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The problem is that so many things have been monopolized or oligopolized by equally-mediocre actors so that quality ultimately no longer matters because it's no
by Nextgrid 9mo ago
The problem is that so many things have been monopolized or oligopolized by equally-mediocre actors so that quality ultimately no longer matters because it's not like people have any options.
You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget.
Apply the same for software (have you seen how bad tech is lately?) or basically any kind of vertical with a nontrivial barrier to entry where someone can't just say "this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend".
- nicbou 9mo agoYou are right. We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource. It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment. I don't work for the public transit company; I introduce immigrants to Berlin's public transit. To answer to the broader question, good documentation is one of the many little things that affect how you feel about a company. The BVG clearly cares about that, because their marketing department is famously competent. Good documentation also means that fewer people will queue at their service centre and waste an employee's time. Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service. Besides, how people feels about the public transit company does matter, because their funding is partly a political question. No one will come to defend a much-hated, customer-hostile service.
- apercu 9mo ago“It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment.” Thank you. I love it when someone poetically captures a feeling I’ve been having so succinctly.
- randmeerkat 9mo ago> Thank you. I love it when someone poetically captures a feeling I’ve been having so succinctly. It’s almost like they’re a professional writer…
- apercu 9mo agoJust giving a human a compliment.
- bell-cot 9mo agoEnshittificartelization?
- alameenpd 9mo agoIt’s almost like they are a professional writer
- publicdebates 9mo agoWord for word, 53 minutes later? Why? I have exactly 1 guess but am waiting to say it.
- fainpul 9mo agoHis other comment in this thread is also a clone of someone else's comment.
- bookofjoe 9mo agoHis or its?
- publicdebates 9mo agoAnd it happened after I wrote that comment. Which means I replied to a bot. I am officially retiring from social media.
- alameenpd 9mo agoI'm not a bot lmao. and dont retire cause of this . sorry for that but this was a genuine though and didnt mean to "copy" you or anyone . And im new to hackernews lol
- apercu 9mo agoThanks for reinforcing the point. Repetition is always the clearest form of insight.
- apercu 9mo agoSarcasm goes whooosh.
- rkomorn 9mo ago> We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource. I'd argue that this started 30 years ago when automated phone trees started replacing the first line of workers and making users figure out how to navigate where they needed to in order to get the service they needed. I can't remember if chat bots or "knowledge bases" came first, but that was the next step in the "figure it out yourself" attitude corporations adopted (under the guise of empowering users to "self help"). Then we started letting corporations use the "we're just too big to actually have humans deal with things" excuse (eg online moderation, or paid services with basically no support). And all these companies look at each other to see who can lower the bar next and jump on the bandwagon. It's one of my "favorite" rants, I guess. The way I see this next era going is that it's basically going to become exclusively the users' responsibility to figure out how to talk to the bots to solve any issue they have.
- tempodox 9mo ago> Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service. Thank you so much for saying this. Trying to convince anyone of the importance of documentation feels like an uphill battle. Glad to see that I'm not completely crazy.
- anamax 9mo agoI had to talk to a human in PayPal's customer service because neither their documentation nor their chatbot says anything about how to "remember" a device, even though certain operations only work on remembered devices. They do document how to delete an unrecognized device.
- theptip 9mo agoCounterpoint - I think it’s going to become much easier for hobbyists and motivated small companies to make bigger projects. I expect to see more OSS, more competition, and eventually better quality-per-price (probably even better absolute quality at the “$0 / sell your data” tier). Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more of the benefits of the big platforms trickle down, why wouldn’t that continue? Nicbou, do you see AI as increasing your personal output? If it lets enthusiastic individuals get more leverage on good causes then I still have hope.
- samiv 9mo agoWhen it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just better of reallocating your resources from the production quality towards the the shouting match of marketing and try to win by finding ways to be more visible than the others. (SEO hacking etc shenanigans) When you drive down the cost of doing something to zero you you also effectively destroy the economy based around that thing. Like online print, basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles but alternative revenue streams (ads) are needed. Same for games too.
- dpoloncsak 9mo ago>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up? ...yes? It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality. It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time.
- FeteCommuniste 9mo ago> You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget. Exactly. If the AI-made documentation is only 50% of the quality but can be produced for 10% of the price, well, we all know what the "smart" business move is.
- marcosdumay 9mo ago> If the AI-made documentation is only 50% of the quality AI-made documentation has 0% of the quality. As the OP pointed, AI can only document things that somebody already wrote down. That's no documentation at all.
- casey2 9mo agoI'd take AI generated slop reviewed by the person who created the system over tech writer babble any day of the week. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was reading about some interesting but flawed system only to discover later that they were talking about MY OWN SOFTWARE!? (only half-joking here)
- Calazon 9mo agoMost documentation is documenting things that somebody already wrote down in a different form. The quality of AI-made documentation may be poor, but calling it 0% is just silly.
- weirdmantis69 9mo agoAI can often synthesis information out of for example, code and screenshots and navigate a website. It could effectively document the current state of a given web application for example whereas most companies have 0 documentation whatsoever.
- psychoslave 9mo ago>it's not like people have any options. That’s one way to frame it. An other one is, sometime people are stuck in a situation where all options that come to their mind have repulsive consequences. As always some consequences are deemed more immediate, and other will seem remoter. And often the incentives can be quite at odd between expectations in the short/long terms. >this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend Hey, this is me looking at the world this morning. Bear with me, the bright new harmonious world should be there on Monday. ;)
- jerf 9mo ago"well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it." First, I understand what you're saying and generally agree with it, in the sense that that is how the organization will "experience" it. However, the answer to "will it lead to a noticeable drop in revenue" is actually yes. The problem is that it won't lead to a traceable drop in revenue. You may see the numbers go down. But the numbers don't come with labels why. You may go out and ask users why they are using your service less, but people are generally very terrible at explaining why they do anything, and few of them will be able to tell you "your documentation is just terrible and everything confuses me". They'll tell you a variety of cognitively available stories, like the place is dirty or crowded or loud or the vending machines are always broken, but they're terrible at identifying the real root causes. This sort of thing is why not only is everything enshittifying, but even as the entire world enshittifies, everybody's metrics are going up up up. It takes leadership willing to go against the numbers a bit to say, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we provide quality documentation, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we use screws that don't rust after six months, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we don't take the cheapest bidder every single time for every single thing in our product but put a bit of extra money in the right place. Otherwise you just get enshittification-by-numbers until you eventually go under and get outcompeted and can't figure out why because all your numbers just kept going up.
- kbelder 9mo agoJust restating: Traceable errors get corrected, untraceable errors don't, and so over time the errors affecting you inevitably are comprised nearly entirely of accumulated untraceable issues. It means you need judgement-based management to be able to over-ride metric-based decisions, at times.
- jacobr1 9mo agoAlso consider that while the OP looks like a skilled, experienced individual, all too often the documentation is being written by someone with that context, but rather someone unskilled, and with read empathy. Quality is quite often very poor, to the point where as shitty as genai can be, it is still an improvement. Bad UX and writing outnumbers the good. The successes of big companies and the most well known government services are the exception.