Email - Not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, I think we can do better. Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things to improve.
Can you list some of the (possible) improvements you can think of?
Ask HN: What annoys you?
91–100 of 355 posts
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#92The fact that 100s of years of art and music are available, but people still gravitate towards whatever is being promoted--typically something recent and inferior. This is partly a function of marketing, partly of herding--both poor selectors of quality.
Personally, I'm offended by the popularity of "Classic Rock" and the fact that marketing channels have broken down to the point where there's no connection between great music being made today and many listeners.
I grew up listening to "Classic Rock" in the 1980s, and it took years for me to realize that this had deprived me of the authentic music of my youth... It was the music of somebody else's youth, which makes it all the more dangerous and seductive. It appeals to geezers who were listening to it when it was new, and it still appeals to new generations of young people.
Classic rock dominates the airwaves in my locale; other than NPR, I find everything else unlistenable [there was ~one~ good urban music station a long time ago, but it's owned by Clear Channel and quit playing anything good rather abruptly after 9/11]
The situation has many dimensions (for instance, any credible 'new' rock has to make a rapprochement with punk) but the thing I hate the most is hearing the same doobie brothers song on the radio driving into work and driving home. I'll listen to NPR or a Shonen Knife or Red Red Groovy disc, but I feel bad for all the boomers who can't escape the gravity of 1968.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#93Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.
Can I ask why you would even keep an account at such a bank then?
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#94Iran. The Twitter Fail Whale. No excuse for either.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#95Things that assume/require that I have exactly one physical address.
That includes banks, insurance companies, government agencies, utilities, and pretty much every business that I need to deal with to do anything.
90% of the pain I encounter during my life on the road stems from the fact that I don't own or rent property in the US, and therefore don't have a fixed address. There are tons of people in my situation (especially among the less well off), yet every time I have to deal with any official paperwork from any organization they make it seem like it's some novel situation they've never encountered before.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#96Advertising - especially online. I believe one of pg's areas he thought YC would fund was an ad startup and there's a good reason for that. Online ads are still in their infancy. Ads are often clumsily placed on content sites using keyword matching that can misfire or even backfire (ads for airline tickets in a story about a crash).
To make matters worse, all content seems to covered with a slimy film - the sorts of ads that normally appear on late night TV seem to show up on the best of sites.
Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy well executed television or print ads, either for their entertainment value or for their effectiveness. I haven't heard the same for online ads, with possibly the recent exception of the "Old Spice Man Who Your Man Could Smell Like."
There's a lot of room here for improvement not only of the ads, but for the online experience overall. While Google and others are milking the contextual cow, some bright minds are going to come up with something revolutionary that will change how publishers monetize their sites. Ads will fit better, be more engaging and monetize sites and drive results for their buyers.
Perhaps then those ads for diet pills, get-rich-quick schemes and their ilk will be banished to the gutters of the internet where they belong.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#97Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?
you don't hear about it because you don't know rich enough people, or because you're tuned out from it - like weathermen constantly being wrong. they aren't, you just remember it more when they are than when they aren't.
I had a great experience with two airlines recently, bmi and airberlin, but it was probably because i was prepared to pay a little more than my usual easyjet price.
Yeah, i think that it's probably more to do with the correlation of how much you pay to how much you will enjoy airlines though
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#98Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?
I've had great experiences on Virgin America. It's cheap, the planes are nice, there is wifi, the terminals are better, the stewards and stewardesses are pleasant and good looking, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#99Slow people in New York annoy me. It's like everyone is on vacation, even the people who live here.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#100Advertisements! They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life. In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles…
Would you be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website? Pay for each show you watch without ads? Pay more for an ad free newspaper? If not, you shouldn't be complaining about ads (even though they are pretty obnoxious). The ads support the content that you consume. Or do you have a better way to compensate the people that create this content?