It's mostly the stack. Once you put in all that, tracking, advertising, there's not much to pair down.
Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#52I’m half of these examples (Reddit, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more), the user is not the customer. Products will always optimize for the customer and do the bare minimum to maintain their product. The customer is advertisers for these platforms, not users. The users are the product. The other aspect though is that devs don’t test in bad conditions. Most modern dev is done on a top of the line MacBook on a f…
I think the first point is so important. A good example is news sites. They aren't optimized for delivering news articles, if they were they'd look like FTP servers. News sites are instead built to track you, serve ads, and sell subscriptions.
That's an open-source tool I really wished would exist though: Something that lets you scrape social networks and news sites of your choice and organize the various bits of "breaking news" and random tweets into longer-term stories.
I don't mean something like Storify, more something that would let you answer questions like e.g. "when exactly did the current Ukraine situation start? What where the major events that led to the current state? Which other stories or developments are related?"
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, users aren't always given a choice. They have to interact with software, because it's the only realistic way to do their jobs, engage in commerce, get medical care, etc. Virtually all of this stuff happens within their browser. What are you going to do, tell people that they can't use a browser unless they've passed a leetcode interview? And how would it help? I've seen elite developers get just as fru…
The problem is that there are too few developers, and most software is just moving data around and structuring that data with forms etc. Most of those operations are often trivial, and can be done with software that manipulates data instead, like excel or specialized software. They're like "interface and UI brought on a silver platter". > They have to interact with software, because it's the only realistic way to do…
Maybe there's a shortage and a surplus at the same time. A shortage, in the classical definition of rising wages. A surplus, in terms of the impact on society. The cynical explanation is that programmers get paid a lot to do things that are evil. A more mundane reason is Brooks' Law writ large, namely that adding more programmers the current landscape of bad software makes software worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#54Developers are not hostile to their users, businesses are. To add to good points made in other posts (users are not customers, time to market is more important than polish): business does not serve customer's (expressed) needs, it serves customer's (revealed) buying behaviour. In other words, who cares if users say they are unhappy as long as the money is rolling in.
> business does not serve customer's (expressed) needs, it serves customer's (revealed) buying behaviour.
This is why I find business news headlines of the form "Milennials reject X" or "Customers want Y" so cynical: It's an euphemism to talk about market pressures and buying behaviour, not what customers consciously want. By the same logic, people "want" more drugs on the street.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#55Dark patterns were very common in the early 200s as well, unfortunately. Remember popops, pop-unders, and sites that intentionally broke the back button? There were plenty of shitty experiences created by developers back then, but they hadn't learned all the tricks.
I was thinking about this the other day: Does anyone else remember when sites made the "log in" form more prominent than the "sign up" form? That made perfect sense, because there are more returning users to your website than new users, and they'll need to log in right away. But that was such a long time ago - now developers have learned to practically hide the login page to make the signup more prominent and optimize your new user funnel. Often the latter is the only form on the homepage, and the former is a tiny link to click. It still annoys me.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#56As a developer on a very small team for many years now for a B2B product, I've spent years now filling feature requests, adding new features, and enhancing the product. The users seem to be getting more demanding and less thankful/polite. One of my least favorite days are when we announce new features. Nobody takes a minute to say thank you, instead they want to submit new requests or demand updates on something prev…
Let's not forget those users that can't live without feature X and then after you build it, never use it, or end up leaving anyway.
This was amazing to see during my work with a startup.
The CEO would take any feedback and try to integrate it into the platform while also refusing to actually talk to our users because "big data knows better" (we had a small database...). It was also fun how they ignored any feedback from the in-house people actually using the product day to day because "they're just low level, they don't understand", and I can vouch that their understanding seemed proper.
The COO would just browse the internet for cool articles and find features of other platforms and just cram them up into the backlog. You'd see him go to the toilet, come back in 30 minutes and fill up 5 - 6 backlog items, like 'conferencing system like Twilio'. This was also done while ignoring his day to day tasks.
It was rather hilarious at times, all that needed to happen is for some feedback to come through some channel and the CEO would instantly get everyone focused on new issues, even if the feedback was minor our out of touch with our actual product.
It feels in hindsight that they used features to pile on top of a bad understanding of the market and total lack of vision.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#57As a developer on a very small team for many years now for a B2B product, I've spent years now filling feature requests, adding new features, and enhancing the product. The users seem to be getting more demanding and less thankful/polite. One of my least favorite days are when we announce new features. Nobody takes a minute to say thank you, instead they want to submit new requests or demand updates on something prev…
I think the users- while empowered, feel the gap of their own lack of power in the knowledge world very cleary, on a sub-concious level. They are dependent on devices, they do not understand, can not repair or change, so the hostility from both sides is part of a steep, invisible power-asymmetry, that previously has turned on other users and ate their lunch.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#58Enthusiastically agree with the title and content
Except the "these days" part.
Yes, it is getting worse, but having started back in the 1980s, there always seemed to be a developer attitude hostile to the users, and not merely being (mostly legitimately) fed up with having to deal with "pebcac" and "1D10T" errors, but actively designing to manipulate the user.
I also have to ask how much of it is the tendency for organizations as they get larger to almost actively select for the dark triad personality traits in mgt & executives.
Solution? IDK, mine has been to stay independent as possible. Probably leave a lot of money on the table, but retain more sanity.
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#59These days?
Re: Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
#60Because the developers don't have direct interaction with them via tech support.
Developers have no clue how the people actually do. They just smugly think the user is using it wrong
It's like picture of a gate leading to a normal walkway and a foot trail has been carved around the swinging gate