Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

In Hong Kong it's simpler: 3-week hotel quarantine when you enter and no guarantee that if you leave your airline will be allowed back in.

I havent moved for the last 2 years and my daughter has grown her first years by seeing her grandparents on Skype. Im not risking what a friend lived through, stuck 6 months in Europe unable to come back.

New people entering these days do so without their family and with the clear understanding they re stuck here for a while. 0-case policy is not even working so well, since the last week we had an "explosive" cluster of 5 cases (so far) because a now fired freight airline employee went out sick everywhere ...

The only potential exit will be China, maybe, if they dont get scared by our recent uptick, if you like to install their gps-based tracking system. And you better not be foreign-looking and sick while in China, you're never coming back :D

The best story was when they still allowed exceptions for diplomatic staff and families and the kids of a Saudi official decided they were too good for self isolation and created a mini cluster isolating entire buildings for re-test. Or the Dubai IT guy who's now in jail after he forced the city to retest 800k philipinos helpers because he lied and contaminated some going to a party (and slowed down tracking since he lied to protect his friends from quarantine) before leaving his 1-week long (+short quarantine at the time, he's the reason we have 3 weeks now) vacation...

So your 100 euros wasted, Im not crying for them :p

some countries had an exception to testing for short trips (when only essential travel was allowed)

I'd say it is more because UX has shifted to acquiring customers at all costs, even if it means constantly annoying your current users.

Every time I have to hunt for the "log in with an existing account" button (after mistakenly trying to login to what turns out to be the sign-up form) I want to punch a "UX "expert" in the face so hard it knocks the shitty dye job off their side-shave hairdo.

Greed and idiocy. Same as always. I think we were luckily sheltered from it for a long time in technology for many reasons - VC funding with long horizons meant no immediate pressure to monetize, lower revenues, salaries and higher entry bars kept greed and idiocy out. Now the VC funded businesses need to show returns and the $$$ is attracting all the wrong people.

A few very successful companies made unimaginable amounts of money early on and established de facto monopolies or close to them. As a result they now continue to make unimaginable amounts of money almost independent of their performance from a user's perspective.

That means they can also now spend unimaginable amounts of money hiring people, which distorts the natural relationships between performance and pay for people working in software development. Many people have come into this industry who are relatively young and inexperienced and don't really know what they're doing at all, yet expect to earn many times the average wage for someone in their demographic on day one and then to increase their income still further as they rapidly job-hop.

Neither those people nor most of their peers or even most of their management teams have ever had to bootstrap a software product where the continued success of their employer depended on making something that users actually wanted to use and customers actually wanted to pay for.

Many of them never work on the same software product for more than a year or two so they aren't evaluated on the long-term benefits of any work they do either. Instead the path to career success often involves high visibility, short-term projects. That brings to mind the old joke that something must always be done and this is something so we're doing it. Or some less flattering comments on modern corporate management and focussing on the next quarterly statement because that's what your astronomically large bonus depends on as CxO.

In short, the reason user satisfaction is often a secondary concern if it's a concern at all in modern software is that a lot of the tech firms seen as highly successful and desirable places to work made stupidly large amounts of money early on and now the incentives for both the tech firms and their employees are heavily distorted because normal financial incentives just don't apply in this crazy little corner of the world.