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

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #143

kgeist wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I doubt they rewrote it just for the sake of rewriting it in a new framework, it costs money for no benefit. What's more likely, which I have witnessed multiple times, is that the original codebase…

Why does it seem (I'm not a backend engineer) that a company moves off of one technical-debt ridden backend to another, even bigger, more complex framework for their backend. It's like we're in a downward tech-debt spiral. Is it going to take an Ever-Given-like or Covid-like disruption of e-commerce that shuts down society to cause us to wake up and take this seriously? (Or have government step in and set standards a…

Post by r_singh » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #313

r_singh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days. Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia. So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all… With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being u…

> 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.

Post by javajosh » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #314

javajosh wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is a solid neo-liberal explanation that ignores one important fact: so much of what's online is not market-driven. It cannot survive in the steady-state on it's own. Much of it is investor funded. It's someone's best guess about what the public will find acceptable. And then, remarkably, these guesses are used by others to triangulate their own guesses, and you get something like a "UX bubble" divorced from eco…

> (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…

Post by gitgrump » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

Post by micromacrofoot » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

5560675260 wrote: post #312

micromacrofoot wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try buying a ticket to a concert by avoiding ticketmaster and you’ll find yourself not going to concerts… I can’t subscribe to any local newspaper without a digital opt-in and a phone opt-out… …a bunch of these services are much harder to avoid than you think

I agree that most of the time with entrenched players it looks like there are no outs. But let's try to look at your example of ticketmaster. Your options depend on how much you are invested in concert-going as entertainment. If not much - stopping altogether might be preferable to further feeding the beast. If a lot - you can explore your local musical scene of amateur bands. The ones that play in bars and other ven…