Ask HN: Is Software Getting Worse?

Honestly, I think the answer is no. But the sheer amount of software in our world is increasing. So if software quality lands on a bell curve, you'll see the lower end of that curve more often. Which actually argues that software quality is increasing - when so much of it "just works", the ones that don't stand out.

We never reached quality on mobile UX for websites. Not because it can't be done (see Wikipedia or apple.com) but because it seems like we don't want it. Social media websites are total crap, presumably because they want you to use the app where they can harvest a lot more data than inside your sandboxed browser. News sites and listing sites earn money from ads, and it's now some sort of standard practice to force your users to see/click on them with those gotcha popups and parallax effects. And then there's websites that appear not to care enough to do something about it, like HN which is usable but could be done better.

So overall I don't think it's getting worse but it's always been bad on mobile for whatever reason.

TikTok is designed to get people to download the app, so it's intentional.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

I think two things are happening.

One is the “things aint built like they used to be” bias — buildings from the past that are physically well built are the ones that don’t get torn down, so we associate the past with the sturdy stone buildings instead of the clapboard houses.

The other is that you are right. We keep pushing rendering engines originally designed to render hypertext into a de facto operating system, so even basic software like a real estate site or video player has to deal with a bunch of accidental complexity that the equivalent desktop software from 1999 didn’t have to. It’s worth noting that both your examples are browser-based apps, not desktop or systems software.