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

You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc.

This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.

I find it really shocking that in 2022 something as simple as an email server has become too hard for close to 100% of organisations who rely on the crapfest that is gmail or 365.

It would be nice to see some innovation that isn't some cloud BS.

Some of it has gotten better I'm told by friends and colleagues, but for my bank, there's still no built-in money transfer option between the same banks or others, there's a requirement to us some third party service (with a non-trivial transaction fee) Card to Card transfers aren't really a thing, again relying on third party services to do the transfers (at cost).

It's not so much that the US can't do good things, but a lot of infrastructure/convenience that the non-US world enjoys is certainly possible, but the way that a lot of the infrastructure is built up and supported simply is because of a preference to offload such services to third party providers that just introduce an extra signup/process/fee.

I don't know the full details of payment processing and why it seems like the card to card transfers within the bank app isn't really widely done, or why the confirmation codes for online purchases isn't a thing or even why contactless was such a struggle for the US for so long (when I visited in 2019, I think only at the Apple store did they have a reader that worked with contactless pay...)

Someone said users tolerate it. I think this has a lot to do with corporations getting out ahead of the law, doing diligence on their own just in case one government or another comes knocking. Yeah, in the case of a streaming device they probably gain a bit of extra intel to sell if they have a phone number to tie to your viewing habits. But it's not just that. Google just asked me on one of my fake accounts to tell them "Charlie's" birthday, just in case so they don't serve me any illegal material. This is to pre-comply with whatever data the government of any country they serve might want.

Now, the problem with Amazon's hostility toward customers of its marketplace is of a whole other order. That's truly a situation where it's cheaper for them to sell rotten garbage to everyone and take returns than it is to make a transparent marketplace, and that's down to the laws of physics. They just make more money being a shipping company than they do a retailer, and the arbitrage between Chinese factory sellers and American consumers is ridiculous. You could design countless better systems, but none of them will ship lead-coated childrens toys as quickly or for as much profit.

This here's the last of the free internet that isn't dumbed down for consumers. This and the retro BBS subculture, and gopher and IRC and other things of that ilk. We're much reduced.

Personally in my own code / administration and training for the company I work for, I really try to make sure that the user experience comes first and there is no daylight between what the customer expected and what they get. This, however, is a minority view.

They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.