What has led to this experience? On the top of my head I can see the following reasons:
* Release Often as KPIs for developers
The release often KPI for promotion and bonuses has led to constant changes to 'systems that are working fine' to become ever-changing user experiences. While daily users can gradually phase-in changes, most sites that are casually used will confuse users with completely new error-prone experience.
* Payment Security and Financial Regulations
At least in the EU fraud has led to various tech-related regulation calling as an example for separate apps for IDs and for transaction verification. While it is well-meant, it leads people to check bank statements less often and anecdotally in my family confuses especially elderly users to the point of introducing more opportunity for scams and fraud.
* Patch-work nature of ID & Verification
Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules and Authentication Apps have been patched onto the original user/pass system. The experience has become truly annoying with some clear winners: anecdotally more and more people simply use Google/Facebook OAuth as logins to sites. This is fine from a UI perspective, but lacks consumer regulation - what happens if you lose your access and who can you contact if your accounts get compromised/scammed/blocked?
* KPI switch from customer first to business model first
Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.
What are other reasons?
However, as the internet became mainstream and competitive, more successful players realized that they can employ dark patterns to increase their revenue by taking advantage of users (lock-in, difficulty unsubscribing, making cloud accounts mandatory, etc).
It's 2022 and I think all the companies everywhere feel like they have no choice but to learn from the best. The pricing tactics used by Apple, are now used by many other companies in different industries and even companies that were non-tech are now using tech with its dark patterns.
Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies. It's just the mindset of growth at all and any cost, that's what I'm seeing all around me on the internet and offline (by using the internet in some cases).
This is 100% the root cause.
Without exponential growth targets, almost all the ills mentioned wouldn't have been required.
And specifically, without exponential growth targets for companies with market cap already above $1T.
I'm convinced we'd be living in a better world if MAMAA would have said "Okay, our core business is mature. We're going to run it as a cash printing machine but with lower growth. If you want growth, here are companies we're spinning off."
Unfortunately, the reality of the software dev and infrastructure economies probably requires halo behemoths. For the former, so they can be compensated in equity, and the latter, because there's only enough demand for a few at minimal-cost-per-unit scale.
I'm not sure. It might also be the opposite: this might be the precise time for a new business that can cut out all the bullshit and give the users what they want. It's not just the HN crowd that is frustrated with Modern Tech.
Case in point: Windows. requires an expensive license, but still pushes ads down your throat on every occasion, collects too much telemetry, and keeps nagging you after every update until you accept having your data collected.
Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.
Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content".
Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.
This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get"
In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person"
How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps.
She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.
Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.
It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.
However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness.
That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong incentives, not that users are stupid.
If you don’t take responsibility for change, it doesn’t happen.
We use WhatsApp groups for this now. It’s perfect, no ads, only the content from people I want content from. No slimy Facebook algorithm. Between tiktok Instagram and whatsapp how is Facebook.com even still a thing?
While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice?
Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.
Rather, I see the problem being that any time a viable competitor appears, it just gets acquired so there's no longer any need for the incumbent to compete. Case in point, Instagram actually became the next hot social network after Facebook, but Facebook the company retained relevance and market share by simply buying them rather than competing. Google has also acquired a bunch of more niche search engines over its lifetime (that's a little more subtle in that none of those alone were going to beat Google like Instagram did to Facebook, but by nipping niche search providers in the bud, Google consolidated the market share around its product).
The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause.
I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000.
It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall.
You do not have to accept that License.
You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys.
The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government.
Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.
You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc.
This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.
This is why I rarely use the same email address longer than 1 year now or try to manage different accounts for different spam. I just change the password to random crap and forget about that email account, while setting up a new one.
If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists.
If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….
This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.
There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.
Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.
Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.
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Come on. This is bullshit.
https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-do...
"When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."
And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding.
So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?"
So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.
I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.
crickets
And no, average users have never avoided scams, email spam is older than web.
The last time I ran into one (call to cancel for insurance) I also filed an official complaint and made it clear it was the sole reason I was dumping them in favor of a competitor.
It's not much of a punch back but it probably had an effect.
It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show.
The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls.
20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple.
It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain.
The Internet adapted itself to the masses.
That'd be my rant.
It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web.
It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.
Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?
Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money.
Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?
Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.
They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.
I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world.
But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>.
This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".
Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!
I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it.
But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”)
It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.
The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...
The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker.
I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls.
And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.
Are you saying that EU cookie law is to blame for software being hostile to its users? I can't see how that can be.
How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s.
Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.
To be fair, that wasn't any kind of scam; it was more like "I started a joke that started the whole world laughing".
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Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure.
The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)
I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty.
I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all.
It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something.
Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies.
Same with music.
I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses.
Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there.
HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.
Edit; in the same vain: microservices etc are not helping either. When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith? Now you have brittle all over the place and devops with 247 stress.
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 was an unmantainable mess, hard to support and extend, with abandoned/unmaintained third-party dependencies, and fewer and fewer developers on the market who know the stack. Sometimes it costs as much (or even less) to rewrite the whole thing than to refactor the original. And when the decision to rewrite the codebase is made, they choose the most popular tools/frameworks so that it was easier to find new developers, and today it happens to be react and the like.
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 and requirements for e-commerce.)
One of the larger insurers is doing this now; I told them not to because it makes no sense. But they drank the koolaid and doing react to svelte rewrites for no reason besides a new cto.
The churn in companies is high and it is not good.
All to output something along the lines of
"select * from meter_readings where accountid = ?", $accountid "select * from bills where accountid = ?", $accountid
In the end I never actually got what I wanted.
overusage of SPA of SPA framework (Next.js etc) has caused a lot of problem for users who are used using browser, which is most of web users. It breaks open the link in another tab, back/forward flow. It is not SPA is bad, however if you chose to go that route then design the app with screen size mind and you got think it as an Application instead of a web page.
Next.js is amazing, and it could make any airline/bank website blazing fast. Are said banks hiring the same devs from Google that are building the newer version of Next? Nope, they're hiring 3rd party companies in Romania.
React et al is far from plug and play. Quality of implementation means a lot more than it used to in terms of performance
You could make a monolith where the UI keeps working even if some of the monolith's endpoints don't work, and you can make a microservices architecture where the UI still doesn't cope if a microservice is down.
I think the pros of microservices are: - deploy smaller - you only update the parts of the system you need to when you modify something. - different technologies - you can use Ruby here and Go there if you like; very un-locked-in and you can maximise the value of any libraries you have. E.g. if you have a number crunching bit of your app you could make a Python microservice with numpy etc installed. - independent data stores - pro and con, of course, but it's nice if you can decouple bits of your system and again use mongo here, postgres there if you need to - as an microservices-based application grows in scope, the number of engineers working on different bits of it can scale, as they can deliver independently. It's harder to scale engineers working on the same codebase
There are different kinds of microservices, some are infrastructure critical (for example, we have an auth service, if it goes down the whole thing goes down because users simply can't login anymore - and it doesn't matter if it's a microservice or a monolith, the end result is same), others are not so critical, for example we implement additional product modules (purchased separately) as microservices which have their own SPAs so if they go down basically only one page becomes unavailable and the system as a whole is unaffected.
Microservices aren't necessarily about 100% SLA, they help scale teams and deployment (however I'd say it only makes sense in larger organizations).
React was open sourced in 2013. It's not that "new" - there are plenty of people who've been using it for 7+ years now.
> did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react
The problem isn't the rewrite from php to react (or any x to any y), but the management saying "ok, we need to rewrite this thing in 'y'. You have two days to learn it. And you'd better show 40 productive hours of work on your timesheets in the meanwhile."
That's not really very long, IMO. There's a huge amount of churn in programming systems these days. Once upon a time, writing compilers and designing languages was something that nerds did for fun and instruction, in their spare time. People didn't get paid to write compilers.
Incidentally, I've never heard of "svelte".
I updated one of my oldest saas app written 17 years ago to the latest php version from apache to nginx and the latest php and it works 100%. That makes me sleep well at night.
It has 60000 active users and costs $4/mo to host and has not had downtime in over 10 years. How is this new stuff holding up?
Nostalgia might be staining your view here… I don’t remember any airline or banking apps that have ever been “perfectly fine and fast”.
I cannot say the same of the website of my French bank and its multiple rewrite over the last 8 years, which still provides less features and make them harder to reach each time.
Or the website of the national lottery and its countless rewrites, each of them getting slower, more inconsistent, and displaying less information on each screen.
Or the website of the national weather forecast, which gets worse at each iteration: now there's a 'weekly' view that shows 5 days; and I cannot for the love of God find the curves of snow and other parameters from the automated altitude weather stations any more (at each iteration, they have become harder to find, but with last iteration there is no access any more; someone's got direct links to the pictures URL on a website, but for how long?). Each time they make an update, the site is completely broken for days or weeks, before they sort out their crap and return the new shit to a more functional state.
Or the website where I did put my bicycle recordings for years without a problem and without feeling the need for any extra feature, which all of a sudden cannot be displayed any more by my old browser.
In all those cases (except the last, which is probably more recent), the needed features have been implemented for at least 15 years. They were working 15 years ago. Yet they got rewritten multiple times, and not for the best. Oh yeah, sorry, for the weather forecast website (which is a public service belonging to the legal type which is the most integrated with the State), there is a new feature added at each iteration: more advertisement, and now more tracking too! The site has become unbrowsable without and ad blocker.
And BTW now, I am met more and more often with the infamous "your browser is not compatible with this site, please update to Chrome / Edge / ..." messages. I thought this kind of things were dead and buried. They were dead and buried, for 10 or 15 years, but now dreadful times are starting again and they rise from their grave.
American Express, on the other hand, is the real WTF.
There's a thing out there called "net promoter score." That's when somebody asks you "would you recommend our business to a friend?" It's based on a 2006 business book with the megalomaniacal title "The Ultimate Question." https://www.worldcat.org/title/ultimate-question-driving-goo...
In theory it's a great idea. In theory it effectively captures a user's attitude toward the businesss. Its inventor, Enterprise Rent A Car, used it to up their game in a competitive market requiring lots of personal service, and it worked brilliantly for them.
But, now the people deploying it in megacorps must have all gotten C- grades in business school. They use it to measure their SUPPORT REPS, not their BUSINESSES. They pretty much only ask it after a support call. So if you give a NO answer to the question because you're frustrated and needed support, the support rep gets dinged, not the product manager.
By the way, anything below a 9 on the 0 - 10 scale in the question means "NO, I would not recommend."
I once got one of those quizzes from my local ISP monopoly provider (Comcast) after somebody CALLED ME to try to sell me something. My answer: "Would I recommend you to a friend? You're a MONOPOLY! " Anyway, they punished the telesales guy for my NO answer. They should have punished the idiot who thought it was an appropriate way for a monopoly to measure customer satisfaction.
A plea to the people who run businesses: take those NO answers seriously. Use them to look for opportunities to improve, not opportunities to punish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws
See also Hyman G. Rickover on Quaker Problem Solving:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28uxu6/more_hy...
And shareholders don't care who suffers. They care purely about profits.
The solution is to introduce laws to reign in "profits at the expense of others". When chemical companies were polluting the ground (superfund sites), we introduced laws to stop them for the good of society. In my opinion, Facebook is the new superfund site, it's just that this time, it is digital and psychological poison, not chemical. So we should just deny them the most user-hostile (e.g. most profitable) behavior through laws.
Every time I have to hunt for the "log in with an existing account" button (after mistakenly trying to login to what turns out to be the sign-up form) I want to punch a "UX "expert" in the face so hard it knocks the shitty dye job off their side-shave hairdo.
Now you have two problems.
None of the changes so far seem to be catching industry wide. Perhaps it’s time for a change that comes with teeth.
The reason the web looks like it does today is because it mostly works, for the value of works that the people building the web care about. Most things on the web are there because someone wants to make money from them. And apparently they do. Things being "hostile" are a side effect of them being effective at making money. That's mostly the whole story.
(A variant: content tech enthusiasts create without profit motive (and therefore without market correction). OSS components being the preeminent example - although github has done a good job commoditizing the design around distributing such things. But these also create bubbles, of a different kind.)
For all their power, I think most people's biggest interactions on the web are with Facebook, Youtube, Amazon and Google. Do you have any good examples of VC-funded UX experiences that fairly prevalent?
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 motive -- they toil in order to earn currency in their communities, which can be something as trivial as Github stars.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I also want to add that one of the arguments on moving everything to the web (applications I mean) was that the web interface was intuitive and didn't require documentation. That may have been true in many cases in 1999, but it certainly isn't now. That leaves users to click around to try to figure out how to use the web app through trial and error. Not a great user XP.
When apps were local, you could always hit F1 and get context sensitive documentation on the particular form you were on and it would (try) to explain what the app was looking for. Apps also had a conformity being all Windows apps using the Windows SDK. It certainly wasn't perfect, but at least it was something. That is mostly long gone and many developers just assume the users know how to use their interface, just because it's intuitive to the developer. Either that or companies don't want to spend the money or have the talent to make complex interactions simple.
I strongly disagree with this. The reason most apps (or rather, most software) moved to the web is because of a few factors:
1. No installer necessary - this made getting people running much faster and more reliable.
2. You could monetize in a way you simply couldn't with offline software. Instead of selling it once, on the web you have myriad ways to finance software, e.g. SaaS, other forms of selling continued access, advertising, etc.
Note that point reason 2 is exactly my point - companies moved to the web in large part because it was far more profitable. (And I say this as someone who's been a developer during most of the time this shift was happening, and was part of companies making the business-model transition to subscription software.)
> When apps were local, you could always hit F1 and get context sensitive documentation on the particular form you were on and it would (try) to explain what the app was looking for. Apps also had a conformity being all Windows apps using the Windows SDK. It certainly wasn't perfect, but at least it was something.
And again I have to chime in here as a long-time computer veteran - if you think what most people do with computers today is harder than it was in the past, you are just plain wrong. Being able to hit F1 to get help was something that was done by maybe .1% of the population. Yes, desktop software supposedly enforcing UX conformity was an advantage, but not as crazy an advantage as you would think.
As someone who has been helping users out for years, I have no doubt at all that the average UX has gotten way better.
(Though side note, I don't think this is just the influence of the web... we've also just gotten better as an industry on making software, IMO)
Someone said users tolerate it. I think this has a lot to do with corporations getting out ahead of the law, doing diligence on their own just in case one government or another comes knocking. Yeah, in the case of a streaming device they probably gain a bit of extra intel to sell if they have a phone number to tie to your viewing habits. But it's not just that. Google just asked me on one of my fake accounts to tell them "Charlie's" birthday, just in case so they don't serve me any illegal material. This is to pre-comply with whatever data the government of any country they serve might want.
Now, the problem with Amazon's hostility toward customers of its marketplace is of a whole other order. That's truly a situation where it's cheaper for them to sell rotten garbage to everyone and take returns than it is to make a transparent marketplace, and that's down to the laws of physics. They just make more money being a shipping company than they do a retailer, and the arbitrage between Chinese factory sellers and American consumers is ridiculous. You could design countless better systems, but none of them will ship lead-coated childrens toys as quickly or for as much profit.
This here's the last of the free internet that isn't dumbed down for consumers. This and the retro BBS subculture, and gopher and IRC and other things of that ilk. We're much reduced.
Personally in my own code / administration and training for the company I work for, I really try to make sure that the user experience comes first and there is no daylight between what the customer expected and what they get. This, however, is a minority view.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one still trying to fight this fight.
It’s really starting to be a problem with games. Buying games during the holiday Steam sales used to be a big part of my holiday break, something that was my way of winding down after a long year.
But I’ve made it a personal policy to refund any game that requires an account to play (I only play single player games, there’s no reason for games to have my email.)
Nowadays this means basically all AAA games are off limits to me. Gaming in general is becoming less and less of my life as a result. I had originally hoped that some PM somewhere would see refunds coming with “requires signup” as the reason, and would maybe second guess requiring signin for future games, but it just keeps getting more and more ubiquitous.
At this point I’m just saying farewell to gaming. It was once something that gave me a lot of pleasure, but I can’t participate in this industry any more. There’s other things I can do with my time.
[edit] I should clarify that I'm probably such an asshole, I didn't even suggest letting my gf use one of my fake accounts to set up the Roku. Not that she gave me a chance; she was already done with the verification email by the time I started decrypting my list of them.
I have a stadia account and I've taken to doing the same thing. If i go to play a game and the first thing it wants me to do is create an account, I'm not playing that game, and I'm telling support about it.
Apple did not remove the Youtube app. Youtube made changes that caused their app to no longer work on older Apple TVs. The Apple TV that are no longer compatible with YouTube’s app (and CBS and MLB) were released before 2015.
It is reasonable that an Apple TV released in 2012 to not have the technical specifications to be compatible with other providers after Mar 2021 due to rapid changes in technology and software.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/older-apple-tv-will-require-a...
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/02/apple-tv-3-losing-signal/
Respectfully, I disagree. To the point where I want to yell at the screen. If the appliance still works, don’t stop supporting it. 9 years is not that long of a time.
I don’t care that it means more work for the development team. They had software working for it, and at its core YouTube is just displaying streaming video. If it can work on a $15 Roku stick, it can run on an Apple TV of any flavor.
Please stop perpetuating all this BS that we should be replacing our perfectly functional hardware every 5 years and keep software working.
I was in Las Vegas with family a couple of years ago and there's a zipline over Fremont street that my kids wanted to do. They wouldn't let us do the fucking zipline until I gave them my email address.
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?
This is not at all now decision making works in publicly traded companies. The feedback loop is much tighter and private companies are just as susceptible to making these decisions.
What is this weird fascination with capitalism on HN? If a socialist government thought collecting data was a good idea and directed its resources that way, would that okay?
My read is (rightly or wrongly) they want to have cloud services, and cloud services require identification.