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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?

#261

Post by wruza »

Ensorceled wrote: post #102
antocv wrote: post #22

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is ac…

> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get" In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failing…

The root of the issue is they never complain, even when cornered into a shitty bank or govt app. Everything else just grows from this fact. They are used to commercials, spam, telemarketers, scammers, pre-checked boxes when the law allows to uncheck it and demand the same service. There is no revolt.

If you don’t take responsibility for change, it doesn’t happen.

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

#262

Post by Freak_NL »

afandian wrote: post #189
Freak_NL wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring th…

More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.

That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.

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

#263

Post by iso1210 »

djohnston wrote: post #56
nly wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

€35 private antigen test in the UK[0], taken within 48 hours of your planned return, would have done it. You paid €100 because you didn't read the guidance and prepare. [0] https://fly.randox.com/

The fact that you're expected to pay some private company 35 quid for a test the NHS will send you for free is laughable and demands subversion.

You want the taxpayer to pay for the test so you can go on holiday?

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

#264

Post by falcolas »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #251
noduerme wrote: post #67

You hit the nail on the head -- repeatedly. Shit. I just bought my gf a Roku as a stocking stuffer. We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device . My own Roku from a couple years ago works great with n…

> But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device. Apple did not remove the Youtube app. Youtube made changes that caused their app to no longer work on older Apple TVs. The Apple TV that are no longer compatible with YouTube’s app (and CBS and MLB) were released before 2015. It is reasonable that an Apple TV released in 2012 to not have the technical s…

> It is reasonable that an Apple TV released in 2012

Respectfully, I disagree. To the point where I want to yell at the screen. If the appliance still works, don’t stop supporting it. 9 years is not that long of a time.

I don’t care that it means more work for the development team. They had software working for it, and at its core YouTube is just displaying streaming video. If it can work on a $15 Roku stick, it can run on an Apple TV of any flavor.

Please stop perpetuating all this BS that we should be replacing our perfectly functional hardware every 5 years and keep software working.

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

#265

Post by someguydave »

greenbit wrote: post #255

20-25 years ago there was at least lip service paid to the idea of "how do we improve software quality", but somewhere along the line that got lost under "move fast and break things", which paved the way for "as a service" madness. I don't want your half baked junk, I don't want constant updates, I don't want monthly fees for perpetually shifting, broken crap. I don't want any ongoing relationship with a team of "dev…

This position would make more sense if the browser and libraries and OS and hardware the users were running didn’t experience breaking changes every 6 months or have horrific vulnerabilities baked in.

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

#267

Post by hypertexthero »

A sort of “computer interface claustrophobia” felt when using mobile phones is part of the reason, I think.

Lack of space, like lack of time, is stressful.

Also, the web became a more professional and commercialized environment, which brings its own problems.

> Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and [sic] unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.

—Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore in The Medium Is the Massage - An Inventory of Effects

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

#268

Post by wott »

sergiomattei wrote: post #70
tluyben2 wrote: post #7

Not a main factor but a factor is 'always the latest tech' issue. Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. This is not the fault of react but more of this idea of tech people that everything has to be new which means we don't have 10+ year experience in it and the results just take more work to get right (despite what everyone says here…

> Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. Nostalgia might be staining your view here… I don’t remember any airline or banking apps that have ever been “perfectly fine and fast”.

I never had a problem with the website of my Finnish bank 20 years ago. And I could order my plane tickets too through the Web in the first half of the 2000s.

I cannot say the same of the website of my French bank and its multiple rewrite over the last 8 years, which still provides less features and make them harder to reach each time.

Or the website of the national lottery and its countless rewrites, each of them getting slower, more inconsistent, and displaying less information on each screen.

Or the website of the national weather forecast, which gets worse at each iteration: now there's a 'weekly' view that shows 5 days; and I cannot for the love of God find the curves of snow and other parameters from the automated altitude weather stations any more (at each iteration, they have become harder to find, but with last iteration there is no access any more; someone's got direct links to the pictures URL on a website, but for how long?). Each time they make an update, the site is completely broken for days or weeks, before they sort out their crap and return the new shit to a more functional state.

Or the website where I did put my bicycle recordings for years without a problem and without feeling the need for any extra feature, which all of a sudden cannot be displayed any more by my old browser.

In all those cases (except the last, which is probably more recent), the needed features have been implemented for at least 15 years. They were working 15 years ago. Yet they got rewritten multiple times, and not for the best. Oh yeah, sorry, for the weather forecast website (which is a public service belonging to the legal type which is the most integrated with the State), there is a new feature added at each iteration: more advertisement, and now more tracking too! The site has become unbrowsable without and ad blocker.

And BTW now, I am met more and more often with the infamous "your browser is not compatible with this site, please update to Chrome / Edge / ..." messages. I thought this kind of things were dead and buried. They were dead and buried, for 10 or 15 years, but now dreadful times are starting again and they rise from their grave.

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

#269

Post by MiddleEndian »

neom wrote: post #260
greenbit wrote: post #255

20-25 years ago there was at least lip service paid to the idea of "how do we improve software quality", but somewhere along the line that got lost under "move fast and break things", which paved the way for "as a service" madness. I don't want your half baked junk, I don't want constant updates, I don't want monthly fees for perpetually shifting, broken crap. I don't want any ongoing relationship with a team of "dev…

It's an interesting question, from a user perspective, would you prefer highly polishes feature rich yearly releases, or continuous feature release? Comes down to competition I guess, for web people can compete against you a lot quicker, if you think back to the 90s, Adobe could afford to take a year, no one was going to do better than Adobe anyways. Depends if the customer could understand/accept the value prop of "…

Adobe could still afford to take a year or more. I pay for CC for a project I'm working on, and in spite of the monthly fees I disable automatic updates. I don't want shit to change or break arbitrarily, I want the tools I used yesterday to behave the same as today unless I make a decision to change something.

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

#270

Post by heresie-dabord »

r_singh wrote: post #27
antocv wrote: post #22

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is ac…

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….

Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile.

Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.

Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.

Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.

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