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The rise of user-hostile software

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Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#161

Post by makeitdouble »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #66
TeMPOraL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience? What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer . Quite a lot of those user-hostile choices - custom apps, SaaS-ification, focus on collaboration features - are attempts to prevent the product from being a commodity. For example, I can replace my current washing machine with any other model of any other bra…

> What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer. Every once in a while I day dream about starting a company[0] called something like "Generic Products" where all we do is make the most basic bog-standard things with no extra garbage or marketing bullshit, striving to have as few different models as possible. Amazon basics and https://xkcd.com/993/ are similar ideas. [0] Never let me…

You are eyeing at Muji, or dare I say IKEA. In the software world, to me Apple was that, until they gave up to become the 21st century Sony.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#163

Post by commandlinefan »

rchaud wrote: post #124

Increasingly I am looking at purchasing my software, instead of using freemium or subscription services that lock you in forever. Here's what I've bought since 2019. All of the below were one-time purchases: - Affinity Designer + Publisher (Photoshop + InDesign replacement, $35 each) - Tumult Hype (Adobe Animate replacement, $100) - SimpleMind (mindmapping tool, MacOS, around $40) - Bootstrap Studio (WYSIWIG site bui…

When I was a kid, TV came for free over the air, and the TV stations made their money selling advertisements. Then came cable TV, which you had to pay extra money for, but which included lots of ad-free stations. But after a while, cable caught on and almost everybody was paying for it, and the cable stations realized they could double-dip and not only charge you to get cable TV, but start putting ads into their previously ad-free stations. After a while, the "included" cable stations had as many ads as the old broadcast stations.

I suspect that the pay software products will follow a similar route and monetize every way they can.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#165

Post by kekeblom »

jasonhansel wrote: post #92

The issue is that there's a reason software is so user-hostile: it increases profits for the software's developers. If we want to get better software, we need an economic system that changes the incentives. One way to get there could be to encourage widespread adoption of copyleft licenses like the GPL, which would encourage more corporations to release their software as FOSS, thus exposing them to competition from m…

One thing that could help, but obviously would not completely solve everything is some sort of "organic" label/certification for software. Basically have someone audit the software and check that it doesn't screw the user in any way. For many categories of software, if you could sell the software as not doing any of this or other bad stuff, it would make sense to stay within the bounds of the certification.

Of course some business models are fundamentally toxic and they could never not break some of the rules.

I wrote about the idea here https://keke.dev/blog/2020/11/29/organic-software.html

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#166

Post by Applejinx »

One word that keeps coming up in all these objectionable scenarios is 'market'.

One word you never see is 'standard'.

All this isn't an exception, it's the rule. If you want stuff to not be wrecked by externalities, back away from free market concepts and look towards more centralized control from whatever source. No exceptions.

We could probably shift towards a sort of managed capitalism model and be just fine. It's the free market absolutism that causes this. This is what you get out of that. It's not increasing the evilness in the world, it's just that without accounting for externalities competitive pressure will always push this direction no matter what. There are no rules in 'competitive' unless you put them there.

Non-free-market systems don't naturally scale, while by definition free-market systems that ignore externalities can scale to unlimited extent, for 'free'. Again, this is what you get.

Figuring out how to make capitalism be managed and still scale nearly as well as free-market capitalism is just a problem, nothing more. It is only an area of possible disruption, work to be done. It's not some tautology.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#167

Post by only_as_i_fall »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

I think that it's a shift in trust. 10 years ago people worried about sketchy/annoying software and would avoid software that asked them to refill their printer ink 10 times a month.

These days everyone lives in a walled garden of some kind so there's less chance of sketchy software being outright malicious.

Also I think people are just inured to it. Apps on my android phone that I pay money for still send ads to my notification bar every day. If my desktop starts doing the same that's hardly a large shift.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#168

Post by EamonnMR »

zelon88 wrote: post #141
zksmk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do whatever they wanted with the user experience without repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into deskt…

> which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible. I like to hope you're right, but I don't believe you are. Most people don't want to learn more about tech. They just want tech to be intuitive enough to pick up and use. The mobile market appeared because Windows is too big and cumbersome. That's why people advertised it as a skill on their resume. It isn'…

The reason you don't list android user on your resume is that it's very difficult to use android (or iOS) for anything beyond passive consumption of content which is not something employers want.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#169

Post by quetzthecoatl »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #58
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

>Something weird happened over the past decade. PR happened. The big players have figured out that if they want to keep misbehaving to make money, they needed people to not fight them. To do so, one amazing tool is to make sure the entire way to speak about the topic is controlled by them. Internet gave us the ability to share more, and we though it would allow us to defend our self better, to make people more aware.…

Politics too. People are far too eager to cede power to these big tech companies just because it will hurt those on the other side of the political spectrum now - without realizing that that power is gone forever. DMCA takedown, demonetization and ad revenue scene, privacy - it's all the same story.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#170

Post by api »

erhk wrote: post #128
mschuster91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. For a piece of hardware I buy at a store I'd expect that the price I paid for it is sufficient to not require further monetization - mandatory cloud services (e.g. a web-available surveillance camera) excepted. Anyway, there is another cause: continuous backward-compatibility breaks from OSes. Windows is ... relatively decent in that the only things tha…

If adware makes money, then even hardware is impacted since you can now undercut competitors. Two mice, essentially the same but $40 price tag. Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on them in the store?

If enough people signal interest, products that do not ship with bloatware/adware could put a "no special software required" on the box/description. I would pick those in a heartbeat since vendor software is usually complete shit (even without adware).
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