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

Me neither in the long run, but it definitely surprised me on Christmas Day how much data they wanted to collect. One bit at a time I've been offended and shocked by it since I came back to this country in 2015 but I gotta say, watching how totally docile and copacetic my girlfriend was about this boot-up experience was more interesting than any of what they were trying to collect. It was totally weird to her that I was telling her not to put in any of this info and that I would return it for her. She was done entering her data before I could mount a full argument why she shouldn't. I know, I'm just a hideous boyfriend. That's not the point though. I was really offended and I tried several ways to get around the boot process without verifying by email. This only succeeded in delaying our HBO show by 20 minutes. She was just like, let me do this. Ok no problem, she said, I verified it.

Now how are gonna expect companies to act civilized when almost everyone's already conditioned to hand over their life every time they're asked?

> Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere,

If you have a phone with open-source firmware for the modem, I will buy it immediately. Who is taking my money?

> Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

Because in the process of 'enhancing the experience' everybody forgot to ask the user.

Classical example - A/B testing.

In the ideal world it means what if some change is introduced then it would be tested on a small subset of users.

In our world A/B testing means what there would be two changes and one with less complaints would be chosen.

"But, but I did that the right way!" somebody would say? Well, if you did A/B testing right, that doesn't means you got the right conclusions from it: if you had only 2% (or even 0%) of complaints on some change that doesn't means you are needed to do that change.

It is sometimes so blunt and evident what you are at loss for words. Eg: the logon page of my bank. After a major redesign a couple of years ago (from a ~2008 style) it was a subject for at least 5 "improvements" since that, all accompanied with "for your experience we did blaablabla...". One time they even explicitly stated "we played with fonts". Imagine the audacity.

Do you know what functionally changed in all those minor "improvements"? Absolutely nothing.

Sometimes there was new fonts, sometimes the fonts got back, one time there showed up this stupid "You have 2 new messages!" notification (ON A LOGON SCREEN OF A BANK WEBSITE FFS!) and all other times I don't even know what (if anything) was changed, because my logon experience wasn't changed a bit. Btw, the colorful, giant photo of some mountains serving as the page wallpaper doesn't show up in the Firefox with a strict security settings, means it's get loaded from some unsecure/unapproved (CORS?) location (and what these idiots doesn't test their site in FF).

But both the PR dept and Web design team DOES THE THING for a couple years, both are running successful A/B tests, both are having good KPIs (selected by themselves I suppose) and both... forgot to ask the user if their changes are actually needed.

It is good to see on the London underground that the adverts for these COVID-test scammers are routinely daubed as such.

I don't see the scam nor a conspiracy.

First of all, private COVID test producing corporations are prolonging the pandemic by suggesting to gov't that testing be done to a higher degree than necessary? Why would governments fall for that? Oh, you mean they're all corrupt. Well, then you should call all government procurements corrupt, not just this one.