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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?

#301

Post by 5560675260 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #78
5560675260 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.

Voting with your dollars does cede a lot of power to the wealthy, since they have most of the money and represent a small portion of the population.

I think you have it backwards. Wealthy already have all the power they need. Everyone else has zero power, unless they organise, pool their resources or at least choose to move in same direction independently.

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

#302

Post by noduerme »

commandlinefan wrote: post #299
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…

> I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! I was in Las Vegas with family a couple of years ago and there's a zipline over Fremont street that my kids wanted to do. They wouldn't let us do the fucking zipline until I gave them my email address.

Heh. I grew up in Vegas. I mean, it's full of surprises. I always watched those people going down the zipline on Fremont and thought they were pretty silly, but I never realized they had to give their email address. Meanwhile around the corner behind the Heart Attack Grill, there's a man who will hand you an axe and let you throw it at targets for a few bucks, no questions axed. I miss the old America sometimes.

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

#303

Post by yosamino »

ArnoVW wrote: post #167
tndtgrwy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app. It's android OR ios. What choices do I have here?

Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.

You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code.

This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.

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

#304

Post by nottorp »

ratww wrote: post #123
Ensorceled wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think anyone is directly blaming the users here. It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success. However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness. That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong in…

> It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.

How many people installed a browser addon that just agrees to the GDPR popup just so they don't have to click on deny?

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

#305

Post by denton-scratch »

wott wrote: post #197
Ensorceled wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think anyone is directly blaming the users here. The comment I'm replying to is LITERALLY blaming "normal users" for these problems.

Normal users, as they represent by definition the largest numbers, are necessary to enable the network effects on which the Internet companies rely, and as a result they also put other, reluctant users in a position of minority, the position of the 'unreasonable', the position of the grumpy old fart, the position of the burden to support. The mass, thus the normal user, is indeed the enabler.

I fall in the "grumpy old fart" category.

But this isn't the fault of users, "normal" or otherwise; enablers don't make people abuse alcohol or whatever. Alcoholics who blame their enablers are deceiving themselves, and if designers try to blame users for their design errors, they are making the same mistake.

A lot of the crapness, AFAICS, is down to mobile. Mobile browsers and desktop/laptop browsers are different, and are used differently. And mobile browsers aren't all alike. Since most website hits are now from mobiles, designers are optimising for mobile, and then their employers stop the project before the desktop/laptop work is done. This really annoys me, because I'm too blind and fat-fingered to use a mobile as much more than a phone.

I think the crapness of the modern web[1] is going to eventually result in a rebellion. Like, the crapness seems to be snowballing. I mean, popups? What? I thought we got rid of them 15 years ago, because they were crap. How come people think they're now OK?

[1] The OP spoke of "todays's internet experience", but all he spoke of was the web. The rest of the internet seems to be working as well, or better, than it was working yesterday.

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

#306

Post by 5560675260 »

feupan wrote: post #75
5560675260 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.

Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.

There is obviously no magical quick denoising solution. But we still can demand less noise and patronise providers that at least pretend to listen.

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

#307

Post by PeterisP »

yosamino wrote: post #303
ArnoVW wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.

You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code. This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.

Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company.

Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.

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

#308

Post by denton-scratch »

bayindirh wrote: post #120
antocv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> normal users have no choice on the matter. The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause. I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000. It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click…

Let's consider a basic example: How can you justify not using Microsoft Office? Yes LibreOffice is there and works 95% of the time, but the remaining 5% are not completely useless parts of the software. It's same for most of the user-hostile software. Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find. Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack. I use Linux, and free…

> Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack

Nor is commercial software. In fact it's more likely than free software to become abandonware.

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

#309

Post by tluyben2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #294
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…

> always the latest tech' issue ... rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs ... we don't have 10+ year experience React was open sourced in 2013. It's not that "new" - there are plenty of people who've been using it for 7+ years now. > did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react The problem isn't the rewrite from php to react (or any x to any y), but the management saying "ok, we need to re…

Sure, but when we have tech 20 years old we can assume you don't need two days to learn it. 7 years is not that young but it changes way, way too fast. So the react 7 years ago is not the same as today: hell I have nodejs and react stuff that simply doesn't work anymore and is only a few years old. While php/html/css/jquery code written 15+ years ago is fast and robust on the very latest versions.

I updated one of my oldest saas app written 17 years ago to the latest php version from apache to nginx and the latest php and it works 100%. That makes me sleep well at night.

It has 60000 active users and costs $4/mo to host and has not had downtime in over 10 years. How is this new stuff holding up?

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

#310

Post by aflag »

djohnston wrote: post #292
iso1210 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am the taxpayer.

Sure, but in a healthy society taxes are used for basic necessities (such as health, education and infrastructure). International holidays are not usually seen as such.
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