Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 498 posts

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#231

Post by rsp1984 »

The web experience. I long back for those days where you used to be able to just type in a URL or click a link and arrive at a webpage without much fuss about it. If the page wasn't what you were looking for, NBD, you just moved on.

The experience nowadays is more like:

    * Google for thing XYZ, wait for some seconds until the result page layout is final due to additional crap being loaded in the background
    * scrolling down while mentally hiding all the crap that big G is trying to sell you
    * finding something that looks interesting and clicking on it
    * being greeted with a cookie settings popup from hell, figuring out how to get it out of the way without becoming an advertising target for the rest of your life.
    * Trying to find the close button for the video that starts auto-playing in some corner of the screen.
    * looking at the site, scrolling, getting another full-screen pop-up reminding you to subscribe to their BS newsletter or their paid service
    * etc..
These days I spend less time on the web than 20 years ago. Back then it was a quirky, endlessly interesting place to explore and spend hours in. Nowadays I have a hand full of sites that I visit and trust, but other than that I kind of use my computer (or phone for that matter) like it's 1990. The internet experience has become really unbearable.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#232

Post by ac2u »

4ggr0 wrote: post #177
aimor wrote: post #133

Logging in. First I need to make an account for nearly everything. Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email. Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password. If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me. Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password gen…

What's a physical password generator? Sounds interesting.

Could be referring to diceware https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#233

Post by [deleted] »

tfehring wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.

I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty co…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#234

Post by carabiner »

belly_joe wrote: post #207
dfghdfhs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's possible that what you call optimum are exactly the state of things in your late twenties / early thirties? And anything more you just call "too much"?

FWIW I'm currently in my late twenties / early thirties and I also think the tech of 10-15 years ago was optimal. Hypothesis 1: The 90s-00s really were the peak and it's not just a generational effect Hypothesis 2: The nostalgia I currently feel is bad enough but oh god it's just going to get worse isn't it?

I remember doing an annual complete disk reformatting, Windows reinstall in the early 2000s (restoring all my data from backups, took hours), and scandisk + defragging on the reg, and manually compiling a kernel on my Slackware box. I remember using public terminals that were crippled by adware and viruses. Good times.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#235

Post by robotresearcher »

WalterBright wrote: post #98

Icons. I hate icons. Every app feels impelled to use icons, and even worse, invent their own due to trying to be cool, and avoiding the copyrights on other icons. I got suckered into that madness on my own website, and can't remember what the icons are for without hovering over then for the alt text. Icons are a giant technological leap backwards. There's a reason that every hieroglyphic language evolved towards phon…

That argument applies to words too. The string ‘run’ has to be learned. So does the spoken version. So does the idea. And you have to relearn the word in each language.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#236

Post by bob1029 »

It's really hard to identify one specific thing, but I would have to say car tech seems to have tripped the most offenses for me.

The most upsetting thing to me is the fly-by-wire controls. I used to drive a vehicle that was EFI, but still had a direct cable from your foot to the throttle body. To describe the throttle response as "immediate" is an understatement when compared to any modern car. Today, I have a recent generation sports car with electronic throttle body. There is a dead zone and about 100 milliseconds of latency associated with any input. It really kills the experience/flow when you are anticipating that step-wise moment.

Also, I will probably never drive a car that doesn't utilize an E2E hydraulic braking or steering system. You can maybe survive the software engineers fucking up TB angle. You can't survive the computer deciding to take you directly into a barrier at 80mph or refusing to apply the brakes in an emergency situation.

I think higher latency, lower reliability and reduced safety (in edge cases) is at the core of most things that bother me with tech. Sure, you can get the statistics to make it look good on paper, but the individuals caught in those "but sometimes" situations would like to have a word with your methodologies.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#238

Post by psyc »

aimor wrote: post #133

Logging in. First I need to make an account for nearly everything. Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email. Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password. If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me. Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password gen…

It seems like no matter what improves in this area, something else breaks it. At first using a password manager helped. So now everyone wants to email or text a code if they don’t recognize the device/browser. But there’s a checkbox to remember the device/browser! And I find more than half the time the checkbox has no apparent effect.

There’s like a Murphy’s Law of Logins: Whatever frustration can be caused, will be.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#239

Post by ksec »

Reliability. Most hardware dont last as long due to cost saving.

Smart Appliance. Most people dont realise how the word Smart ( implying software ) and Appliance contradict each other.

Information Quality. I spend some time thinking about it. I thought as I age and become more knowledgeable in multiple domains, I smell more BS. But then I realise that is not exactly true. It is not that I smell more BS, it is more BS are being produced at a much faster pace and spread at a much faster rate ( in many order of magnitude, likely thousands if not millions times easier than pre internet era. ). The old dream of information super highway where people can "share" information turns out to be a nightmare.

Constantly connected. No excuse for Battery is dead, not picking up phone? Instant messaging. This combined with Information Quality makes life way worse. I would not be surprised if the great resignation and people want to go to hermit have correlation with this because our brain are bombarded with information.

Digital Photos. Just like everything that started what was suppose to be a great idea. We dont value photos any more. Especially when they are compressed and takes very little space, you can store as much as you want. Not to mention modern smartphone camera "pretty up" your photo and they are no longer realistic.

Edit: I wrote this without first reading all the comments. Turns out many people feel the same as well.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#240

Post by recursive »

cwkoss wrote: post #222
codazoda wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me. I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last comme…

We need to start a collective action where audiences punish advertisers. How can we lower the ROI on advertising as a society? Harass customer service lines with complaints about the advertisements? Organize focused boycotts of worst offenders? Form a journalistic non-profit that investigates unethical and illegal business practices, ordering targets by ad spend? Maybe we should mock friends and acquaintances that pu…

IMO The only plausible way to do this is stop consuming media that has ads present.
Post reply on HN