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The rise of user-hostile software

den.dev

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Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#151

Post by stronglikedan »

kstenerud wrote: post #80

You'll notice that all of his examples of user-hostile software lack a universally accepted standard. This is not new. Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No - everyone follows the standard, so your OS just knows how to hook up your headset. With USB it's different, because the standards are insufficient for the gadgets that we use, resulting in specialized software for your…

> Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No

Logitech and Samsung would like a word...

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#152

Post by lp0_on_fire »

Not sure this author actually drinks their own medicine based on this comment. One would have thought that someone who just wrote what I read would not have tracking enabled _by default_ and everything would be _opt in_.

> Respect user choices. If someone doesn’t want to send telemetry (or any data for that matter), give them the option to not do it. At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with Google Analytics. Don’t want to send it? Have your browser send a Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work.

"Respect user choices (unless it's my blog and I want to collect metrics)"

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#153

Post by selfhoster11 »

the_other wrote: post #127
selfhoster11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.

As a career front-end developer, I take affront at this. I have never argued in favour of any of the shit people face on the web on a daily basis. I’m close to wanting to get out of the industry because the product is so toxic these days. The people are largely great, I love my current team.. but every month we’re told to add more tracking, or advertising (from Google of all people). I could leave out of political di…

I understand that you may feel affronted (and apologise for making you feel like that), but I'm actually criticising the web development as an industry and as a set of broad trends, rather than individual developers. Sometimes developers may have leverage, but from my experience in backend dev, that's rarely an option.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#154

Post by selfhoster11 »

dasil003 wrote: post #139
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

The problem is too much money came into tech. Even 10 years ago software companies had only a fraction of today's representation among blue chip companies. Once the industry is recognized as a top place to make money then the wrong sort of people start worming their way in slowly but surely undermining whatever integrity came out of the early engineering culture and values that built the foundation.

I'm not sure what you mean. Blue chips like IBM and Microsoft were making bank even in the late 90s. Lots of money in tech isn't new.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#155

Post by trutannus »

mrweasel wrote: post #132

As someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality. The developers will try to “fix” or improve their work by bolting on things like ActiveMQ, Kafka, ElasticSearch, NoSQL and everything but the kitchen sink. They rarely give production deployment much though, and if they do it’s just a bunch of people yelling Kubernet…

> someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality.

Not just you. Developer tools are slowly decaying into disasters also. Pretty much every enterprise development tool I've used is just... lacking basic QOL features. Or the workflows are strange to the point of being counter-productive. Atlassian and Microsoft are the biggest offenders.

I actually spend more time fixing things that Visual Studio messed up (ie: removing dependencies but destroying a config file in the process, deletions creating phantom files, ect) than I do actually resolving bugs I created by being asleep at the keyboard.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#156

Post by noasaservice »

the_other wrote: post #127
selfhoster11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.

As a career front-end developer, I take affront at this. I have never argued in favour of any of the shit people face on the web on a daily basis. I’m close to wanting to get out of the industry because the product is so toxic these days. The people are largely great, I love my current team.. but every month we’re told to add more tracking, or advertising (from Google of all people). I could leave out of political di…

Dont take a critique of the job title as a slight against you personally. We, frankly, don't know you.

And as a whole industry, front-end devs have implemented atrocious dark patterns and all manners of disgusting anti-user choices. Have you? Only you can answer that - but I sincerely don't care about your personal choices. This discussion was never aimed at "the_other".

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#157

Post by commandlinefan »

> they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers

I'm not sure what he means by "developers" - the people who actually wrote the code? This didn't come from them. Or the marketing people who create the JIRA tickets that the developers are supposed to "close" 10 of every "sprint"?

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#158

Post by jcelerier »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks. And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

> And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

No. Literall every Electron chat app (Signal, Discord, Element, Slack, etc) is slow, laggy and unresponsive, while every Qt chat app (Telegram, Ripcord, Nheko) is blazing fast.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#159

Post by commandlinefan »

api wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

> Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame free (as in beer). If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible. It’s hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I…

> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

Somebody had to say it out loud...

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#160

Post by ryandrake »

greatgib wrote: post #44

This article is globally so true, but there is a major error: It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Like for telemetry, most of the time the business side "can", so they do. And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain and not like release such user-hostile software but they are forced by business to do it. Like this stupid pr…

> And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain and not like release such user-hostile software but they are forced by business to do it

For every dark pattern, invasive analytics package, adware, malware, spyware that gets added to a product, there is an actual software developer sitting in a chair, voluntarily adding it. Maybe someone here on HN, reading this very thread! Nobody is putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to do it. I've quit jobs in the past where I was asked to work on something I considered unethical. Developers have options. The job market is evidently still going gangbusters now, so who can really say they are "forced" to develop anything?

It's so strange: On one hand, people keep saying developers have tremendous leverage, and high market value, and are being sought after, and then one thread later, developers are powerless victims, having to do the will of their evil "project managers". Which one is it?

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