Users hate change • Hacker News Board

Re: Users hate change

#41

Post by rjf72 » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

DougN7 wrote: post #15

flohofwoe wrote: post #5

My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to 'keep the team busy'. Instead o…

Keeping bean counters shouldn’t be the goal, but everyone does like to keep eating. What do you suggest for keeping the business healthy while not making things terrible?

One might argue that the current system is making things much more terrible than any alternative. Software as a service makes sense for some things. But for the majority of things its now being used for, its only purpose is rent seeking. Cryptocurrencies offer an interesting balance between rent seeking and consumer friendliness. You use a piece of software, it mines for coins which are transferred to the company. The more you use their product, the more money they get yet from the user perspective it's all free (beyond some initial purchase) and doesn't even get into the nastiness of the ad world.

Only problem there is that as ASICs are developed, general purpose CPU mining rapidly becomes grossly inefficient, so you'd somehow need a decentralized coin optimized for extremely high usage scenarios that was also resistant to ASICs. Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm, but it poses a complex challenge of changing the algorithm in a purely decentralized fashion in a way that one can not build adaptive ASICs for. Though I would imagine this is a solvable problem.

Re: Users hate change

#42

Post by flohofwoe » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #32

diggan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is that every deployable version of the service should be usable on it's own and users should be able to chose exactly what version they are locked on to. Or they can choose to live on bleeding-edge and always get the latest updates. Wishful thinking maybe

It's called long term support. And it's not cheap.

There's a big difference between offering "end-of-life" versions for download, even if they are no longer supported, and forcing users on new versions even if they don't want to (which is fairly common for mobile/web apps and generally subscription-models like Adobe and Autodesk switched to).

Re: Users hate change

#43

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Users hate change

#44

Post by collyw » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #5

My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to 'keep the team busy'. Instead o…

Thank god Linux gives you multiple desktop options. I am happily using "Windows 98 style" XFCE.

To be fair there probably hundreds of subtle improvements over Windows 98, but no horrendous game changers like when Ubuntu went from Gnome to Unity.

Re: Users hate change

#45

Post by pwenzel » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #2

I did not like the change from old reddit to new reddit. Remember Digg v 1.0 to 2.0 and how it made it sink?

I am still clinging to the old Reddit design.

I also am still on Mac OSX Sierra.

Yeah.

Re: Users hate change

#46

Post by vbezhenar » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #42

vbezhenar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called long term support. And it's not cheap.

There's a big difference between offering "end-of-life" versions for download, even if they are no longer supported, and forcing users on new versions even if they don't want to (which is fairly common for mobile/web apps and generally subscription-models like Adobe and Autodesk switched to).

That's because the world decided to adopt software as a service model, where your device is just a thin client and real work is happening on a server. And that model is incompatible with letting customers to run old versions.

Re: Users hate change

#47

Post by karrotwaltz » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

johnday wrote: post #33

It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they…

> Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place.

I was using twitter to follow very few, high quality feeds, and with this new update it was made clear that the intended usage is the opposite. No more twitter for me, I'm back to good old RSS feeds.

Beside that, I can't believe anyone would find the new design better than the old one on a monitor, the menu has more presence than the actual tweets.

Re: Users hate change

#48

Post by donclark » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

Why not allow users to toggle btwn versions of software/UI/etc?

Re: Users hate change

#49

Post by yboris » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

karrotwaltz wrote: post #47

johnday wrote: post #33

It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they…

> Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place. I was using twitter to follow very few, high quality feeds, and with this new update it was made clear that the intended usage is the opposite. No more twitter for me, I'm back to good old RSS feeds. Beside that, I can't believe anyone would find the new design better than the old one on a monitor, the menu has more presence than the a…

The Twitter redesign (last week or so?) has been wonderful for me: it keeps your place in navigation, allowing you to look at a tweet thread and go back to the place you were before.

Previously on Twitter, after any navigation you'd lose your place, having to scroll (and reload all the previously-seen content) very far if you were down far.

Re: Users hate change

#50

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #46

flohofwoe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between offering "end-of-life" versions for download, even if they are no longer supported, and forcing users on new versions even if they don't want to (which is fairly common for mobile/web apps and generally subscription-models like Adobe and Autodesk switched to).

That's because the world decided to adopt software as a service model, where your device is just a thin client and real work is happening on a server. And that model is incompatible with letting customers to run old versions.

I.e. exploitation pure and simple - delivering value to customers is incompatible with company exploiting those customers. This deserves as much pushback as possible, even though it seems like a quixotic effort.