Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?

Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.

I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.

Similarly, whomever said Signal has a good point… it never manages to download MMSs for me (which isn't its fault, signal is bad in my house), but it alerts me anyways so I get a stupid "this couldn't be downloaded message" that I have to be distracted by instead of only notifying me when I move into a place where I have good enough signal to download it. It also then says "tap here to retry" but does nothing when I do so (not even an indication that it's working or that I tapped it). Aside from the annoying notifications about messages I can't even read, it tries to make you spread it to your friends and you have to manually close the stupid "Tell this person about signal" thing for every single person you open a chat with. I had to just go back to another SMS app and lose the ability to use their protocol.

The worst though for me is probably pulseaudio (still, after all these years, even though it's gotten a ton better). People knowledgeable about it love to tell me that it's obviously a configuration problem on my part, but every time I start my computer something else is wrong. Every time I plug in my midi controller and start up a synth I have no idea if it will work or not, but it also fails in a different way almost every time. If I turn on a bluetooth device, the device itself mostly connects fine, but then how the audio is routed just seems random. That one works most of the time, but not always, and if I turn the device off my audio settings sometimes go back to whatever they were before, but sometimes I randomly find I no longer have a microphone, etc. everything about it just feels bad.

No new user, and rarely an experienced one, starts a new thread. Every reply just builds on the original.

All this even when the new thread button is _right in front of you_. But the design is so terrible I don’t blame people for missing it.

(On a separate note, I see no Apple products in main threads. I see a few google ones, Microsoft, Amazon (AWS) and Facebook (workplace))