where it makes sense. Two CLI tools are more alike than two AI tools, theh tend to respect the user and their intelligence more, there is no sign in, it works together with other software and it will work for decades. I'd love if GUI applications were similarly stringent or even had the goal of creating an ecosystem, but they don't, they are competing against each others trying to grasp user attention, bending them to their wills, locking them in. Not all of them of course, but the mental overhead with CLI is much smaller.
- hello_computer 2y ago
  CLI presently selects for users with reading comprehension, who are a hard sell for trojan horses. If the great unwashed ever took a shine to CLIs, CLIs would become just as bad. You can already see a bit of this in PowerShell (i.e. marketing & telemetry).
tobr 2y ago
I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in this article frankly makes me feel somewhat embarrassed to describe myself as a UX designer. Maybe I should start to think of myself as a… personal computing designer? small software designer? dignity designer? (No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”.)
- atoav 2y ago
  UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project. Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste). If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine. A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is. Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience” Much. "Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity… And Dignitas. "Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.
- gyomu 2y ago
  We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology). The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on. “User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals. Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.
hello_computer 2y ago
Yes cyborg. The more you unite with the machine, the more you will be used like one. There are no free rides. No calculating or politicking your way out of the metaphysical toll.
freetonik 2y ago
I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ > User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our A/B-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent? Tasteless, but I felt, and still feel, like the notion of a user is truly lost. Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.
- rjbwork 2y ago
  >Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships. Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".
- crabbone 2y ago
  > Somehow? Oh no! Working with end-users is madness. It's tiring, exhausting, counterproductive. Users don't know what they want, and will demand the worst possible solution for them. They will resist and circumvent security measures in the program. They will make sure to use the program in an unintended way and then endlessly complain about it not working in the way it was never meant to work. The day I transitioned from B2C to B2B my emotional well-being improved tenfold. Now, on a more serious note: making an individual user facing product is more expensive. It's easier to pitch and sell the product to an organization managing multiple users because the organization will agree and compromise on many aspects of the product, and then will create internal organizational policy for its users to use the product only in permitted ways. It will make feedback and improvements requests expensive for the users and will serve both as the customer surveyor and as the first tier of the customer support for the software shop. It's a match made in heaven (and that's how Microsoft and the likes built their empire). There's nothing surprising about that.
rogual 2y ago
You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business". Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday. Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field. And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself. This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find. There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word. One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  > At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.
  - misnome 2y ago
Nasrudith 2y ago
There were wiffs of it before, but I immediately knew the weiter was full of crap once he whipped out the communist-conspiratorial view of Taylorism. Talk about a red-flag!
huijzer 2y ago
One big problem, I think, is how big tech gained monopolies and now could live easily for years. This excites me about AI. It’s a disruptive technology that is likely to disrupt some of the big tech just like Google disrupted Altavista. Big tech will probably struggle to adapt whereas small teams will come out of nowhere with better solutions, see Cursor AI and DeepSeek as recent examples.
lokimedes 2y ago
I like the idea of either augmented computing or calm computing. Either it is fitting comfortable on/in me, or it is seamlessly integrated in the ambient environment. The basic idea that we are a mechanistic factory line, where computing are industrial tools, and I have to master my role in the process, or get my hands malested is sicking. I really hope the LLM wave makes this view realistic. We still mostly see tools that enhances our use of tools, but I believe LLM's strongest functionality is that it provides efficient translation between human needs and machine instructions.
- skydhash 2y ago
  What about just computing? Gving us tools and the manuals that comes with them. You bought a computer, you bought/get a set of software that helps accomplish some tasks and that’s it. Mac and macOS used to be that, but they’ve wrapped it up in harzadous “services” brought by MBA. Windows used to be that, more versatile and fragile, but they’ve destroyed it. Linux is that, but you have to learn CLI speak.
samiv 2y ago
Based on my 25 yoe in the industry the article is extremely cynical but unfortunately very much spot on. Today in the corporate world the MBAs are running the show and they need continuous, growth and engagement. All needs of the developer and they manifest themselves in the software as features that are only there to serve the needs of the developer, not the user often combined with (deliberate) dark patterns and confusing UX just drive up the KPIs. What a load of BS. And the user often has no choice but to eat their frustration due to lack of alternatives, corporate/workplace policies or the alternatives being equally bad. Unfortunately I expect the whole concept of "PC" as in Personal Computing is going to go away and will be replaced by "locked down, you don't own shit computing". All the major platforms today are more or less locked down, Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows is on its way. I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps. They can shove all candycrush, azure etc garbage in the users face who have no choice but to eat it. Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha. Hopefully I can retire soon.
- WhyNotHugo 2y ago
  > I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps. This is already the case in lower end hardware. > Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha. I fear that a lot of mayor software is suffering from a similar issue. Targeting a fantasy “user” who is both literate enough to install, maintain and use Linux, but illiterate enough that displaying keyboard shortcuts or showing a menu when right clicking would confuse them. There’s little effort to stabilise software. The priority is often “I want all apps to use my chosen theme”, and not “I want apps that work out of the box”. And there’s a huge trend of “X for gnome” or “Y for KDE”. Portable software has a become a niche thing.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    I think a bifurcation is likely. You can't program these locked-down devices/systems on themselves. At the end of the day, some of us have to be able to write the code that makes these things work. So I think there will always be "unlocked" or "developer" operating systems and hardware. But those systems will be considered "too powerful" or "too dangerous" for mundane tasks, especially entertainment. Right now, the legacy operating systems like Windows and macOS are trying to straddle the line. I think in the not too distant future you'll have to choose between being able to run a debugger and hack the OS vs. being able to watch shows, play video games, and access your bank account. I'm not exactly sure how the split will happen, it could be through totally different ecosystems, or an irreversible flag in the firmware, or maybe something else entirely, but it seems almost inevitable at this point.
openrisk 2y ago
> Folk music is enmeshed in a particular culture. It is knowledge transmitted across generations, but which evolves to meet the challenges of the times and changing sensibilities. This is a beautiful and unexpected connection. Drawing analogies between software and other forms of cultural expression is a long overdue mental shift. The use of linguistic expressions such "tech" and "engineering" highlights the prevailing desire to think of software as some sort of thing apart, less social, less political (and thus something we can profitably pursue with fewer moral qualms). The switch from the original mentality of software as a product (literally shipped in a box), to the current business model of "user as a product" and software merely being the bait and hook is so profound that we are not really talking about the same industry anymore. Not clear where the strange and twisted journey of software would lead. The infinite reproducibility at zero cost is not something current economic systems can handle. The enshittification might continue, further enshittifying society or open source becomes the norm.
zombot 2y ago
I wish I could call it cynicism, but it's just the unvarnished truth.
mediumsmart 2y ago
“Users” are a commodity, a hot one perhaps, but like any other commodity, can be bought and sold." that reminds me of an ancient saying - change your mind and you change your world
PaulHoule 2y ago
I like the sentiment but the article itself ought to be edited to be 1/3 the length, certain themes should be broken out. The story of 'cyborg software' should be told in depth, for those of us who live that dream it doesn't need a lot of explanation but for other people it needs to be spelled out. There are some interesting business patterns such as 'investment than disinvestment' which is common in communications applications. An application like Zoom, for instance, needs a lot of engineering work to deal with old computers, new computers, people with four cameras attached to their computers, who have slow internet connections, etc. A 'just works' experience is essential and the money is there to support it. A decade later it will be in a harvesting phase, the money won't be there to fix funny little bugs, and now it 'just doesn't work'. There are other problems around recurring subscriptions, for which Creative Cloud is hardly the worst example. See the gaming industry, which has moved away from experiences that are 20-120 hours to wanting to be the one game you play for decades
ickelbawd 2y ago
I’ve been coming around to a similar point of view that modern software technology removes human agency. Everything is being automated—we thought it would free up our time for other things, but to my eyes we’ve become less free. AI is only going to accelerate this phenomenon—robbing us of even higher levels of agency as well as our ability to think independently and deeply. All in the name of efficiency and engagement. I struggle with this daily since I work in and have been steeped in tech for decades. I used to love it. Part of me still sees the good that modern technology has enabled too. I’m not sure what the solution is here besides logging off the internet and returning to live in the real world with real human interaction and slower, more meaningful connections.
teucris 2y ago
I’ve read a lot of articles like this over the past decade, and books, and papers. I agree with most of it: we need to bring technology back “to the people”. But everything I’ve read, including this, has two problems: 1. Consistently, people reminisce about older tech that they loved, and wishing they could have stuff like that again. But the reality is that people like us, on HN, are not the average person. The tools we adored were great to us because we knew how to wield their power and felt empowered to do so. What parts of those applications could the broader population use easily? 2. What should we be using to create personal/folk/situated software? How do we even accomplish this goal? Again, we (HN readers) know the tools and feel empowered. But for the ideas in this article to come to light, many more people need to be empowered to solve their own problems and tailor their tools to their needs. What technologies should they use? I never get a good answer to that one.
foobarbecue 2y ago
Words tend to accumulate negative connotations, and then it's tempting to discard or ban them for synonyms. I agree with most of what's said in the article, but the theme that calling a spade a shovel will fix things is silly. Misaligned incentives have to be realigned, and that means stepping back from extreme crapitalism.
layer8 2y ago
This reminds me of the concept of “user” as presented in the 1982 Tron movie, where users were regarded as sovereigns with god-like powers by the software (“programs”). The notion of “user” in the article is almost the reverse. We should return to that older conception.
K0balt 2y ago
The shitshow that has washed over the internet is about to become a parched wasteland as human eyes turn away, towards AI ux. The internet will become a place for AI agents to search out services to provide to their users through their own UX , be it voice, audiovisual, text, or some kind of universal AI “desktop OS” interface. API endpoints will be the new UX, and adversarial prompt engineering will be the new “dark pattern”. The internet will become a place that your AI goes to discover and do things for you.

176 points by tobr 2y ago

I think this string of questions from the middle of the post really gets to the heart of it: ⁃ Does the “user” feel respected by the software? ⁃ How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”? ⁃ How does the software fit into the rest of the “users” lifestyle? ⁃ Does this software help the “user” perform a task/entertain them without coercion? A lot of modern software looks really bad if evaluated through the lens of these four questions.

dartos 2y ago
Yeah… it’s awful. The user is often not the end customer of any software, so it’s not optimized for their benefit.
- amelius 2y ago
  So, kill the advertising monetization scheme.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    The more I think of it the more I conclude that advertisement truly is the root of so much that is rotten in the modern world.
    - Dansvidania 2y ago
      advertising is a necessity, IMO. The problem is the adversarial way it is done. How would you exercise your free choice of products, if you don't know about them? Selling and advertising could be and has been done in a "positive-sum" way, it's just not as effective. I would point to the _under-regulated_ stock market as the problem, causing short term profit being highly incentivised... but then again that's a slippery slope too and I don't have the macro-economics chops to propose where exactly is the problem and how to fix it :/
      - amelius 2y ago
        > How would you exercise your free choice of products, if you don't know about them? The problem is that advertising does two things: 1. inform people of the availability of the product/service 2. persuade people to buy said product Point 2 is the evil part. Note however that we can easily remove 2 but still have 1. For example, show the information when the user wants to see it, as opposed to shoving it in their face (distraction) when they were doing something else. We could bring back yellow pages. Or have dedicated websites where users can search for products and services. It is not rocket science.
        Dansvidania 2y ago
        I don't disagree, but I would still argue that it would not work as well. The only way I'd see this working would be with heavy government intervention, and I think the british figure of speech for that is "fat chance".
        amelius 2y ago
        Yes, government should intervene here. But there is another figure of speech that goes like "don't let good be the enemy of perfect" ...
        Dansvidania 2y ago
        what would be the "good-not-perfect" solution?
        card_zero 2y ago
        Keeping it in a designated place, where you have to go to look for it deliberately? Like yellow pages, as suggested? Sounds good to me. When advertising was new, people really liked it. It sold newspapers, it was the thing people wanted before news.
        amelius 2y ago
        It probably needs more thought but fines for anyone who does not comply. You will still get ads that slip through, but it can be a good start. I'd also like to point at tobacco commercials which are banned in many countries now. This ban works (it's probably not perfect but I cannot remember seeing such an ad recently, even online).
dist-epoch 2y ago
> How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”? We need to talk about Jira...

atoav 2y ago

This is why I predominantly use CLI tools where it makes sense. Two CLI tools are more alike than two AI tools, theh tend to respect the user and their intelligence more, there is no sign in, it works together with other software and it will work for decades. I'd love if GUI applications were similarly stringent or even had the goal of creating an ecosystem, but they don't, they are competing against each others trying to grasp user attention, bending them to their wills, locking them in. Not all of them of course, but the mental overhead with CLI is much smaller.

hello_computer 2y ago
CLI presently selects for users with reading comprehension, who are a hard sell for trojan horses. If the great unwashed ever took a shine to CLIs, CLIs would become just as bad. You can already see a bit of this in PowerShell (i.e. marketing & telemetry).

tobr 2y ago

I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in this article frankly makes me feel somewhat embarrassed to describe myself as a UX designer. Maybe I should start to think of myself as a… personal computing designer? small software designer? dignity designer? (No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”.)

atoav 2y ago
UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project. Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste). If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine. A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is. Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.
ben_w 2y ago
> No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience” Much. "Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity… And Dignitas. "Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.
gyomu 2y ago
We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology). The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on. “User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals. Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.

hello_computer 2y ago

Yes cyborg. The more you unite with the machine, the more you will be used like one. There are no free rides. No calculating or politicking your way out of the metaphysical toll.

freetonik 2y ago

I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ > User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our A/B-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent? Tasteless, but I felt, and still feel, like the notion of a user is truly lost. Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.

rjbwork 2y ago
>Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships. Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".
crabbone 2y ago
> Somehow? Oh no! Working with end-users is madness. It's tiring, exhausting, counterproductive. Users don't know what they want, and will demand the worst possible solution for them. They will resist and circumvent security measures in the program. They will make sure to use the program in an unintended way and then endlessly complain about it not working in the way it was never meant to work. The day I transitioned from B2C to B2B my emotional well-being improved tenfold. Now, on a more serious note: making an individual user facing product is more expensive. It's easier to pitch and sell the product to an organization managing multiple users because the organization will agree and compromise on many aspects of the product, and then will create internal organizational policy for its users to use the product only in permitted ways. It will make feedback and improvements requests expensive for the users and will serve both as the customer surveyor and as the first tier of the customer support for the software shop. It's a match made in heaven (and that's how Microsoft and the likes built their empire). There's nothing surprising about that.

rogual 2y ago

You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business". Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday. Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field. And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself. This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find. There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word. One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.

dist-epoch 2y ago
> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.
- misnome 2y ago

Nasrudith 2y ago

There were wiffs of it before, but I immediately knew the weiter was full of crap once he whipped out the communist-conspiratorial view of Taylorism. Talk about a red-flag!

huijzer 2y ago

One big problem, I think, is how big tech gained monopolies and now could live easily for years. This excites me about AI. It’s a disruptive technology that is likely to disrupt some of the big tech just like Google disrupted Altavista. Big tech will probably struggle to adapt whereas small teams will come out of nowhere with better solutions, see Cursor AI and DeepSeek as recent examples.

lokimedes 2y ago

I like the idea of either augmented computing or calm computing. Either it is fitting comfortable on/in me, or it is seamlessly integrated in the ambient environment. The basic idea that we are a mechanistic factory line, where computing are industrial tools, and I have to master my role in the process, or get my hands malested is sicking. I really hope the LLM wave makes this view realistic. We still mostly see tools that enhances our use of tools, but I believe LLM's strongest functionality is that it provides efficient translation between human needs and machine instructions.

skydhash 2y ago
What about just computing? Gving us tools and the manuals that comes with them. You bought a computer, you bought/get a set of software that helps accomplish some tasks and that’s it. Mac and macOS used to be that, but they’ve wrapped it up in harzadous “services” brought by MBA. Windows used to be that, more versatile and fragile, but they’ve destroyed it. Linux is that, but you have to learn CLI speak.

samiv 2y ago

Based on my 25 yoe in the industry the article is extremely cynical but unfortunately very much spot on. Today in the corporate world the MBAs are running the show and they need continuous, growth and engagement. All needs of the developer and they manifest themselves in the software as features that are only there to serve the needs of the developer, not the user often combined with (deliberate) dark patterns and confusing UX just drive up the KPIs. What a load of BS. And the user often has no choice but to eat their frustration due to lack of alternatives, corporate/workplace policies or the alternatives being equally bad. Unfortunately I expect the whole concept of "PC" as in Personal Computing is going to go away and will be replaced by "locked down, you don't own shit computing". All the major platforms today are more or less locked down, Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows is on its way. I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps. They can shove all candycrush, azure etc garbage in the users face who have no choice but to eat it. Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha. Hopefully I can retire soon.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago
> I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps. This is already the case in lower end hardware. > Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha. I fear that a lot of mayor software is suffering from a similar issue. Targeting a fantasy “user” who is both literate enough to install, maintain and use Linux, but illiterate enough that displaying keyboard shortcuts or showing a menu when right clicking would confuse them. There’s little effort to stabilise software. The priority is often “I want all apps to use my chosen theme”, and not “I want apps that work out of the box”. And there’s a huge trend of “X for gnome” or “Y for KDE”. Portable software has a become a niche thing.
- kbolino 2y ago
  I think a bifurcation is likely. You can't program these locked-down devices/systems on themselves. At the end of the day, some of us have to be able to write the code that makes these things work. So I think there will always be "unlocked" or "developer" operating systems and hardware. But those systems will be considered "too powerful" or "too dangerous" for mundane tasks, especially entertainment. Right now, the legacy operating systems like Windows and macOS are trying to straddle the line. I think in the not too distant future you'll have to choose between being able to run a debugger and hack the OS vs. being able to watch shows, play video games, and access your bank account. I'm not exactly sure how the split will happen, it could be through totally different ecosystems, or an irreversible flag in the firmware, or maybe something else entirely, but it seems almost inevitable at this point.

openrisk 2y ago

> Folk music is enmeshed in a particular culture. It is knowledge transmitted across generations, but which evolves to meet the challenges of the times and changing sensibilities. This is a beautiful and unexpected connection. Drawing analogies between software and other forms of cultural expression is a long overdue mental shift. The use of linguistic expressions such "tech" and "engineering" highlights the prevailing desire to think of software as some sort of thing apart, less social, less political (and thus something we can profitably pursue with fewer moral qualms). The switch from the original mentality of software as a product (literally shipped in a box), to the current business model of "user as a product" and software merely being the bait and hook is so profound that we are not really talking about the same industry anymore. Not clear where the strange and twisted journey of software would lead. The infinite reproducibility at zero cost is not something current economic systems can handle. The enshittification might continue, further enshittifying society or open source becomes the norm.

zombot 2y ago

I wish I could call it cynicism, but it's just the unvarnished truth.

mediumsmart 2y ago

“Users” are a commodity, a hot one perhaps, but like any other commodity, can be bought and sold." that reminds me of an ancient saying - change your mind and you change your world

PaulHoule 2y ago

I like the sentiment but the article itself ought to be edited to be 1/3 the length, certain themes should be broken out. The story of 'cyborg software' should be told in depth, for those of us who live that dream it doesn't need a lot of explanation but for other people it needs to be spelled out. There are some interesting business patterns such as 'investment than disinvestment' which is common in communications applications. An application like Zoom, for instance, needs a lot of engineering work to deal with old computers, new computers, people with four cameras attached to their computers, who have slow internet connections, etc. A 'just works' experience is essential and the money is there to support it. A decade later it will be in a harvesting phase, the money won't be there to fix funny little bugs, and now it 'just doesn't work'. There are other problems around recurring subscriptions, for which Creative Cloud is hardly the worst example. See the gaming industry, which has moved away from experiences that are 20-120 hours to wanting to be the one game you play for decades

ickelbawd 2y ago

I’ve been coming around to a similar point of view that modern software technology removes human agency. Everything is being automated—we thought it would free up our time for other things, but to my eyes we’ve become less free. AI is only going to accelerate this phenomenon—robbing us of even higher levels of agency as well as our ability to think independently and deeply. All in the name of efficiency and engagement. I struggle with this daily since I work in and have been steeped in tech for decades. I used to love it. Part of me still sees the good that modern technology has enabled too. I’m not sure what the solution is here besides logging off the internet and returning to live in the real world with real human interaction and slower, more meaningful connections.

teucris 2y ago

I’ve read a lot of articles like this over the past decade, and books, and papers. I agree with most of it: we need to bring technology back “to the people”. But everything I’ve read, including this, has two problems: 1. Consistently, people reminisce about older tech that they loved, and wishing they could have stuff like that again. But the reality is that people like us, on HN, are not the average person. The tools we adored were great to us because we knew how to wield their power and felt empowered to do so. What parts of those applications could the broader population use easily? 2. What should we be using to create personal/folk/situated software? How do we even accomplish this goal? Again, we (HN readers) know the tools and feel empowered. But for the ideas in this article to come to light, many more people need to be empowered to solve their own problems and tailor their tools to their needs. What technologies should they use? I never get a good answer to that one.

foobarbecue 2y ago

Words tend to accumulate negative connotations, and then it's tempting to discard or ban them for synonyms. I agree with most of what's said in the article, but the theme that calling a spade a shovel will fix things is silly. Misaligned incentives have to be realigned, and that means stepping back from extreme crapitalism.

layer8 2y ago

This reminds me of the concept of “user” as presented in the 1982 Tron movie, where users were regarded as sovereigns with god-like powers by the software (“programs”). The notion of “user” in the article is almost the reverse. We should return to that older conception.

K0balt 2y ago

The shitshow that has washed over the internet is about to become a parched wasteland as human eyes turn away, towards AI ux. The internet will become a place for AI agents to search out services to provide to their users through their own UX , be it voice, audiovisual, text, or some kind of universal AI “desktop OS” interface. API endpoints will be the new UX, and adversarial prompt engineering will be the new “dark pattern”. The internet will become a place that your AI goes to discover and do things for you.