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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?

#331

Post by isleyaardvark »

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…

The whole point of dark patterns is the users don’t accept them , but are misled by them. That is what dark patterns are.

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

#332

Post by denton-scratch »

laurent92 wrote: post #100
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…

> and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it. But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your star…

> badly-written cookie banner laws

The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker.

I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls.

And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.

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

#333

Post by ModernMech »

javajosh wrote: post #325
ModernMech wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (A variant: content tech enthusiasts create without profit motive (and therefore without market correction) I would not agree that the consequence of lacking a profit motive is an absence of corrective market forces. There are many kinds of markets out there, and many kinds of market forces that aren't related to monetary profit. For example, the marketplace of ideas is very powerful for people without a profit mot…

Very true, although it is an embarrassing thing to admit (for me, anyway). Although, now that it comes to it I wonder: is it really something to be embarrassed about, to care about github stars more than zeroes in your bank account, and the wonderful things that gets you? Will not the stars really and truly affect more people more meaningfully than the zeroes? I suppose in the end it's a struggle between pleasure and…

Tell me about it, I definitely look at my stars every day, and get overjoyed when even a single person stars one of my projects. I feel this is a little more justified than the dopamine rush caused by a like on a tweet, because I put so much effort into the underlying software project (as opposed to the thoughtless, throwaway effort spent on most tweets and fb posts).

That's why I think you shouldn't be embarrassed about putting weight on such a thing. I need food and electricity to power my body and computer. But I also need external validation to power my ego. The software doesn't get written if I don't think it's a good idea and worth doing, no matter how full my belly is.

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

#334

Post by ratww »

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.

"Enabler" is a good term, as in psychology enablers can often be victims too.

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

#335

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> using it for 7+ years

That's not really very long, IMO. There's a huge amount of churn in programming systems these days. Once upon a time, writing compilers and designing languages was something that nerds did for fun and instruction, in their spare time. People didn't get paid to write compilers.

Incidentally, I've never heard of "svelte".

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

#336

Post by ratww »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #331
ratww wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The whole point of dark patterns is the users don’t accept them , but are misled by them. That is what dark patterns are.

Don't know if you're agreeing or disagreeing, but: this is why I said "accept" in quotes.

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

#337

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Fundamentally it is about GUI toolkits and design, and those get chucked for fashion yearly now.

It used to be five year cycles, but now with the web toolkit du jour and constant web "standards" churn, it happens even faster.

And that's without the hipster "design" fads like material design and flat design and all that jazz.

UIs are a variant of the halting problem: unlike a lot of fixed input/output systems like CLIs and other things that programmers love, any non-trivial UI will rapidly cycle out of control in terms of making a good testability, and that's for code that is fundamentally a lot more difficult to get up and running for even the base use cases.

HTML in the beginning attempted to solve that with its simple forms. Well, those got chucked out for ... whatever it is we have now. I'm not saying that the HTML basic form wasn't flawed, but for the standards bodies after five major revisions to the HTML standard to not do anything and basically just say "here's CSS and javascript if you want validation or multiple buttons or anything that powerbuilder had back in 1990" well, that's an industry failure too.

It seriously flabbergasts me that we had powerbuilder and a lot of the VB stuff cranking out pretty sophisticated interfaces on 486s and pentiums and we are still spinning our wheels 30 years later with 100-1000x the computational firepower.

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

#338

Post by MaxBarraclough »

gitgrump wrote: post #330
kortilla wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pointing out that it’s a side effect of user market forces. The point is that users keep using these sites despite all of these annoying patterns.

Or because they have no other choice. It's mind-boggling that the very people responsible for creating this landscape have the audacity to throw up their hands and try to absolve themselves of responsibility for the things they built by saying "idk the users just love being screwed". We must do better.

> We must do better.

Meaning what? Name-and-shame clearly won't do the job. The only solution I can see is for there to be laws against dark patterns. The profit incentive for user-hostile design isn't going to go away.

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

#339

Post by denton-scratch »

brightstep wrote: post #200
netcan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth, otoh, is quite a regular feature of nature. Rabbits boom and bust. Single cell algae transforms a newly formed pond within days, followed by exponential growth of organisms that like to feed on it.

Then our infinite growth economy is like an invasive species that has taken over the planet. Hunting resources to extinction, growing ever larger and all-encompassing, heating up our planet with its metabolic cycle of fossil fuel extraction and burning.

Interesting thing about exponential growth: it always comes to an end rather quickly. If it weren't so, the planet would be completely covered in rabbits.

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

#340

Post by denton-scratch »

r_singh wrote: post #323
denton-scratch wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone Really? I wonder where you are. I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.

I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table

Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
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