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The rise of user-hostile software

den.dev

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Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#181

Post by selfhoster11 »

sneak wrote: post #149
marcodiego wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most mainstream software from renowned companies should be [...] classified as malware. Most FLOSS has not fallen in this category.

But even a significant portion of FLOSS can be legitimately called spyware. Firefox, Chromium, Docker (although Docker Desktop is no longer open source), Homebrew, Mattermost, Netdata, Bitwarden - all of these are common, popular FLOSS that embed spyware, oftentimes operating silently (other than a little notice at install time that the authors think constitutes informed consent). The spyware epidemic is real, and FL…

With FLOSS, the culture often looks down upon telemetry so there's an incentive not to include those because of user outcry (Audacity, ahem). Forking or patching out the offending pieces of code is also possible (see Audacity again).

Caddy v1 also came with telemetry, but it was trivial to rebuild it with the telemetry switched off. The best you can do with closed software like Windows is to apply a hack and hope it's not undone after an update.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#182

Post by dend »

zonabey wrote: post #136

I couldn't stop laughing whilst reading the entire article. The one that really got me was the Electron-based “launcher”. I had to take a break for ten minutes.

OP here. Sadly a true story with a "shall not be named" software for optical media management. I just want a Win32 binary that does it's job. Instead, I had to wait 45 seconds every launch until the server "spins up" from working in the background.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#183

Post by selfhoster11 »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #99
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…

> back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. Clearly not the case or they wouldn't have been as ubiquitous as they were.

Flash came with McAfee. Everyone knew that McAfee is being distributed by assholes, but they needed the assholes' product anyway, so they put up with it. Eventually projects like Ninite were created precisely to install software without all that included junk.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#186

Post by dend »

wilde wrote: post #114

But who will pay for this software? Not the author, they’ve made that very clear. The things they’re railing against fall into two categories: 1. The OS vendor hasn’t built it into the OS. 2. Cost saving measures. One the developer has little influence over. The other is business physics.

OP here. Au contraire - I am happy to pay a bit extra for software that does its job and gets out of the way. With hardware, one could argue that can be made a part of the price for the device - if I buy a "premium" component, I prefer to have a clean user experience that does not create a hole in my network to manage RGB lights.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#187

Post by seph-reed »

enumjorge wrote: post #113
loup-vaillant wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How slim can you really be when your stack bundles an entire web browser so you can push pixels on the screen? Focusing on performance probably requires running away from such bloat. Remember: 25 years ago we were able to write relatively fast GUI applications. They may have gotten prettier, fancier, and screens have definitely grown larger. Still, computers are now much faster. And with M2 drives, starting a word pr…

IMO it’s the increase in platforms that have pushed people towards a cross-platform solution even though it’s pretty wasteful. In the 90s if I wanted to write an application to target most computer users I would have written a Windows application. Now, depending on the app you need to target MacOS, Linux, web, iOS, Android. I think people underestimate how much stuff you have to learn to be an effective UI developer…

Very much agree.

I think web-dev, for better or worse, has pioneered a lot of UI concepts and design strategies purely by being more accessible.

Getting those lessons into a more efficient compiled form would be a great step, and I do think TypeScript is slowly approaching a place where it might be able to bridge that gap.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#188

Post by selfhoster11 »

abecedarius wrote: post #140
api wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Worth noting that 'crypto' creates an opening for new ways to fund open-source development. Let's try not strangling that in its crib? We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto, and if the older funding models were going to take free software beyond the niches it's found, we'd see that by now.

Precisely. Payment processors gatekeeping the collection of small donations is soon to be a solved problem thanks to cryptocurrency. I mistrust anything that purports to enable something like this via centralised banking, primarily because it will let regulators of unrelated jurisdictions and large corporations/banks control and surveil the transactions. It's either crypto, or this.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#189

Post by selfhoster11 »

drstewart wrote: post #171
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…

Surely the genius software developers can just do away with the stupid and pointless project managers with their self inflated egos and release the great software ourselves? Why don't we do that? Surely there must be some reason if these useless business people only provide negative value!

The problem is that it's not possible to unbundle the business acumen and the "profit above everything" mentality. Developers need the former, literally nobody needs the latter.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#190

Post by selfhoster11 »

zelon88 wrote: post #141
zksmk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do whatever they wanted with the user experience without repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into deskt…

> which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible. I like to hope you're right, but I don't believe you are. Most people don't want to learn more about tech. They just want tech to be intuitive enough to pick up and use. The mobile market appeared because Windows is too big and cumbersome. That's why people advertised it as a skill on their resume. It isn'…

Ignoring the fact that Android puts its buttons in basically arbitrary places, the fact is that it's just not a very useful platform for more complex tasks. It can do less, so there's not much to master. Windows and Linux can do more, so there is more to master because they allow more complicated interactions between things inside the computer. In other words, listing an OS on your resume means that you are sort-of competent enough to pull off such tasks at all.
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