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

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

#41

Post by ratww »

nielsole wrote: post #8
sigmaprimus wrote: post #2

I agree with most everything you have said but wonder if it is just the internet or everywhere these days. I recently went through a McDonalds drive thru for the first time in a very long time and felt a longing for the old menu boards that had items and prices clearly listed instead of these TV screens with all the items and prices scattered about like a teenage girls dream collage. I walked into a new BestBuy store…

Why is there a Google captcha in increasingly more checkout pages? This is the _only_ place a shop makes money.

Mostly because of credit card fraud.

Credit card numbers are constantly being leaked like crazy, and criminals have a hard time testing them by hand. So they rely on automating fake purchases on small shops so they can verify the number is correct.

Another common thing is criminals selling products via non-legitimate shops for very little to "launder" those card numbers. After a customer pays, they buy the proper product on a proper shop with another stolen credit card number. Any investigation takes long enough for those people to just disappear and get away with it.

We gotta fix credit cards as much as we need to fix the web.

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

#43

Post by yayr »

> Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.

At least for Google most of the time the end user is not the customer, the advertiser is.

This has various reasons, one of them being economics, another one being end user psychology.

Also for Amazon this is more and more becoming the case, as sellers and businesses using their services contribute much more to Amazons margin than an end user does.

The rest follows pretty much automatically from the internal incentive structures of those companies, which are dominated by share value increases.

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

#44

Post by Ragnarork »

chii wrote: post #34
r_singh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).

Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone.

How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone?

(Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).

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

#45

Post by keawade »

chii wrote: post #34
r_singh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).

The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all.

Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy.

In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture.

Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above.

Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.

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

#46

Post by djohnston »

durnygbur wrote: post #33
djohnston wrote: post #3

I've recently been travelling to some fam in Europe and the entire COVID experience is so convoluted and obscene I feel a moral obligation to defraud the private services profiting off of it.

Quoted post unavailable.

With respect to the private testing entities with buddies in parliament that make it mandatory for us to pay businesses like Randox, I entirely agree.

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

#47

Post by Freak_NL »

chii wrote: post #34
r_singh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).

What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.

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

#49

Post by pmontra »

chii wrote: post #34
r_singh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).

On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.

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

#50

Post by Hnrobert42 »

srcreigh wrote: post #40

Unregulated winner take all effects. Too many acquisitions - not enough competition. Giant companies providing market leading services at 3+ layers, increasing startup costs, enabling anti competitive behaviour. However I believe the true reason is geopolitical. The entire digital market is simply the best espionage system. If the US govt had a better way to dominate other countries, they would use it instead, and th…

> Dark patterns in digital services are not just about greed. They give the US government greater power which translates to increased protection of its citizens.

What?

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