Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

Games have huge advantages of constraint of application that mapping applications don't. You can get pixel perfect scrolling when you constrain the max rate the user can pass through the dataset, you deny them random access into the dataset, your dataset isn't trying to represent a space the volume of planet Earth, etc.

There's a huge gulf between the use cases you're comparing here, and I don't believe for one second that loading the Google Maps dataset into Commander Keene's engine would make for a better experience.

(Also, not to be overly pedantic, but "The professional doesn't start a job before he has everything he needs to do it" pretty much classifies all building construction as unprofessional. The professional doesn't magically have everything on-hand, especially bulky or expensive resources; they have a plan for acquiring them at reasonable rates of input and mitigation strategies if that plan can't be followed)

> Online stores have less and less useful categories and filters.

Yes, I agree. But at the same time, F-Droid has only improved.

But is software getting worse or better?

Even from a premise that the introduction of networking and graphical GUIs was a huge mistake that caused software quality to plummet dramatically, a lot of modern software today is still faster and better designed than the software I had as a kid.

I can maybe accept that I got born at the wrong time and everything before that point was magical and wonderful. I never used early DOS word processors so I can't speak to whether the many features we have today are a worthwhile tradeoff for the startup speed. I'll have to take your word for it.

But if people want to say that we're actively making stuff worse today, they're skipping over a massive chunk of history. If you look at the overall trend of how computers have changed since the 90's, I think literally the worst thing you could say is that we are still recovering from a software quality crash. People either forget or dismiss that a lot of early 90s software was really, really bad -- both in terms of performance and UX.

From the original post:

> amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased

I'm still calling bull on this, because I also used 1998 Library computers and a lot of them were garbage. And I've used modern Library search engines, and while they're not great, a good many of them have substantially improved since then. This is a rose-colored view of history based off of individual/anecdotal experiences.

I'm not wildly optimistic about everything in the software ecosystem today. I do wish some things were simpler, I do see systemic problems. But holy crap, HN is so universally cynical about computing right now, and I feel like there's a real loss of perspective. There are tons of reasons to be at least somewhat optimistic about the direction of computing.

Maybe a small select group have been. Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? Come on.

> the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

FWIW, I don't care about the details, there are plenty individual examples of bad design today and slower software. I disagree completely with your larger thesis that things have gotten worse, and with the title in particular as a summary of your point. Why do you feel it's completely valid, and what does that mean exactly if you agree that many of the supporting examples are wrong?

And I also disagree with characterizing people who disagree with you as "Computer Person Thinking" and "Stockholm Syndrome". That charge seems doubly ironic, quite hypocritical, given the content of your tweet-storm, but I understand if you're feeling a bit attacked or defensive about this discussion. It's okay that it wasn't all true, and if this causes discussion that seems annoying, at least it's a discussion. We can continue to improve software and hardware and UX, and it's good to discuss it. It's just not true that it's gotten worse, and you don't really need to crap on today's software or the people who disagree with you to prove the point that we still have room for improvement. There's always room for improvement.

Anyway, computing is objectively faster today than in 1983 (I was there), and not by a little, by orders of magnitude, especially if you are fair and compare functionality apples to apples, but even if you only tally wait times for activities that seem similar on the surface but are completely different today (such as in-memory queries vs internet queries).

I don't see much objective data or measured results in your UX argument on the whole. Arguing that function keys are intuitive and that the mouse is useless is pure opinion based on what you like and being used to something, not something that can be shown by any large scale user studies to date, and history has already somewhat demonstrated the opposite, that many people prefer mice navigation to keyboards, and that function key workflows are for experts, not Twitter users, by and large.