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The rise of user-hostile software

den.dev

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Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#81

Post by motogpjimbo »

zo1 wrote: post #63
selfhoster11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.

I blame Javascript and the "hipster" devs that fueled its rise unnaturally.

I've never worked with a Javascript developer who was responsible in any way for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy. In my experience, those decisions are always made by PMs and approved by the board.

Your comment seems like an opportunistic attack on a type of developer you don't personally like rather than something that is rooted in reality.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#82

Post by merpnderp »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #68
dvdkon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect example of why some things shouldn't be services, just plain old downloadable software.

Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally working and probably much more featureful calculator app. People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in this www query wou…

Convenience. You can google the answer faster than your calculator app can even open.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#83

Post by anovikov »

dvdkon wrote: post #46
anovikov wrote: post #42

Natural selection will quickly weed out everyone who tries to follow the suggested path. Simply due to cost of traffic becoming lower than revenue.

Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect example of why some things shouldn't be services, just plain old downloadable software.

By cost of traffic i mean: cost of acquiring users/clients. Nowadays it makes everything which is not a clickbaity, addiction-based scam, pretty much futile. Slowly but surely, Internet becomes a land of sociopaths, no one else gets to make much money.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#84

Post by flyinghamster »

mschuster91 wrote: post #56

> Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. MTP exists, Windows and Linux can use it... but OS X still doesn't have a native MTP client.

Vendor lock-in absolutely figures into a hell of a lot of user-hostile tech. Even before Apple went full spyware, I refused to buy iThings on principle, just due to Apple's abuse of its customers and developers (ever-changing connectors, unrepairability, needing to get Apple's blessing, revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for them, etc.).

Android is very far from perfect, but for now it's at least still usable, except that manufacturers have decided to follow Apple's lead on unrepairability. But at this point I'm preparing myself to do without, as I'm not optimistic about the future of smartphones. I was a holdout for a long time anyway, and the whole "Install our app! which, by the way, also sucks down your contact list and mines cryptocoins" thing has gotten out of hand.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#85

Post by gwbas1c »

> Would any user benefit from this?

Corporate types will just self-delude themselves to always answer "yes" to this.

Recently, a telemarketer called me to sell me solar panels. Initially I thought he was calling me about my existing solar panels, so I asked, "Are you trying to sell me something, or do I already have a relationship with you."

His answer, "I'm not calling to sell you something. I'm calling to tell you about the blah blah blah."

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#86

Post by loup-vaillant »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks. And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

How slim can you really be when your stack bundles an entire web browser so you can push pixels on the screen? Focusing on performance probably requires running away from such bloat.

Remember: 25 years ago we were able to write relatively fast GUI applications. They may have gotten prettier, fancier, and screens have definitely grown larger. Still, computers are now much faster. And with M2 drives, starting a word processor or a drawing application should be instantaneous. Yet somehow it isn't.

You're right, the main problem is the lack of focus on performance. Here's the thing though: if we did focus on performance, we wouldn't have tolerated such bloated stacks in the first place.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#87

Post by criddell »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks. And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

How can you build something slim and fast on Electron? It's essentially Chrome running Javascript, isn't it?

For an example of what I think is slim and fast, consider Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool[1]. I downloaded it a week ago and used it. It's 150 kB.

[1]: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#88

Post by echopom »

Nothing new here !

The vast majority of Today's software is built by "Corporate Developers" and "Corporate Business Owner".

Generally these people don't have any background in UX or UI or simply commonsense about software ergonomics.

An example would be Stripe , as an Architect in Banking I've spend years explaining to Executives and Business Owner to invest in "Partner Experience" and good "Developer Ecosystem" , something they've always refused because the current model "Answer the Need"

This is the same problem , the people who are building are generally not using the product, the people in charge simply don't understand the "Added Value" of making a change to the current software so it's doesn't weight "150 MB" but rather "1MB" and has "auto installer" with it , "we have always done it this way , why change ?".

Add to that software legacy you end up with mess like those which are obscenely hostile piece of software.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#89

Post by bryanrasmussen »

motogpjimbo wrote: post #81
zo1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame Javascript and the "hipster" devs that fueled its rise unnaturally.

I've never worked with a Javascript developer who was responsible in any way for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy. In my experience, those decisions are always made by PMs and approved by the board. Your comment seems like an opportunistic attack on a type of developer you don't personally like rather than something that is rooted in reality.

> for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy

well, generally a JavaScript developer is just a frontend developer so I'm assuming at least some have experienced a PM saying: too many people are doing X which we don't want them to do, how do we keep them from doing X? And the developer then makes helpful suggestions.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#90

Post by AshamedCaptain »

merpnderp wrote: post #82
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally working and probably much more featureful calculator app. People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in this www query wou…

Convenience. You can google the answer faster than your calculator app can even open.

If this was true for _any_ platform I would immediately throw it away.

But the point is that there is, for some reason, a pressure for platforms to be this way; convenience is not the cause.

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