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Stop Ruining It

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Re: Stop Ruining It

#71

Post by SoftTalker »

vitally3643 wrote: post #62
SoftTalker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for targeted online ads based on browsing/search history or other spying, most advertising is just brand/product awareness, hoping to create a memorable impression.

What really baffles me is that among people my age in the sorts of circles I interact with, that memorable impression is overwhelmingly negative. Seeing an ad at all creates an immediate negative association. "This brand/company feels they have the inviolable right to assert themselves on me and forcibly take up my attention and time". It's wild that this sentiment either hasn't percolated up to advertisers, or (more…

General, non-obtrusive and non-targeted ads don't really bother me. Maybe because I grew up with ads in newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio and TV. The latter two were most annoying because they interrupt the programming, but I understood that's how broadcasters make money so that they could operate.

Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#72

Post by drfloyd51 »

mft_ wrote: post #40

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment , created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't…

There are a lot of ads where you are “empowered” to choose between provided choices.

“Manage your privacy your way! Simply sign in to choose what is right for you!”

Nah, I am going to use something else.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#73

Post by ubercow13 »

fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

Tabs and breadcrumbs are both useful features though, that almost every other OS/DE file manager has supported since forever

Re: Stop Ruining It

#74

Post by [deleted] »

Legend2440 wrote: post #25
fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

>Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.

[deleted]

Re: Stop Ruining It

#75

Post by jessetemp »

fsckboy wrote: post #52
elevation wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

> Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

That would actually be a great feature. Opening two file browsers to move stuff around is a really common workflow. Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”

Re: Stop Ruining It

#76

Post by bionsystem »

fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#77

Post by jknoepfler »

rapnie wrote: post #67
vitally3643 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

> We stopped considering the user as a human being Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified…

Try starting your user stories "As a human being fully endowed with creative and critical faculties who yearns for purposeful, reciprocal engagement within my Lebenswelt..." and see how it goes?

Re: Stop Ruining It

#78

Post by Forgeties79 »

bionsystem wrote: post #76
fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.

I've been on bazzite for a little over a year and nothing is as satisfying as turning on my computer, getting to the desktop...and silence. No alerts. No sounds. No popups. It's just a blank slate every time.

You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#79

Post by priorcod »

munificent wrote: post #60
ryandrake wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

> I'm not sure when it happened I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software. When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without…

This is it. When software was built to provide legitimate, tangible value to the user.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#80

Post by jp57 »

Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.
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