[HN Gopher] The rise of user-hostile software
___________________________________________________________________
The rise of user-hostile software
Author : dend
Score : 397 points
Date : 2021-08-24 16:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (den.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (den.dev)
| loxs wrote:
| Is there a list of ethical software somewhere? It does not need
| to be free in any sense, just not implement the described asshole
| practices.
| greatgib wrote:
| This article is globally so true, but there is a major error:
|
| It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of
| product manager, marketing, c-level asshole".
|
| Like for telemetry, most of the time the business side "can", so
| they do.
|
| And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain
| and not like release such user-hostile software but they are
| forced by business to do it.
|
| Like this stupid project manager that thinks that his
| product/software is the most important in the world and there is
| no reason why a random user would not want to install it and also
| that the user computer belongs to him and to the company because
| he is using the product, without shame.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| OMG the pointless telemetry. I got asked to install some on a
| project I took over. I checked, and said "there is already
| telemetry integrated for account XYZ". Nobody knew who had
| access to XYZ. Like, they install it, and lose it. Its not even
| fulfilling a useful purpose.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs
| of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole".
|
| Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and
| bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which
| definitely negatively affects the user experience.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming
| itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There
| are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks.
|
| And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he
| would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim
| nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of
| focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| How slim can you really be when your stack bundles an
| entire web browser so you can push pixels on the screen?
| Focusing on performance probably requires running away from
| such bloat.
|
| Remember: 25 years ago we were able to write relatively
| fast GUI applications. They may have gotten prettier,
| fancier, and screens have definitely grown larger. Still,
| computers are now much faster. And with M2 drives, starting
| a word processor or a drawing application should be
| _instantaneous_. Yet somehow it isn 't.
|
| You're right, the main problem is the lack of focus on
| performance. Here's the thing though: if we _did_ focus on
| performance, we wouldn 't have tolerated such bloated
| stacks in the first place.
| enumjorge wrote:
| IMO it's the increase in platforms that have pushed
| people towards a cross-platform solution even though it's
| pretty wasteful. In the 90s if I wanted to write an
| application to target most computer users I would have
| written a Windows application. Now, depending on the app
| you need to target MacOS, Linux, web, iOS, Android.
|
| I think people underestimate how much stuff you have to
| learn to be an effective UI developer on a new stack.
| There's layout rules, visual customization, state
| management, how to organize your effectively for large
| code based, debugging, accessibility, localization,
| visual effects. Not to mention how fleshed out the
| tooling and documentation is for the web stack. Browser
| dev tools are really good. It's no wonder people want to
| reuse all those skills to build UIs.
|
| If even companies like Spotify or Slack think they don't
| have the resources to build custom applications per
| platform, smaller companies or teams won't either. (I say
| think because I disagree with their strategy but that's
| beside the point). We need a way for people to use their
| web stack knowledge without requiring a full browser.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Very much agree.
|
| I think web-dev, for better or worse, has pioneered a lot
| of UI concepts and design strategies purely by being more
| accessible.
|
| Getting those lessons into a more efficient compiled form
| would be a great step, and I do think TypeScript is
| slowly approaching a place where it might be able to
| bridge that gap.
| 0des wrote:
| I'll admit, this was my first chuckle out loud of the day.
| No stack would intentionally label itself as such, while
| basically all of them eventually become that. If you bundle
| the world in your package, expect bloated outcomes, in all
| of its cyclically-dependent glory.
| criddell wrote:
| How can you build something slim and fast on Electron? It's
| essentially Chrome running Javascript, isn't it?
|
| For an example of what I think is slim and fast, consider
| Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool[1]. I downloaded it a
| week ago and used it. It's 150 kB.
|
| [1]: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
| srdev wrote:
| None of those frameworks are slim and fast. No framework is
| going to admit that they are bloated, and many will claim
| to be slim and fast, despite the fact that they are not.
| titzer wrote:
| Pardon me, but slim and fast? Xclock from the 1980s (long,
| long before Qt) was tens of kilobytes. "XClock" on Android
| is 2.6MB. "XClock" as an Electron app would weigh tens of
| _megabytes_.
|
| This isn't progress, no matter how pretty those clock hands
| are.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he
| would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim
| nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack
| of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.
|
| No. Literall every Electron chat app (Signal, Discord,
| Element, Slack, etc) is slow, laggy and unresponsive, while
| every Qt chat app (Telegram, Ripcord, Nheko) is blazing
| fast.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > And again, for specific app and co, most developer would
| complain and not like release such user-hostile software but
| they are forced by business to do it
|
| For every dark pattern, invasive analytics package, adware,
| malware, spyware that gets added to a product, there is an
| actual software developer sitting in a chair, voluntarily
| adding it. Maybe someone here on HN, reading this very thread!
| Nobody is putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to do it.
| I've quit jobs in the past where I was asked to work on
| something I considered unethical. Developers have options. The
| job market is evidently still going gangbusters now, so who can
| really say they are "forced" to develop anything?
|
| It's so strange: On one hand, people keep saying developers
| have tremendous leverage, and high market value, and are being
| sought after, and then one thread later, developers are
| powerless victims, having to do the will of their evil "project
| managers". Which one is it?
| jclardy wrote:
| Both, because different organizations prioritize different
| things. In some places, developers can run the show, in
| others, it is the marketing team calling the shots.
|
| I think the early startup area is driven by developers, but
| once a product gets some traction they transition into the
| product manager/marketer driven mode where dark patterns
| start to show up.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| At the end of the day even if all devs collectively decide
| they won't implement these features (which already is
| utopian), there will be _someone_ in a more desparate
| position who would just be too glad to take the job. You may
| have to go looking in other countries. Or raise wages. But it
| will get done.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| At least that would slow it down and/or force assholes to
| pay more.
| liketochill wrote:
| Professional Engineers have to take ethics courses and have
| values which include protecting the public welfare.
|
| I would like to see something similar for people writing
| software.
|
| What keeps Professional Engineers honest is that they are
| accountable to the discipline committee and liable for
| negligence. This is in stark contrast to consumer software
| which comes with no guarantees other than a click through
| EULA.
| drstewart wrote:
| Surely the genius software developers can just do away with the
| stupid and pointless project managers with their self inflated
| egos and release the great software ourselves? Why don't we do
| that? Surely there must be some reason if these useless
| business people only provide negative value!
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The problem is that it's not possible to unbundle the
| business acumen and the "profit above everything" mentality.
| Developers need the former, literally nobody needs the
| latter.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| "Developer" here isn't being used to mean only the people who
| directly write code. It means the entire organization
| responsible for developing the product, which includes the
| managers, marketing, and executives. As in Microsoft the
| company is the developer of Windows, and Windows is made in
| such a way as to prioritize the needs of Microsoft over the
| needs of Windows users. They're not prioritizing the needs of
| any specific employee or category of employees. All stakeholder
| groups on the producer side may or may not be fighting for
| their own specific interests, but collectively producer-side
| stakeholder groups are given way more of a say than consumer-
| side, because the consumer-side only has the purchase as their
| tool to influence product decisions, and thanks to various
| forms of lock-in and information asymmetry, they can't or won't
| make informed purchasing choices that force Microsoft to care
| about them.
| lutorm wrote:
| Isn't it sort of obvious that practically every product
| developed for profit is done for the benefit of the
| organization doing it?
|
| "The needs of the user" is just one factor for satisfying the
| primary incentive, which is making money. The needs of the
| user needs to be met to the point that they are willing to
| pay money for it, anything more you're not maximizing your
| profit. I mean, why would you expect anything to be
| different.
|
| I primarily blame the _users_. They 're the ones who accept
| this shit and still give their money. If they don't want
| user-hostile software, they shouldn't use it. If people
| refused to pay for it, things would change. And yeah, that
| might come with some sacrifices.
| MatthiasWandel wrote:
| This isn't new. I was annoyed enough to write a rant about it on
| my website back in 2004, 17 years ago.
| http://www.stentex.net/~mwandel/rants/hp_scanjet_4600.html
| nicbou wrote:
| With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a
| damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those
| businesses.
|
| I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at
| odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services), but surely a
| generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic
| experience?
|
| This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open
| standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to
| last long.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be
| at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services)
|
| This is also the case in paid services, who are not known to be
| more user/privacy-friendly.
|
| > This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open
| standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to
| last long.
|
| Same here. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly harder!
| Fortunately the second-hand market is inundated with hardware
| that has proved its reliability thus far... I feel definitely
| more at risk when i have to buy new hardware.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a
| generic experience?_
|
| What they want, first and foremost, is to _not be a generic
| hardware manufacturer_.
|
| Quite a lot of those user-hostile choices - custom apps, SaaS-
| ification, focus on collaboration features - are attempts to
| prevent the product from being a commodity.
|
| For example, I can replace my current washing machine with any
| other model of any other brand. Independently, I can use any
| brand of detergent with my machine. Both the machine and the
| detergent are commodity products. They mostly compete on price
| and marketing bullshit, which offers very limited margins.
| Modern tech companies desperately want to avoid being in this
| situation.
|
| The most common - but by far not the only - approach of
| ensuring you can't be easily commoditized is through network
| effects. Not just "I can't switch from Facebook to Diaspora
| because all my friends are on Facebook", but also the weaker
| forms: "I can't stop using Teams because everyone at work uses
| Teams, and we can't switch because of SharePoint integration -
| which also incidentally means we have to use MS Office and
| Windows". Or, "I can't stop using Google Docs because a bunch
| of non-techies I have to deal with don't know how to (or don't
| want to) use anything else".
|
| This is why companies fight interoperability[0] tooth and nail
| - breaking lock-in for users threatens breaking the weak
| network effects they need.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Except "API interoperability", which isn't really proper
| interoperability for users, as it's governed by business
| contracts between API providers and API consumers.
| gumby wrote:
| > Or, "I can't stop using Google Docs because a bunch of non-
| techies I have to deal with don't know how to (or don't want
| to) use anything else".
|
| Interesting example. I've worked with two organizations this
| year (one large, one small), both of whom happily use gmail,
| google docs etc. In both cases people expressed surprise that
| my address wasn't gmail.com, that on a screen share my search
| was different etc.
|
| Some of these people expressed concerns about privacy but
| clearly had no understanding of how pervasive the spy
| infrastructure is. And why should they? Their expertise lay
| in other domains.
|
| The private sector has a lot to answer for and an government-
| driven response (driven by a combination of experts,
| ignorami, and grandstanders) will be their own fault.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic
| hardware manufacturer.
|
| Every once in a while I day dream about starting a company[0]
| called something like "Generic Products" where all we do is
| make the most basic bog-standard things with no extra garbage
| or marketing bullshit, striving to have as few different
| models as possible. Amazon basics and https://xkcd.com/993/
| are similar ideas.
|
| [0] Never let me start a company, I am not suited for this
| job.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You are eyeing at Muji, or dare I say IKEA. In the software
| world, to me Apple was that, until they gave up to become
| the 21st century Sony.
| sjs7007 wrote:
| I've like Muji but find the pricing to be inconsistent.
| Some items pretty reasonably priced whereas some seemed
| pretty expensive for no reason.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We can do a joint venture with my occasional day-dream
| company, which would sell appliances designed for longevity
| - e.g. an electric kettle or hairdryer designed to last you
| a 100 years. Featuring generic packaging[0], lifetime
| warranty, and extreme repairability - with CAD and circuit
| diagrams in the box, and spare parts available for as long
| as they can be manufactured. If any substantial change
| happens over the years (e.g. we change AC frequencies or
| switch from AC to DC mains), the company would also sell
| conversion kits.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Seriously, xkcd/993 is what I dream the shopping
| experience to look like.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I share this dream. I also dream of manufacturing a
| single model of automobile that lives forever and never
| changes.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| If we are ever able to significantly increase human
| lifespans and/or birth rates decline, I wouldn't be
| surprised to see a business model similar to this
| eventually outcompete all others.
|
| Even with the brief few decades of existence we might get
| (if we're lucky) now, the planned obsolescence and
| bullshit, mind-cluttering marketing gets _really_ old for
| most of us well before we 're halfway through it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Which is better, to be a commodity, or to be a not-commodity
| but the thing that makes you not a commodity is a thing that
| nobody actually wants?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Market-wise? Obviously the latter, as can be plainly seen
| from company valuations.
| FranksTV wrote:
| Printer companies make money band over fist. It's a razors-and-
| blades recurring revenue model.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I suspect one printer company is making money hand over fist.
| The rest look pretty sickly to me. They are all desperately
| trying to shift to services in an attempt to shore up their
| profits.
| II2II wrote:
| > With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just
| a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those
| businesses.
|
| Why does a company need an end game? That implies there are
| winners and losers, with the winner taking all. Shouldn't we be
| striving for a more diverse business environment, where there
| is credible competition to help keep the actions of businesses
| in check? Wouldn't this be a healthier environment for
| businesses as well, since they could focus upon long term
| sustainability?
| burnished wrote:
| Well, two thoughts. 1) long term sustainability matters more
| to stakeholders than it does to shareholders 2) you need an
| endgame because its compete or get out-competed, so a company
| that had better, more consumer focused practices holistically
| might close after a rough patch, leaving more competitively
| fit companies behind.
|
| Tragedy of the commons. Its why we need government that isn't
| business controlled, to care for the common good and help
| steer against problems where local incentives drive everyone
| to a stable but sort of terrible state.
| mosselman wrote:
| I hate my brother printer. Now I have to do some weird black
| magic that involves pulling out the power cable and paper tray
| and inserting the cable while holding some buttons in order for
| it to even turn on.
|
| A year earlier it suddenly stopped being able to print
| wirelessly and, as with all cartridge printers, the ink is
| crazy expensive.
|
| A month ago I bought an HP printer with an ink reservoir for my
| mother and it is great. You don't need apps to print and
| printing costs nothing compared to traditional printing. It
| comes with ink for about 10k pages and new ink costs around 10
| euros.
|
| The best in class for ink-tank printers are supposedly Epson
| and instead of buying new ink for my own printer, I'll probably
| just buy one of those.
| wolrah wrote:
| When people talk about good reliable Brother printers they're
| always talking about their cheap laser line.
|
| Inkjet printers exist in two forms: Quality photo printers
| and complete garbage.
|
| They are not for documents or other normal printing, that's
| what laser printers are for. Your primary printer should not
| be an inkjet unless you only ever print color photos.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Your primary printer should not be an inkjet unless you
| only ever print color photos._
|
| And unless you print photos very regularly or sometimes
| need them right-this-instant-gods-damn-it, you are usually
| better off going to a local shop and having them printed
| there on better paper with better equipment, cheaper.
|
| My main printer is a relatively inexpensive[+] laser, that
| has a true-black-only mode.
|
| [+] not _absolutely_inexpensive, because I wanted the
| luxury of automatic duplex and the cheapest models out
| there are rather unreliable or nearly as
| expensive/inconvenient to keep running long-term as some
| inkjets.
| II2II wrote:
| > And unless you print photos very regularly or sometimes
| need them right-this-instant-gods-damn-it, you are
| usually better off going to a local shop and having them
| printed there on better paper with better equipment,
| cheaper.
|
| If I had any need for colour prints, it would be a viable
| option since there is a shop a block away. For many
| people who regularly print in colour, the cost of the
| printer could be justified by the time it takes to stop
| off at the shop to pick up the prints. That being said, I
| don't see consumer grade colour printers fitting this
| role.
|
| Convenience is why I maintain a relatively inexpensive
| laser printer. I could easily print off 10 pages per week
| of work related documents at work, but racing across the
| building only to discover the printer isn't working
| (which it isn't about 10% of the time) and having to work
| around that problem for a good chunk of the day isn't
| worth the trouble of saving about $50/year.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> For many people who regularly print in colour, the
| cost of the printer could be justified by the time it
| takes to stop off at the shop to pick up the prints_
|
| Agreed. Though for me, assuming an inkjet in full quality
| mode isn't at least an order of magnitude faster than
| they were last time I had a supposedly high-spec one,
| printing a few A4 prints (or more of a smaller size),
| even assuming no "need several head cleans as I've not
| used the device for a week or two" or "had to reprint as
| something went odd half-way through a page" issues or
| similar, would take longer than marching to the nearest
| shop with printing facility, printing there, and getting
| home! Time of day makes a difference of course, my
| nearest 24-hour place is a noticeably further walk.
|
| _> Convenience is why I maintain a relatively
| inexpensive laser printer._
|
| Same, mostly. I like to be able to print things to
| annotate. Wasteful environment wise but I'll take the
| deserved selfishness accusation on the chin there! The
| main use for it ATM is printing custom maps and other
| notes for trail runs, on fancy "thin but indestructible"
| paper that I doubt a print shop would offer, and
| sometimes being able to make a late correction before
| heading out to travel to the start is useful.
| plemer wrote:
| I am sorry you've had that experience.
|
| My Brother has been running perfectly for years. Use cheap
| generic toner. It just works.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Or just buy a laser printer and never have the issue again?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Better yet: get rid of all printers. Stop printing. I
| haven't needed to print anything in the past 28 months.
| When I do need to print something it's a 5 minute walk to
| the town library where I can print 100 sheets for free
| every month.
| rlonstein wrote:
| If your life aligns with it, great (I also like that
| you're using the public library, I'm on my local library
| board and we also have b/w and color printer/copiers for
| patrons)!
|
| To reduce my printing and improve my own convenience, I
| replaced my failing twelve year old Brother laser with a
| Brother laser multifunction. Now when I deal with
| paperwork for my accountant, lawyer, bank, etc. I scan
| and send them a PDF. I made a scan of my signature and
| apply it as needed. With a few exceptions this has been
| acceptable. The kitchen chromebook is still no substitute
| for printing out recipes, though :)
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Some of us have use cases where this won't work. :)
|
| I happen to like my photo printer. Ordering a hundred
| 13x19 prints would cost more than all that I spent on the
| printer, ink, and paper.
|
| I still use my ten-year-old laser printer several times
| per month. Usually for RPG character sheets or paper
| copies of notes. Sometimes I'll print out a story I'm
| beta reading. If I need a printout at 7pm on a Monday,
| the library isn't open.
|
| I have gone digital with a lot of things, for instance:
| all of my handwritten notes go on a reMarkable 2 now.
| gumby wrote:
| I was away when our printer ran out of toner. My son
| called me concerned that he had an assignment due and
| needed to print something out.
|
| As I wasn't home I had to resort to online. Amazon would
| deliver an entire laser printer in an hour for less than
| the cost of a new toner cartridge (no generic cartridges
| in the one hour service).
|
| Five years later we are still on the starter toner
| cartridge that came with that printer.
| lasereyes136 wrote:
| > I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses.
|
| The end game is often an annual bonus for a decision maker at
| the business that doesn't think they will be there in 2 years
| when there might be fallout. The incentive is short term gain
| for me, I wouldn't be here in the long run so whey should I
| care about the long run.
| srdev wrote:
| I've gotten a lot of flack for saying that advertising and
| marketing are terrible industries and need to be chopped down by
| 95% or more, but I think this only supports my point. They can't
| stop themselves from trying to hook into everything so that they
| can track and "engage" the user.
|
| I've gotten a lot of stink eye by strongly pointing out that the
| users don't want to be "engaged" with your brands and that people
| are creepy for having that expectation. They just want a product
| or service that works well. Somehow along the way we convinced
| ourselves that all of this is normal.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Hear, hear! My disillusionment with tech is at full boil at this
| point. It's gotten to the point where I trust tech products about
| as much as I'd trust a wild chimpanzee.
|
| Unfortunately, one person boycotting hostile tech is like one
| person trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > one person boycotting hostile tech
|
| So I don't try to boycott; I assume I'm an outlier, and my
| choices won't make much difference to the supplier.
|
| I just stay away from stuff I don't like or disapprove of. Of
| course, I hope that others -ercing the supplier is a path to
| unhappiness.will share my views, and that the supplier will
| notice and change; but it doesn't usually seem to happen.
|
| But I'm not upset. I'm just exercising my preferences. Trying
| to use your preferences as a way of proving a point or coerce
| the supplier is a path to unhappiness. Exercise your
| preferences, and be happy that your preferences are satisfied.
| If your supplier receives a signal, so much the better - but
| that's the cherry on the cake.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I don't boycott, I try to check out whenever I can. I've been
| running a libre stack on my desktop computer for over a decade.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Would be nice to have more communities dedicated to bloat-free,
| user-respecting UX... that are not complete pro-hitler neonazis
| like the suckless clique. I'm all ears for links and suggestions!
| dekken_ wrote:
| > pro-hitler neonazis
|
| hyperbole?
| southerntofu wrote:
| See my other comment where i dug very briefly:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312725
| baal80spam wrote:
| Wow, it seems the discussion hit the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law really quick.
| southerntofu wrote:
| That's unrelated. Godwin's law state that you would call
| someone you disagree with a nazi in order to discredit
| them.
|
| In this case, i agree with the suckless arguments, but i'm
| considering serious evidence that key contributors to the
| suckless community are actual neonazis, and that the
| community at large seems ok with it because they claim to
| be non-political (see other comments).
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Whatever, Racist
| forgingahead wrote:
| What do you mean? I didn't know anything about them until this
| thread, and then there is this comment[0] where one of the devs
| clearly states:
|
| 1. They don't politicise in their group
|
| 2. The commenter literally says: "Torch hikes are nothing
| unusual in Germany and there was no political intent behind
| it."
|
| What's the issue then? Serious question and relevant to the
| thread because I too would love to see more communities
| dedicated to user-friendly bloat-free software. Why shouldn't
| we participate with them?
|
| [0]:
| https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_omk1bi
| oytis wrote:
| Torch hikes are nothing unusual, but when done by groups of
| young men with cleanly shaved heads in camouflage outfit it's
| a pretty clear statement.
| lolbutshwatsrs wrote:
| Some of them speak German as well!
|
| It's pretty clear that they are Nazis, and use the cover of
| a group about software to plan the invasion of Poland.
| southerntofu wrote:
| See my other comment where i dug very briefly:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312725
| raspyberr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org
|
| https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_4g2lqi
| southerntofu wrote:
| From following those links (recursively) i get that:
|
| - people in their community are concerned with "cultural
| marxism" (whatever that means is up to interpretation, but
| that's definitely a marker of alt-right/neonazi newspeak)
|
| - their mail server (run by a contributor, not collectively)
| is called "wolfschanze" which is a direct nazi reference:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf's_Lair
|
| - someone on a mailing list (i assume a suckless contributor)
| has a very weird framing of history where hitler is presented
| as the natural result of a giant international anti-german
| conspiracy, and finds it strange/bad that someone gets
| condemned by a tribunal for denying the holocaust, without
| themself acknowledging the holocaust
|
| I would add another example from their repos: https://git.suc
| kless.org/sites/commit/758f429c404dbdd4682c72...
|
| > +---- Fuhrerbunker, 2015-07-31
|
| > +(You can guess who's the Fuhrer.)
|
| I'm definitely not OK to take part in a community that's OK
| with such things, even when they're produced by individuals
| and not as a collective statement. Although i agree comparing
| torch hikes with nazis is exaggerated.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > +(You can guess who's the Fuhrer.)
|
| To clarify, it's Lennart Poettering. This is a systemd joke
| in poor taste, but that's all it is.
| forgingahead wrote:
| This seems like a lot of jumping to conclusions to fit your
| pre-determined opinion of them. Without derailing the
| thread, I do think we all need to extend charity to people
| who have openly declared what their affiliations _are not_.
|
| We shouldn't normalise bad interpretations regardless of
| our own biases.
|
| They have said they're not, so we should take them at face
| value. Let's now focus on participating to achieve the
| shared goals of good user-software without bloat, spyware,
| and other crap that makes up modern technology.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > They have said they're not, so we should take them at
| face value.
|
| If only it were that simple.
| forgingahead wrote:
| I've enjoyed your comments here, and have learned a bunch
| from them over the years, so I'm honestly surprised by
| your comment. Are you saying personal interpretation
| always supersedes direct clarification by the person or
| group in question?
|
| Seems like a lot of what ails modern discourse is simply
| imagining malicious injury or oppression when we should
| work on finding commonalities instead of what differences
| are there.
| MereInterest wrote:
| What you are calling direct clarification can instead be
| deliberate misinformation. Should we consider North Korea
| to be a democracy because their official name includes
| "democratic"?
| forgingahead wrote:
| The opposite can also be true - if I said I met
| MereInterest in real life and you were behaving badly
| (shouting at wait staff and so on), and you claimed you
| were not, who should be believed?
|
| If I wanted to slander someone, believing me, the
| accuser, over you, the accused, is a good way to break
| societal trust since nothing can be believed any more.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, besides the well-known fact that all countries with
| $adjective in the name aren't really $adjective...
|
| ... then yes, as a general principle, we should take
| people at face value on the Internet, unless there's a
| clear reason to do otherwise - which could be a reason to
| confront the person about their statements. Quite a lot
| of dysfunction in Internet (and increasingly, offline
| too) discourse comes from "they say X, but what they
| really mean is Y" pattern of thinking.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I've enjoyed your comments here, and have learned a
| bunch from them over the years, so I'm honestly surprised
| by your comment.
|
| I see this kind of remark every now and then and I
| interpret it as 'when we agree I like what you write but
| when we don't you must be wrong'.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > This seems like a lot of jumping to conclusions to fit
| your pre-determined opinion of them.
|
| Unfortunately, that's the opposite. I was very interested
| in suckless some years ago, and was very disappointed to
| learn their tolerance (if not sympathy) towards nazism.
|
| > They have said they're not, so we should take them at
| face value.
|
| Denying affiliation is a classic strategy in psyops. The
| alt-right and manosphere have established entire PR
| strategies based on that.
|
| I'd be more inclined to trust a person/collective
| declaring they anti-nazi (or antifascist if you will),
| than a person/collective declaring they're "not a nazi"
| then leaving traces of nazi symbolism everywhere.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| > Denying affiliation is a classic strategy in psyops.
| The alt-right and manosphere have established entire PR
| strategies based on that.
|
| The same is true for attributing tainted characteristics
| to your ideological opponents - just call them "nazi" or
| "fascist" and anything goes. If they deny that they are
| nazis or fascists, well, that just proves they are nazis
| or fascists. This is called a Kafka trap. It is the same
| tactic used by so-called anti-fascists to legitimise
| physical assault on ideological opponents, they just
| simply call them "nazi" and start a "punch a nazi"
| campaign. It is also the tactic used by Ibram Henry
| Rogers (who took up the nom-de-guerre "Ibram X. Kendi")
| to be able to label people racist by stating that those
| who deny they are racist thereby confirm their racism.
| What all these tactics have in common is that they do not
| actually aim to confirm or refute the presence of a given
| trait, instead they are used to force another trait upon
| the accused - whether that be "anti-fascism" (which you
| referred to) or "anti-racism" (which Rogers refers to).
| Those forced traits tend to carry the name of the thing
| they supposedly refute while often encompassing elements
| of the refuted trait: so-called anti-fascists act like
| fascists, so-called anti-racists call for racism like the
| following quote from Rogers' "How to be an anti-racist":
| " _The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist
| discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is
| present discrimination_ ".
|
| This can be generalised: _the opposite of an extreme
| opinion is another extreme opinion, the opposite of an
| extremist is another extremist_.
|
| > I'd be more inclined to trust a person/collective
| declaring they anti-nazi (or antifascist if you will),
| than a person/collective declaring they're "not a nazi"
| then leaving traces of nazi symbolism everywhere.
|
| Honest question: would you be more inclined to trust a
| person or collective declaring themselves to be, say,
| anti-communist than one declaring not to be communist? I
| have seen a glaring discrepancy between the trust put in
| so-called "anti-fascists" (who more often than not are
| all too happy to use the same tactics as the original
| brownshirts used to spread their ideology) and that put
| in those calling themselves "anti-communist" with the
| former being given the benefit of the doubt while the
| latter are watched with suspicion since they may be
| "right-wingers". Well, yes, they might lean to the right,
| just like those "anti-fascists" most likely lean to the
| left. Whether that makes the one better than the other
| depends solely on your ideological standpoint and as such
| is subjective, not objective.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| FYI, I vouched for tofu's dead reply to my question on
| whether he'd be inclined to trust anti-communists. I
| might not agree with his stance on this subject but I
| think he should be able to answer the question - which he
| did. From reading his comment history I get the idea that
| we agree on many points related to technology but
| disagree on many political subjects. I'd much rather have
| an honest discussion on _all_ subjects out in the open,
| without labelling or epithet throwing than to suppress
| parts of that discussion while allowing other parts of it
| to thrive. The former might lead to some useless
| political discussions but those can simply be ignored -
| just collapse the thread [1]. The latter inevitably leads
| to some politics getting through while other politics is
| killed.
|
| [1] this could even be an option in personal settings,
| something like 'Show dead [ ]', 'Show politics [ ]'). It
| would also make the job of policing the forum easier
| since anything political can simply be flagged as such by
| moderators or users, just like users can flag posts and
| replies.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > If they deny that they are nazis or fascists, well,
| that just proves they are nazis or fascists. (...) used
| by so-called anti-fascists to legitimise physical assault
| on ideological opponents
|
| That's plain bullshit. A few creampies thrown, an actual
| white supremacist ideologue getting punched in the face,
| and a bunch of popular self-defense groups does not
| equate with "legitimizing assault". I mean punching a
| nazi in the face is a thing, but it's neither a programme
| nor generalized and is not a threat to their health. When
| was the last time you saw antifascists attack defenseless
| people or kill random people? Yeah that's what i thought
| only nazis and other deranged reactionaries do that.
|
| > those who deny they are racist thereby confirm their
| racism
|
| I think any serious anti-racist would recognize to be
| racist as well, not in ideal but in practice. Political
| anti-racism recognizes that we were not raised into a
| void, but in profoundly racist societies. Acknowledging
| one's racist education and feelings (to deconstruct them)
| is a must. And if you believe only white people can be
| racist, or that white people (in our western societies)
| can be victims of racism, you're probably missing the
| point and should educate yourself on these topics.
|
| Approaching the topic from a moral judgement perspective
| leads oneself to overlook their own shortcomings and just
| point the finger at somebody else, which is not helping.
| Antiracism and antifascism are political struggles to tip
| the balance of powers in the world, not mental frameworks
| to absolve oneself from wrongthinking. We'll probably
| agree that the morally-superior liberal (as in, content
| with the status quo and not advocating for social
| revolution) Twitter police is not helping the situation
| for anyone.
|
| > Honest question: would you be more inclined to trust a
| person or collective declaring themselves to be, say,
| anti-communist than one declaring not to be communist?
|
| I think i'd be more trustful of any anti-something in
| general, because people usually have a good idea with
| what they don't want. For a counter-example, most people
| who label themselves communist in fact desire a
| dictatorship of the proletariat, which in marxist
| discourse is not communism (supposedly just a
| transitional step).
|
| "Anti-communist" people, on the other hand, are very
| clear that they don't want mutual aid and self-
| organization, which are borderline characteristics of
| fascism. Hitler was famously placed in power by the
| industry owners leveraging anticommunist/anti-union
| rhetoric, while Mussolini argued that fascism should
| better be called "corporatism" because it represents a
| merger of corporate and State power. All this is well
| documented in history, and you can find a TLDR in the
| Fascism Inc documentary:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c01NN9zvTe0
|
| > "anti-fascists" (who more often than not are all too
| happy to use the same tactics as the original brownshirts
| used to spread their ideology)
|
| Oh, really? Antifascists don't have leaders and
| discipline, receive paramilitary training and organize to
| attack and kill random people for their religion,
| culture, or sexuality. To those people who can't see the
| difference, maybe this will make you think, or at least
| laugh: https://ttm.sh/trk.jpg
| forgingahead wrote:
| I'm sorry, but motivation and intent matters. "Software
| group dedicated to Nazism and user-friendly and non-
| bloated software" seems like a hell of a weird
| combination.
|
| I think you're mistaken in your interpretation,
| especially given their own clarifications, however let's
| not derail this thread further, and let's agree that
| user-friendly non-bloated non-spyware technology is a
| good goal for all of us even if we pursue them in
| different groups.
| fmajid wrote:
| Wow, I was unaware of this subtext, thanks for exposing it.
|
| Germany has very tough laws against glorifying the Nazi
| regime, so if they are Germans it's not just sick humor but
| deliberate.
|
| Though Suckless vs. Poetering seems like a Hitler vs.
| Stalin evil-fights-evil situation best avoided by giving
| both a wide berth.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Germany does not have laws against Nazi jokes.
| southerntofu wrote:
| When is a joke a joke and when does it stop being a joke?
| Alt-right types are famous in their attempt to blur the
| lines by claiming sarcasm or dark humor. To be clear,
| that's fine in certain contexts: if you're with people
| you know well, and with whom you have a mutual
| understanding of when to understand _the exact opposite_
| of what just came out of your mouth.
|
| However, when you're doing that with strangers in public,
| for example on the Internet, you're just sending the
| wrong message and building a space where such takes are
| normalized. See also "cultural hegemony".
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I'm just referring to the previous comment. You have to
| be pretty overt to fall afoul of SS130, blurred lines
| don't count.
|
| (It says something about the intelligence of neonazis
| that the paragraph still finds frequent application.)
| swiley wrote:
| That's pretty upsetting except Apple is getting racist and
| attacking sexual deviants as well. The difference is vanishing
| and in that case I'd rather be using software I know I can
| throw out and replace.
| TheTruestKyle wrote:
| Wasn't your generation taught to not judge a book by its
| cover. Or did I lose your attention to tik tok and
| neolibralism?
| tsjq wrote:
| please check https://1mb.club/
|
| related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151773
|
| https://10kbclub.com/
|
| R HN T : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556860
| southerntofu wrote:
| I like that, but unfortunately it's just for the web. My
| personal website could fit in there btw
| https://staticadventures.netlib.re/
|
| I'd be interested to have a more generic community in the
| spirit of suckless, though maybe not as radical in its
| interpretation of minimalism.
|
| From the recent threads about Haiku OS, i gather that
| implementing features/UX is not incompatible with respecting
| user resources. That's what i'm interested in.
|
| I also follow gemini protocol development, the Jabber/XMPP
| community, and i'm also a member on rawtext.club (an SSH
| social network where i'm not as active there as i should be).
|
| I'd be interested in a cross-project platform much like
| suckless to gather such lightweight programs/protocols, if
| you can think of any.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Would any user benefit from this?
|
| Corporate types will just self-delude themselves to always answer
| "yes" to this.
|
| Recently, a telemarketer called me to sell me solar panels.
| Initially I thought he was calling me about my existing solar
| panels, so I asked, "Are you trying to sell me something, or do I
| already have a relationship with you."
|
| His answer, "I'm not calling to sell you something. I'm calling
| to tell you about the blah blah blah."
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| Closed source software has always been built on an extortion
| business model. As long as we permit math to be patented and
| copyrighted this will continue to be the case. The issue now is
| that each of us as individuals uses much more software than we
| did, 5, 10, or 20 years ago.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Almost all of the examples listed are in relation to hardware. As
| far as I can see, hardware vendors see software as a cost centre
| and at best don't care about quality and more often than not try
| to make up for the cost by bundling crapware with the drivers.
|
| General purpose application software is leagues beyond the crap
| that hardware vendors pull off.
| can16358p wrote:
| Well, I'd want to see it only be hardware but sadly it's also
| common in software-only too: Adobe applications being extremely
| slow/inefficient/buggy (not even mentioning the creative cloud
| app which insists on working in BG even if no Adobe apps are
| open), want a monthly fee, or Microsoft bloating its own OSes
| UI with ad of its own services are just a few examples.
| [deleted]
| nsm wrote:
| Another example: Cue Health makes a rapid COVID19 test. They ship
| you a little box, and a set of wands to insert into the box. The
| box should literally be able to tell you whether the test passed
| or failed, like thermometers, and pregnancy tests.
|
| But no, the stupid thing requires you to install an app on your
| phone, create a cloud account (because we all know we can totally
| trust the cloud with personal data) and it will refuse to work
| without any of this.
| RealPlastic wrote:
| My favorite is being hit with a popup asking for me to sign up
| for a newsletter the moment I land on a website. I don't think
| one single page load is enough time for me to decide I want to
| sign up for a newsletter.
| inshadows wrote:
| > All of the examples above have one thing in common - they focus
| on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers.
|
| Exactly. https://web.dev is prime example of that. Shiny new
| features for _developers_ all the time, as if any of that will
| make incompetent web developers write slick and fast
| applications.
| holri wrote:
| Just use free software. Stallman was right.
| akho wrote:
| To be fair, most of the examples in the post are about shitty
| hardware, or shitty mobile experiences. The option of using
| baseline commodity hardware with no RGB lights is somehow not
| considered.
|
| Free software is indeed a breath of fresh air.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Unfortunately:
|
| - A lot of free software either sucks or is entirely non-
| existent for many use cases
|
| - Free software is not entirely immune to this behavior either
| thefr0g wrote:
| The point is that with FLOSS you can fix both of these
| problems yourself.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| That is not the case for any software that is not trivial.
| Recompiling to remove ads from a free program may be
| achievable but something like adding the missing support
| for Excel VBA into LibreOffice Calc is beyond the
| capability of almost all users.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| "Either the user controls the software, or the software
| controls the users":
|
| https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
| TheCapn wrote:
| I think the entire argument falls apart at the Flowchart
| presented:
|
| _" Would any user benefit from this?"_
|
| Why? Because its trivially easy to say those shitty additions
| help _a_ user, satisfying the check and throwing you into "Build
| It" territory.
|
| Do users know how to navigate their local network to upload data
| to a folder? Not all of them, hook it into a cloud service. Do
| all users know how to download the _right_ BIOS for their mobo
| and execute the update? No, make an app. Do users even know what
| version of OS they 're on? Nope, better make something platform
| agnostic so electron it is!
|
| I'm not _all in_ on FOSS, but I do try to support them when
| appropriate. I think that ecosystem does a _decent_ job of giving
| the user control over what 's happening, but that comes with the
| obvious drawbacks of having a higher barrier to entry. _I_ can
| figure these things out, but my wife can 't... my mom can't.
|
| At the same time some of the examples given live in two different
| realms. A calculator accessing your contacts & location is a
| different case than your dashcam wanting to ease the backup
| process. A mobo bios update is different than ads in your video
| driver installer.
|
| I don't pretend to offer realistic solutions. I think I'm a bit
| pessimistic that our hacker culture will collectively decide we
| need to focus on user-first features and oust malicious
| developers looking to exploit the tech-illiterate. I've seen it
| too many times on hackernews that people will justify any action
| because it simplifies things now. I've never favored "move fast
| and break things" culture and butted heads with hackers who think
| regulation a la engineering code of ethics is detrimental to our
| profession.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| Yeah, I had a broadly similar reaction. Some of the things the
| author points out seem like genuine attempts to make software
| less user hostile by adopting solutions that "just work" across
| all platforms even if the users have no technical knowledge. I
| think a lot of engineers think of user friendly as "I can
| configure it any way I want" whereas for the vast majority of
| people user-friendly means "just do what I think it should do
| and don't ask me any questions I don't understand".
| thefr0g wrote:
| > but that comes with the obvious drawbacks of having a higher
| barrier to entry.
|
| Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many governments even
| raise the barrier of entry artificially for dangerous activitys
| by requiring licenses or training to operate heavy machinery,
| handle dangerous chemicals, install electricity etc. Using
| technology sometimes requires knowledge about the inner
| workings so users will not accidentally hurt others or
| themselves. Imo developers shouldn't infantilize users but give
| them tools to work with. Of course this naturally works better
| with FLOSS since there (more often than not) is no monetary
| incentive to get absolutely everyone on to use it.
| city41 wrote:
| I am using Ubuntu 20 and as far as I know I don't encounter any
| of these issues. If anyone is aware of user hostile things in
| Ubuntu, I'd love to hear it.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Isn't this a VC/investor problem? If you make a new device, say
| some GPS locator for hikers, isn't their very first question
| going to be, "Okay, this is cool hardware, but how are you going
| to generate MRR from each purchase?"
| [deleted]
| stadium wrote:
| I saw my get kid prompted to pay $59.99 usd to buy in-game
| achievements for the hill climb racing game on Android. That's a
| f-ton of money to be soliciting from anyone, yet alone a kid.
| He's not quite at reading age and just clicks things. The game
| design and characters is clearly targeting kids. In my opinion,
| these aren't games any more, they are gambling.
| benatkin wrote:
| I've played Hill Climb Racing, and it's a pretty awesome game,
| even for an adult. The varying gravity, and inaccurate but fun
| physics, and the variety, are what made it fun for me. I
| haven't played it in years, and after that moved on to Geometry
| Dash, which I see myself wanting to play in the future more
| than Hill Climb Racing. I've scoffed at Candy Crush, but
| wondered if people who play that might feel the same way I did
| about Hill Climb Racing.
|
| I think the price is high, but not absurd. I don't know how
| you'd determine the maximum price in a way that was fair to
| everyone.
| stadium wrote:
| As a parent the volume of in-game purchase advertising and
| scarcity tactics are anxiety inducing for both myself and my
| kids.
|
| Every game on every platform should have a global opt-out for
| in-game purchases, just like do-not-track on iOS 14.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| I wish the article would be a little more documented, however
| matching its definition of hostile SW those two examples come to
| my mind:
|
| - Origin, the game distribution system of EA, forgets the user's
| credential if she declines to upgrade
|
| - at work, a piece of software contracted from a well known
| three-letter German multinational always warns the user she may
| lose unsaved work when quitting, no matter she just clicked
| "save" a second ago.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| Not sure this author actually drinks their own medicine based on
| this comment. One would have thought that someone who just wrote
| what I read would not have tracking enabled _by default_ and
| everything would be _opt in_.
|
| > Respect user choices. If someone doesn't want to send telemetry
| (or any data for that matter), give them the option to not do it.
| At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with
| Google Analytics. Don't want to send it? Have your browser send a
| Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes
| an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work.
|
| "Respect user choices (unless it's my blog and I want to collect
| metrics)"
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think it is correlated to the rise of free (as in $0) software.
|
| People don't like to pay and developers want to make money. So
| the strategy is to make the initial cost low, preferably zero,
| and then make the user pay, directly or indirectly. It is not
| new, we had things like shareware in the past, but now,
| developers have more options, and they use them, because the most
| "user-hostile" thing is to ask for money, especially a large up-
| front payment.
|
| I know some people prefer to pay, but they are a minority, and
| therefore, it is not the most profitable way to monetize.
| yawboakye wrote:
| It is a universal and fractal problem: toolmakers make tools they
| don't use. They include a manual in the box because your
| intuition alone won't be enough to understand and use the tool
| (see React, especially React hooks where several blog posts later
| no one is finding them easy to use). The unhappy users make even
| more bad tools they don't use (and, mind you, the badness is
| exponential from one layer to the next).
|
| The first toolmaker in the chain will be a user of the final
| product. They'll see all the badness in the product and rage
| about it. But they won't see their contribution. They don't make
| bad tools; it's their users who refuse to MTFM (master the
| [scrubbed] manual), they think.
|
| The reward of doing the job is the money. Ergo, focus on what
| brings more of it, as patio11 advised. This is the natural
| destination of the "Profit Center" advise. Bad experience for the
| user, yes, but Excel is having a great time.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| > At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with
| Google Analytics. Don't want to send it? Have your browser send a
| Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes
| an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work.
|
| How is this consistent with the message to not be hostile?
| dend wrote:
| OP here. You have an explicit option to opt out, no gimmicks.
| [deleted]
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Few sites respect Do Not Track. Some even use it for
| tracking. So you force people to opt in to other tracking to
| opt out of yours.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is this default ON designed for the users needs? Or the
| developers?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This piece is a great idea, but I was disappointed at the
| execution.
|
| New, but doesn't mention Apple's photo scanning. Forced Windows
| upgrades and telemetry mentioned but buried. Focuses on keyboard
| lights, which is fine but not exactly near the top of my list of
| concerns. Doesn't mention ads in the OS.
|
| Finally it blames "developers." This phrase could include
| management from certain perspective. Honestly, I'm sure
| approximately zero engineers are pushing for this stuff.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > New, but doesn't mention Apple's photo scanning. Forced
| Windows upgrades and telemetry buried.
|
| Those two things are different issues, the article is about
| software that makes it difficult to perform the actual task you
| are using the product for.
|
| Apple's photo scanning doesn't make my camera difficult to use.
| Windows telemetry doesn't make Windows difficult to use. Yes,
| they are user hostile, just not in the way you wish the article
| was written.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| > Disable telemetry? Not a chance - you better be ready to
| have seven layers of defense in /etc/hosts, Pi-Hole, and a
| custom-built DNS + firewall + URL filter + deep packet
| inspector inside a server rack in the basement. I am
| exaggerating, of course. You only need six layers of defense
| to make this all work.
|
| That's in the post (and, incidentally, it appears OP works
| for Microsoft)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, I think it could be better, and these hostile practices
| do overlap. Author does mention telemetry, although the lede
| is buried.
| zmix wrote:
| So, who of you earns their money that way?
| Applejinx wrote:
| One word that keeps coming up in all these objectionable
| scenarios is 'market'.
|
| One word you never see is 'standard'.
|
| All this isn't an exception, it's the rule. If you want stuff to
| not be wrecked by externalities, back away from free market
| concepts and look towards more centralized control from whatever
| source. No exceptions.
|
| We could probably shift towards a sort of managed capitalism
| model and be just fine. It's the free market absolutism that
| causes this. This is what you get out of that. It's not
| increasing the evilness in the world, it's just that without
| accounting for externalities competitive pressure will always
| push this direction no matter what. There are no rules in
| 'competitive' unless you put them there.
|
| Non-free-market systems don't naturally scale, while by
| definition free-market systems that ignore externalities can
| scale to unlimited extent, for 'free'. Again, this is what you
| get.
|
| Figuring out how to make capitalism be managed and still scale
| nearly as well as free-market capitalism is just a problem,
| nothing more. It is only an area of possible disruption, work to
| be done. It's not some tautology.
| Tothegulag wrote:
| This is retarded tankie bullshit. Centralization has been the
| problem, it isn't the answer.
| lukifer wrote:
| I'd take it one step further: _every_ market is a managed
| market, and we 're only haggling over details. While you could
| find exceptions (local babysitting clubs using hours as
| currency), the vast majority of Actually Existing Markets use
| state currency, and state contracts, and property rights
| defined and enforced by the state. Markets are merely one tool
| in a political toolbox, and the details matter.
|
| An excellent book on the history of property rights and policy
| (for good and ill), and which explores the tradeoffs between
| different forms of "ownership design":
| https://www.minethebook.com/
| thewebcount wrote:
| Oh man, I just ran into this. I work on a product that has a 3rd
| party API so other people can write plug-ins to extend the
| functionality of the app. It's great for users and developers. We
| received a bug report related to a particular plug-in, so I went
| to download their demo to see if the problem was on our end or
| theirs before contacting them. Here's how the process went:
|
| 1) Go to their website and click "Download" 2) Prompted to enter
| email address with no way to opt out. Shit. Go to mailinator.com
| and create a fake email address to enter. Enter it. 3) Wait for
| them to send the real download link to my fake email. 4) It came
| in almost instantly. Great! Click on the link. 5) Click to
| download the installer package. Wait a few minutes. 6) Run the
| installer package. 7) It needs the same email address and
| password so it knows I'm a "legitimate user" just to install the
| thing. 8) After entering it, it kicks me back to the web page for
| some reason. No idea what it's looking for or what I'm supposed
| to do on the web site, so I go back to the installer. Oh it's not
| an installer. It's an installer installer. It's going to download
| the installer I want from a list of dozens of possible
| installers. Download the real installer. 9) Run the real
| installer - It lists dozens of products. Find the one I want.
| Install it. 10) Prompted for email and password again.
|
| And keep in mind this is all before I'm actually a customer. I
| haven't paid anything and am trying to evaluate the software to
| determine if it fits my needs. (Or I would be if I were an end
| user.) Honestly, if this weren't for my job, I would have given
| up on step 2. Fuck these people. I'm trying to save them time by
| seeing whether the bug is ours or theirs, but they're actively
| wasting mine and everyone else's who downloads this crap.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Do you work on the Lumberyard engine? lol
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I do think the flowchart needs one more diamond (if-statement):
| Between "Would any user benefit from this?" and "Build it"
| there's another state. "Would _other_ users be harmed
| /disadvantaged by this?" (and draw the obvious lines out of
| that...)
| foxfluff wrote:
| "Would _some_ users benefit from it? "
|
| -> build it and allow them to opt in if they like it.
| echopom wrote:
| Nothing new here !
|
| The vast majority of Today's software is built by "Corporate
| Developers" and "Corporate Business Owner".
|
| Generally these people don't have any background in UX or UI or
| simply commonsense about software ergonomics.
|
| An example would be Stripe , as an Architect in Banking I've
| spend years explaining to Executives and Business Owner to invest
| in "Partner Experience" and good "Developer Ecosystem" ,
| something they've always refused because the current model
| "Answer the Need"
|
| This is the same problem , the people who are building are
| generally not using the product, the people in charge simply
| don't understand the "Added Value" of making a change to the
| current software so it's doesn't weight "150 MB" but rather "1MB"
| and has "auto installer" with it , "we have always done it this
| way , why change ?".
|
| Add to that software legacy you end up with mess like those which
| are obscenely hostile piece of software.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wilde wrote:
| But who will pay for this software? Not the author, they've made
| that very clear.
|
| The things they're railing against fall into two categories:
|
| 1. The OS vendor hasn't built it into the OS.
|
| 2. Cost saving measures.
|
| One the developer has little influence over. The other is
| business physics.
| dend wrote:
| OP here. Au contraire - I am happy to pay a bit extra for
| software that does its job and gets out of the way. With
| hardware, one could argue that can be made a part of the price
| for the device - if I buy a "premium" component, I prefer to
| have a clean user experience that does not create a hole in my
| network to manage RGB lights.
| wilde wrote:
| Thanks for responding! I guess I was mainly reacting to your
| claim about the move to subscriptions. It costs $10/mo to
| make software these days. $0.33/mo (your stated price) isn't
| tenable.
|
| I expect the added costs apply similarly for other portions
| of the supply chain. Apple hardware provides similar quality
| to what you're asking for. It is 2-4x more expensive and
| that's with the advantage of scale.
| dend wrote:
| I think this can be taken on a case-by-case basis. With
| software, where I am looking is a place where I can buy a
| "snapshot" - the current release that time and effort was
| invested in, that I can compensate for. That's it. I am not
| asking for constant updates, as I would be perfectly
| content with the release I bought. That is, until it can't
| work for my needs, and I need to buy another version.
|
| But I do understand your point and I agree - it's not a
| cheap effort.
| wilde wrote:
| This is the perennial problem with pricing. You should
| pay for the value you get out of the software. At a fixed
| price, there's a lot less flexibility. In this case that
| same software might decide to charge for 3y or 5y of
| value. Would you balk at paying $500-$700 for perpetual
| use?
|
| The subscription is more efficient in the sense that the
| folks getting more value pay more.
| dend wrote:
| If the software is worth it, absolutely - I would pay
| $500 and use it for years to come. Up until a couple of
| years ago, that was the model used by Adobe for their
| Creative Suite. Tools like Vegas Pro are in the same boat
| - it's expensive for a one-time fee, but I view it as an
| investment in my craft (if I really need the tool).
|
| My hypothesis (and I have no data to back this up) is
| that most users leverage the same functionality over and
| over despite the updates and new features. As a hobbyist
| user of photo-editing software (and Photoshop in the
| past), I can't recall a single update to the stack in the
| past five years that was groundbreaking in my day-to-day
| usage of the tool. That's not to say this won't be the
| case in the future, but when it is, I will happily pay a
| premium for the next version.
|
| There is, of course, the argument that subscriptions
| lower the bar of entry - a student can't afford $600 per
| tool, but they can much easier bear the $29.99/mo. My
| argument is less about "no subscriptions, ever" but more
| about "give me an option to give you money upfront and
| forget about updates until 5 years later."
| wilde wrote:
| Ok, that's fair then!
| mrweasel wrote:
| As someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly
| pissing me off. We get software from customers and their
| suppliers with declining quality. The developers will try to
| "fix" or improve their work by bolting on things like ActiveMQ,
| Kafka, ElasticSearch, NoSQL and everything but the kitchen sink.
| They rarely give production deployment much though, and if they
| do it's just a bunch of people yelling Kubernetes.
|
| The sad part is that many of these problems aren't THAT hard.
|
| I'm really facinated by the lack of quality and that no one seems
| to care.
| trutannus wrote:
| > someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly
| pissing me off. We get software from customers and their
| suppliers with declining quality.
|
| Not just you. Developer tools are slowly decaying into
| disasters also. Pretty much every enterprise development tool
| I've used is just... lacking basic QOL features. Or the
| workflows are strange to the point of being counter-productive.
| Atlassian and Microsoft are the biggest offenders.
|
| I actually spend more time fixing things that Visual Studio
| messed up (ie: removing dependencies but destroying a config
| file in the process, deletions creating phantom files, ect)
| than I do actually resolving bugs I created by being asleep at
| the keyboard.
| dancemethis wrote:
| Discord comes to mind.
| rchaud wrote:
| Increasingly I am looking at purchasing my software, instead of
| using freemium or subscription services that lock you in forever.
| Here's what I've bought since 2019. All of the below were one-
| time purchases:
|
| - Affinity Designer + Publisher (Photoshop + InDesign
| replacement, $35 each)
|
| - Tumult Hype (Adobe Animate replacement, $100)
|
| - SimpleMind (mindmapping tool, MacOS, around $40)
|
| - Bootstrap Studio (WYSIWIG site builder, $59)
|
| - YouCut (Android video editor, $11.99 full version)
|
| - Sketch ($99 for 1 year of updates; more than enough for
| storyboarding and basic prototyping)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| When I was a kid, TV came for free over the air, and the TV
| stations made their money selling advertisements. Then came
| cable TV, which you had to pay extra money for, but which
| included lots of ad-free stations. But after a while, cable
| caught on and almost everybody was paying for it, and the cable
| stations realized they could double-dip and not only charge you
| to get cable TV, but start putting ads into their previously
| ad-free stations. After a while, the "included" cable stations
| had as many ads as the old broadcast stations.
|
| I suspect that the pay software products will follow a similar
| route and monetize every way they can.
| rchaud wrote:
| It already has. Which is why it's important to highlight the
| remaining few iconoclasts that stick to the tried and true
| method of "I provide a product, you buy that product". Not
| rent the product as you would with Spotify, but be able to
| buy it permanently.
| [deleted]
| dangisanazi wrote:
| Once again the Nazi dang allows the left to say whatever they
| want regardless of the rules, yet one person mentions anything
| about curiosity towards a central neutral idea, fuck you! Banned.
|
| What a fucking fascist website. I hope dang's family gets raped
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Agreed on all points.
|
| Interesting to see this:
|
| > _You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long
| time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions
| that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web
| browser and taskbar._
|
| What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was
| universally known that those toolbars and extensions are
| distributed by assholes. The whole software category was called
| by various pejorative names - "adware", "spyware", "malware".
| There was a whole ecosystem of tools and tricks to get rid of
| them, as well as preventing them from being installed in the
| first place.
|
| Something weird happened over the past decade. We find ourselves
| in times where most mainstream software from renowned companies
| should be, by the standards of the toolbar era, classified as
| malware.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > back then it was universally known that those toolbars and
| extensions are distributed by assholes.
|
| Clearly not the case or they wouldn't have been as ubiquitous
| as they were.
| [deleted]
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Flash came with McAfee. Everyone knew that McAfee is being
| distributed by assholes, but they needed the assholes'
| product anyway, so they put up with it. Eventually projects
| like Ninite were created precisely to install software
| without all that included junk.
| slingnow wrote:
| They were ubiquitous because your unwitting grandparents
| wanted into install some simple application and weren't savvy
| enough to read and uncheck all of the boxes that installed
| the new Ask Jeeves toolbar.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Right, that's partially my point. My unwitting grandparents
| are precisely in the set of "universally", and they didn't
| know nor care by whom these apps were distributed.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oh, but my point is, they knew and cared _after_ they got
| them installed and had to ask someone to have them
| removed.
| dkarl wrote:
| Yeah, I think they fall into the same category as fad diets,
| MLM schemes, and those cold calls to buy real estate for less
| than market rate: incredibly popular despite "everybody"
| knowing better.
| userbinator wrote:
| _We find ourselves in times where most mainstream software from
| renowned companies should be, by the standards of the toolbar
| era, classified as malware._
|
| It's called Microsoft. Microsoft Windows 10, to be precise.
| amelius wrote:
| Just watch the movie Idiocracy, and you'll understand where it
| all comes from.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| The smartphone era gave the internet as a whole its Eternal
| September.
|
| User growth outpaced culture absorption so the tech leaders got
| to direct the new culture, at least wrt to expectations on
| companies in the internet.
| [deleted]
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| I think that it's a shift in trust. 10 years ago people worried
| about sketchy/annoying software and would avoid software that
| asked them to refill their printer ink 10 times a month.
|
| These days everyone lives in a walled garden of some kind so
| there's less chance of sketchy software being outright
| malicious.
|
| Also I think people are just inured to it. Apps on my android
| phone that I pay money for still send ads to my notification
| bar every day. If my desktop starts doing the same that's
| hardly a large shift.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I don't think there is a sense of "safety" because of walled
| gardens. I think it is a sense of "learned helplessness". If
| you keep shocking the rat no matter what they do, eventually
| they lie down and just hurt.
| api wrote:
| > Something weird happened over the past decade.
|
| I blame free (as in beer).
|
| If you can't sell software you have to monetize in other ways.
| This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of
| surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible.
|
| It's hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a
| network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like
| surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I have a rule
| that "every step required to adopt something halves the
| adoption rate."
|
| Greed for both lightning growth and profitability tends to put
| conventional economic models off the table.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Worth noting that 'crypto' creates an opening for new ways to
| fund open-source development. Let's try not strangling that
| in its crib? We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the
| GNU Manifesto, and if the older funding models were going to
| take free software beyond the niches it's found, we'd see
| that by now.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Precisely. Payment processors gatekeeping the collection of
| small donations is soon to be a solved problem thanks to
| cryptocurrency. I mistrust anything that purports to enable
| something like this via centralised banking, primarily
| because it will let regulators of unrelated jurisdictions
| and large corporations/banks control and surveil the
| transactions. It's either crypto, or this.
| rixed wrote:
| > If you can't sell software you have to monetize in other
| ways.
|
| If you can't sell software and have to monetize it somehow,
| sure you can steal user data. But you can also steal user
| data even if you sell the software, as has been demonstrated
| many times.
|
| Only authors who have no intend to monetize the software
| could really be trusted.
| api wrote:
| The ability to directly sell software is necessary _but not
| sufficient_ to enable a software ecosystem that is not
| about exploiting the user.
|
| That's why I mentioned forcing functions. Once "free"
| became the norm, it became _impossible_ to even think about
| doing anything else. The door to conventional honest
| business models was closed for most software authors and
| vendors.
|
| The notion of all software actually being free is a
| fantasy, unless you are talking only about software that
| can only be used by nerds. The amount of effort required to
| make software usable by the general public is absolutely
| massive. Then throw in constant UI changes, ecosystem
| changes, and supporting a lot of targets.
|
| In general once the app basically works you are 10% done.
| The other 90% of the effort is UI/UX.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If you can't sell software you have to monetize in other
| ways.
|
| For a piece of hardware I buy at a store I'd expect that the
| price I paid for it is sufficient to not require further
| monetization - mandatory cloud services (e.g. a web-available
| surveillance camera) excepted.
|
| Anyway, there is another cause: continuous backward-
| compatibility breaks from OSes. Windows is ... relatively
| decent in that the only things that really broke drivers over
| the last decades were the shift in GPU driver architecture
| that came with Vista (IIRC) and the shift to 64-bit that
| began with Windows 7. The only change that busted old games
| was with Windows 8 and the DirectDraw removal, but other than
| that you don't need to do any maintenance for Windows drivers
| and software if you don't have new features.
|
| Keeping software working on macOS or on Linux is a real pain
| in the butt, in contrast - Apple changes stuff around every
| minor release, and maintaining any support for Linux is just
| as a massive effort.
|
| Kernel drivers pretty much have no choice but upstreaming
| (which is a hassle in itself when you have proprietary
| blobs/IP), and userspace stuff suffers from fragmentation
| (x11 vs wayland, flatpak vs deb vs rpm vs self-build/gentoo,
| systemd vs sysv, kde vs gnome vs ...).
|
| And the worst of all to maintain _anything_ for is Android,
| where an insane level of fragmentation collides with _even
| more_ binary blobs, devices that are widespread in usage but
| haven 't seen an upgrade for years if ever, shoddy (or
| none...) QA and preloaded crap from manufacturers and
| carriers.
| erhk wrote:
| If adware makes money, then even hardware is impacted since
| you can now undercut competitors. Two mice, essentially the
| same but $40 price tag. Which one do you buy? Can you smell
| the bloatware on them in the store?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on
| them in the store?
|
| This is why I prefer to shop online or at least do a
| quick search on the internet to show potential issues.
|
| On the other hand, I would _really_ prefer a requirement
| for products that are sold in a physical store to be
| reviewed by a government-run, independent organization on
| build quality and sustainability, and that this review be
| presented or easily accessible in a store next to the
| product.
|
| We already have such a requirement in the EU for
| electricity usage of appliances, it could be extended to
| small electronic devices.
| therealjumbo wrote:
| Government run? The EU is about to _require_ the sort of
| CSAM scanning that Apple is running on devices and the
| rest are running on the cloud. Also:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-
| tech-g...
|
| Governments have a very long ugly history.
| api wrote:
| If enough people signal interest, products that do not
| ship with bloatware/adware could put a "no special
| software required" on the box/description. I would pick
| those in a heartbeat since vendor software is usually
| complete shit (even without adware).
| nottorp wrote:
| > If you can't sell software you have to monetize in other
| ways.
|
| What do you mean, can't sell software? Lately you can't BUY
| software. Everything is either free or subscription based.
| And they sell your data even if you pay for a subscription.
| ticviking wrote:
| This is the thing that makes me most upset. I'd very
| happily pay more of they'd stop selling my data, but since
| it's always there as an option I basically have to either
| selfhost, be robbed, or get politically active on the
| topic.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > If you can't sell software you have to monetize in other
| ways.
|
| Somebody had to say it out loud...
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Precisely. The fact that most software these days can be called
| "spyware" and "adware" is very unsettling from the perspective
| of someone who got into computing at around the time of Windows
| 98.
| zksmk wrote:
| >Something weird happened over the past decade.
|
| I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective
| monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone
| was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do
| whatever they wanted with the user experience without
| repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as
| a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into
| desktop apps or even Windows, and people just accepted it. What
| I think could reverse the user hostility trend would be
| competition which would require breaking the
| oligopolies/network effect which means the rise of Linux
| desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while,
| but not impossible. And of course there are limits to how far
| they can degrade the user experience without starting to lose
| users so I don't think it can be a lot worse than now, but
| still we're stuck with the status quo.
| zelon88 wrote:
| > which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse
| platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible.
|
| I like to hope you're right, but I don't believe you are.
|
| Most people don't want to learn more about tech. They just
| want tech to be intuitive enough to pick up and use.
|
| The mobile market appeared because Windows is too big and
| cumbersome. That's why people advertised it as a skill on
| their resume. It isn't fun. Windows is a chore to most
| people.
|
| Nobody puts "experienced Android user" on their resume
| because it is expected that just by being alive you should be
| capable of using every function of an Android device. Very
| little functionality is abstracted away into 20 year old UI's
| or shell commands. There is a button for everything, and the
| button makes sense.
|
| So if Windows didn't stand a chance, there is absolutely zero
| chance Linux will catch on at the scale it needs to for your
| post to come true.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Ignoring the fact that Android puts its buttons in
| basically arbitrary places, the fact is that it's just not
| a very useful platform for more complex tasks. It can do
| less, so there's not much to master. Windows and Linux can
| do more, so there is more to master because they allow more
| complicated interactions between things inside the
| computer. In other words, listing an OS on your resume
| means that you are sort-of competent enough to pull off
| such tasks at all.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The reason you don't list android user on your resume is
| that it's very difficult to use android (or iOS) for
| anything beyond passive consumption of content which is not
| something employers want.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I agree. Based on what I saw those that want to move either
| have or are exploring their options already.
|
| Average user is perfectly content with what they have,
| because it requires zero new knowledge and zero extra work.
| Linux is still anything but that.
|
| edit: Come to think of it. It is a good thing. Web became
| mainstream and see what happened to it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| A little too literal IMHO. No reason a floss mobile os
| can't exist. Android proves Linux is technically capable.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The
| relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what
| brought the acceptance of spying.
| the_other wrote:
| As a career front-end developer, I take affront at this. I
| have never argued in favour of any of the shit people face
| on the web on a daily basis. I'm close to wanting to get
| out of the industry because the product is so toxic these
| days. The people are largely great, I love my current
| team.. but every month we're told to add more tracking, or
| advertising (from Google of all people). I could leave out
| of political differences but where am I gonna go that's
| different (in London)?
|
| Biz: we need to track our users, stick GA on it Me: we
| could do a privacy-friendly alternative which brings the
| data in-house. It would lower our lower our GDPR burden so
| our cookie notices would be simpler, and at the same time
| make it easier to link our user data with other metrics (I
| work in streaming video at the moment) Biz: GA is free Me:
| Longer term, out overall cost of development will be lower
| because the complexity will be lower, and you wont be
| leaking data about your customers Biz: but GA is free and
| works out of the box with more analysis than we'd use Me:
| Do you see how that actually makes it more complex, over-
| engineered and unfit for OUR purposes? It's also a dog to
| use by the data people and they will ask for a different
| tool because they can't change GA Biz: it's free. The
| deadline is three weeks.
|
| BIZ: we want to make more money so we'll sell advertising
| Me: Ok, but content-based advertising would guve us more
| control over what we get linked with, doesn't track users,
| lets us set our own pricing, lets us sync better with our
| own content (because presumably we'd be able to control the
| manifests better Biz: but GA gives us an admin panel and we
| don't have to think about it Me: but the integration will
| take months and half of it's out of our hands be ause Third
| Party Biz: here's the admin key they gave us...
|
| (Ok, so I didn't actually have these conversations and TBH
| I only learned the detail of sharing manifests with a third
| party after I joined the team.. but you get the idea).
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I understand that you may feel affronted (and apologise
| for making you feel like that), but I'm actually
| criticising the web development as an industry and as a
| set of broad trends, rather than individual developers.
| Sometimes developers may have leverage, but from my
| experience in backend dev, that's rarely an option.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Dont take a critique of the job title as a slight against
| you personally. We, frankly, don't know you.
|
| And as a whole industry, front-end devs have implemented
| atrocious dark patterns and all manners of disgusting
| anti-user choices. Have you? Only you can answer that -
| but I sincerely don't care about your personal choices.
| This discussion was never aimed at "the_other".
| billytetrud wrote:
| Start your own company
| zo1 wrote:
| I blame Javascript and the "hipster" devs that fueled its
| rise unnaturally.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| I've never worked with a Javascript developer who was
| responsible in any way for their employer's adtech and
| dark UX patterns strategy. In my experience, those
| decisions are always made by PMs and approved by the
| board.
|
| Your comment seems like an opportunistic attack on a type
| of developer you don't personally like rather than
| something that is rooted in reality.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns
| strategy
|
| well, generally a JavaScript developer is just a frontend
| developer so I'm assuming at least some have experienced
| a PM saying: too many people are doing X which we don't
| want them to do, how do we keep them from doing X? And
| the developer then makes helpful suggestions.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| And yet almost every example of malware in the article is a
| native app.
| donkarma wrote:
| Electron is not native
| wolrah wrote:
| I blame marketing departments being given too much (read:
| almost any) control over product development.
|
| No developer cares about the level of analytics being
| pushed today, and unless they're profit sharing they
| probably don't care about the ads either.
|
| Those anti-features are there because marketing departments
| want them there and have enough power to get what they
| want.
|
| Don't let marketing make product decisions.
| Frost1x wrote:
| The underlying cause here is unbound and often
| unregulated profit motive with the farse that competition
| self regulates. At some scales competition self regulates
| but at scale we see now, it simply doesn't. There are too
| many barriers and too strong of foothold in markets.
|
| As a result it trickles down, how can we improve our
| revenue stream. More data, more ads, more nickel and
| diming consumers, how can we lockdown control of this
| product/service, charge more for the same and even more
| for less.
|
| Developers are, in my opinion, just along for the ride
| and not making these decisions so much as allowing and
| enabling them to happen. In the world of professions
| software engineering pays quite well and it pays well for
| a variety of reasons. People take lucrative positions and
| decide, reasonably, that what they're being told or
| pressured to do isn't that bad. It's not like the
| holocaust where they're turning a blind eye to genocide,
| they're turning a blind eye to corporate, monopolistic,
| and oligopic market abuses because at the end of they day
| they get to live comfortably.
|
| I develop garbage I don't agree with often. I reduced my
| comp level to have more leverage to haggle against
| questionable practices but even then I still have to do
| some questionable things. For developers it's a choice of
| following along and being paid well or taking a hit and
| working somewhere that comps a hit less but doesn't
| product hostile products. I have nothing against those
| who choose to enable these business practices because
| they're building financial security in a world we've
| created that says these practices are OK. Businesses are
| sort of doing the same but they're more proactive in
| shaping the policy that allows these practices, so they
| have real responsibility here. Consumers have a
| responsibility as well by continuing to buy garbage they
| don't need that uses these practices. Voters have some
| responsibility for pushing politicians in who bend to the
| will of businesses to allow deregulation or prevent
| regulation for these practices. Politicians have blame
| for the ethical flexibility to let lobbyists and
| businesses incentivize them to represent businesses more
| than their voter base.
|
| We have a mess on our hands with everyone having a little
| bit of blame here but the biggest responsibility I
| believe falls on large businesses and the capital holders
| behind them setting most of this in motion.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If you build your culture on an ethic of competitive
| individualism, this is what you get.
|
| Hardly anyone is really happy. Not even those with huge
| piles of money.
|
| They're _comfortable_ and (largely) immune to everyday
| threats. But the system as a whole continues to be made
| of traps and sharp edges. And a _lot_ of people fall
| through them, never to be seen again.
|
| Not a few were convinced it couldn't possibly happen to
| them, until it did.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Back up even farther, though - SO MANY PRODUCTS are
| literally indistinguishable outside of marketing.
|
| I think the issue is much deeper than "don't let
| marketing make product decisions".
|
| Browse through any app store - click a category, and it's
| a sea of apps that provide essentially the same
| capabilities.
|
| Just like your grocery store has a sea of jars filled
| with slightly varying salsa.
|
| So take the diagram in the article:
|
| Customers asked for it: Check.
|
| Customers would benefit from it: Check.
|
| We built/tested/shipped it: Check.
|
| What's the missing step? Did _ANYONE_ fucking buy it?!?!
|
| And it turns out none of the other steps actually matter
| compared to the last one, if the goal is to remain a
| functioning company.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Customers asked for it: Check._
|
| > _Customers would benefit from it: Check._
|
| The key is in what the word "it" means. The answers are
| positive if by "it" you mean "this category of product".
| They may very well be negative if by "it" you mean "our
| particular product".
|
| The customers want a jar of salsa. They _don 't_ want,
| and never asked for, your particular variation of a jar
| of salsa, essentially identical to 10 other variations
| except for a differently designed label.
|
| Another tricky bit is in the "asked for" part. For most
| products on the planet, customers don't really _ask_ for
| anything. The market isn 't structured this way. Products
| are just dumped on the market, and those that sell
| survive. This is wasteful, but has some benefits. It
| would just be better if marketing wasn't there to meddle
| with things, artificially sustaining more variations of a
| product than needed.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > most mainstream software from renowned companies should be
| [...] classified as malware.
|
| Most FLOSS has not fallen in this category.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Exactly. To keep being user-hostile and keep the user base,
| software needs to satisfy some requisites: being closed or
| depending on not reproducible proprietary services, or having
| no better competitors. A user-hostile software that happens
| to be useful and is open would be forked and cleaned in no
| time, or users would flee to the competition if there is any.
| The fact that the most user-hostile applications today live
| in closed proprietary PC or mobile operating systems, or
| proprietary services where there is no such thing as either
| openness or competition, gives an hint on where the problem
| is.
| sneak wrote:
| But even a significant portion of FLOSS can be legitimately
| called spyware. Firefox, Chromium, Docker (although Docker
| Desktop is no longer open source), Homebrew, Mattermost,
| Netdata, Bitwarden - all of these are common, popular FLOSS
| that embed spyware, oftentimes operating silently (other than
| a little notice at install time that the authors think
| constitutes informed consent).
|
| The spyware epidemic is real, and FLOSS is not immune.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is what Mozilla says about data collection.
|
| > By default, Mozilla collects limited data from Firefox to
| help us understand how people are using the browser, such
| as information about the number of open tabs and windows or
| number of webpages visited. This does not include data that
| can reveal sensitive information about users' activity
| online, such as search queries or the websites users visit.
|
| I think you are defining the term spyware too broadly.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| With FLOSS, the culture often looks down upon telemetry so
| there's an incentive not to include those because of user
| outcry (Audacity, ahem). Forking or patching out the
| offending pieces of code is also possible (see Audacity
| again).
|
| Caddy v1 also came with telemetry, but it was trivial to
| rebuild it with the telemetry switched off. The best you
| can do with closed software like Windows is to apply a hack
| and hope it's not undone after an update.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's true, but still, the trend of embedding spyware in
| FLOSS is becoming normalized. On top of that, FLOSS
| spyware vs. proprietary spyware is a distinction that is
| useful only for _software developers_ - a subset of
| "tech-savvy people". Until recently, tech-savvy people
| could just _assume_ that FLOSS software is free from
| bullshit, and both use it and recommend it to non-tech-
| savvy people without checking.
|
| FLOSS or not, most software is still products, with a
| name and an owner. The openness could, in principle,
| enable a "network of slightly different forks" model of
| software evolution, _but it didn 't_. There's universally
| a single canonical repo, with the "real" owners, and
| occasionally some niche forks. A fork takes over only
| when it can win the marketing game against the repo it
| forked from. So, each time an owner of the canonical repo
| decides to include telemetry in their project, their
| users who aren't software developers are screwed.
| mishafb wrote:
| Wait, what did Bitwarden do?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem is that since the past decade or so you started
| being able to get tons of investment money from simply
| "engaging" users (whatever the fuck that means). This works
| recursively too - you can create a company that provides
| services to other companies who "engage" users. Best of all,
| you don't even have to be profitable or have a long-term
| business plan (being against your users is not a successful
| strategy unless you're a monopoly), you can just enjoy the VC
| money and get you and your mates a nice salary for a few years
| and then rinse & repeat.
|
| This turns the entire thing upside down. It used to be that you
| made money by making good tools that users paid money for
| because they solved their problem - thus the incentives are
| clear and aligned. But now it's the opposite, you simply waste
| the user's time and annoy them as much as possible and money
| just magically appears and the users don't even have a choice
| because they're not the ones paying for it.
| xnx wrote:
| Like other malware, they learned that it's best to not draw
| attention to yourself. Viruses don't put a big animation on
| your screen anymore, they silently enlist your machine in a
| botnet and steal your account number and credentials. Toolbars
| (now extensions) don't change your search engine, they silently
| add affiliate parameters and cookies.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The problem is too much money came into tech. Even 10 years ago
| software companies had only a fraction of today's
| representation among blue chip companies. Once the industry is
| recognized as a top place to make money then the wrong sort of
| people start worming their way in slowly but surely undermining
| whatever integrity came out of the early engineering culture
| and values that built the foundation.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean. Blue chips like IBM and Microsoft
| were making bank even in the late 90s. Lots of money in tech
| isn't new.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Up until web 2.0 and the smart phone revolution it was
| mostly hardware, and mostly business. What changed was once
| the majority of the consumer market and attention span was
| tapped via ubiquitous web and mobile penetration which
| opened up the possibility for software companies to extract
| maximum value from every single consumer.
|
| Consider this:
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-history-of-the-
| lar...
|
| In 1999 (dotcom peak!) there were 5 companies in the top 10
| (1 software, 4 hardware). In 2019 it was 7 out of 10,
| including the top 5 spots.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| >Something weird happened over the past decade.
|
| PR happened. The big players have figured out that if they want
| to keep misbehaving to make money, they needed people to not
| fight them. To do so, one amazing tool is to make sure the
| entire way to speak about the topic is controlled by them.
|
| Internet gave us the ability to share more, and we though it
| would allow us to defend our self better, to make people more
| aware. But we didn't predict that an entire industry would
| specialize into creating submarine communication that pretend
| to be an organic one of such quality that the average human
| can't tell the difference.
|
| With old school com and ads, you at least knew somebody was
| trying to sell you crap. Now, you are nicely having a chat in
| what you think is a community of peers, while being exposed to
| commercial and political influence that have been crafted to
| reach you here without raising your BS radar.
|
| And with AI, it's going to get worse.
| kortex wrote:
| > And with AI, it's going to get worse.
|
| Cynical prediction: AI influencers, possibly with a hybrid
| components. Accounts powered by some GPT-esque generator,
| acting like a real human, shilling various widgets in a
| naturalistic way. Use humans-in-the-loop to add randomness
| and natural-ness. Or just AI extending how much marketers can
| generate.
|
| And/or microinfluencers. Platforms benefitting (otherwise
| regular) users in some way to adopt some stance. Oh, you said
| good things about Brawndo, and our fingerprinting was able to
| trace your social media to your amazon wishlist, which
| happens to have Brawndo in it? Free pack of brawndo shipped
| to you from a "mystery admirer". Post a selfie with a logo
| prominently, CV bots pic it up, get swag. Gossip quickly
| spreads that if you say nice things about X, or take pics of
| Y, you get free swag. Suddenly your feed is full of your
| friends giving a lot of organic-seeming attention to
| corporate products. It'll put the Sunoco bumper sticker
| campaign to shame.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, that's what I had in mind, and I suspect it's already
| going on to some extend with votes and follow ups, which is
| easier than content generation, until the later becomes so
| good you can let it roll free.
| quetzthecoatl wrote:
| Politics too. People are far too eager to cede power to these
| big tech companies just because it will hurt those on the
| other side of the political spectrum now - without realizing
| that that power is gone forever. DMCA takedown,
| demonetization and ad revenue scene, privacy - it's all the
| same story.
| b3morales wrote:
| Was (is) there any normal person who was in favor of the
| DMCA? Geeks knew about it and hated it; non-geeks were
| unaware or, if informed, hated it. It was a product of
| lawyers and moneyed "entertainment" industry interests.
| [deleted]
| avnigo wrote:
| > However, the problem is becoming much more endemic lately, with
| everyone on the hunt for more data, more accounts, and a level of
| access to a computer that would make it seem like they're using
| it as a giant bullseye for everyone on the Internet.
|
| And I would argue that the main driving force for that is for
| selling your data to advertisers on software that is free (and
| sometimes paid), and maybe to increase sales on software that is
| paid. All this, quite possibly, at a privacy detriment to the
| user.
|
| I don't think the fault lies directly and singly on developers,
| as mentioned in the article, but many are reacting to the way the
| software market currently works, and attempt to gain that edge. A
| lot of the big-name software may also likely be designed by
| committee, one of which may include the marketing department,
| growth analytics etc.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a
| faster horse." - Henry Ford
|
| If you have the users design a car you end up with a Homer bubble
| car.
|
| A better strategy is don't be an asshole.
|
| You know telemetry on by default is wrong.
|
| Putting sane defaults that the users must opt in instead of opt
| out is right.
|
| No one wants to make an account for your product, other login
| choices are usually available, but don't force it if you don't
| need it.
| thewebcount wrote:
| The author didn't say, "Let the user design the software." They
| said, "Would the user benefit from this feature?" That's a big
| difference.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| The issue is that there's a reason software is so user-hostile:
| it increases profits for the software's developers. If we want to
| get better software, we need an economic system that changes the
| incentives.
|
| One way to get there could be to encourage widespread adoption of
| copyleft licenses like the GPL, which would encourage more
| corporations to release their software as FOSS, thus exposing
| them to competition from more user-friendly forks.
| kekeblom wrote:
| One thing that could help, but obviously would not completely
| solve everything is some sort of "organic" label/certification
| for software. Basically have someone audit the software and
| check that it doesn't screw the user in any way. For many
| categories of software, if you could sell the software as not
| doing any of this or other bad stuff, it would make sense to
| stay within the bounds of the certification.
|
| Of course some business models are fundamentally toxic and they
| could never not break some of the rules.
|
| I wrote about the idea here
| https://keke.dev/blog/2020/11/29/organic-software.html
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the
| customers
|
| I'm not sure what he means by "developers" - the people who
| actually wrote the code? This didn't come from them. Or the
| marketing people who create the JIRA tickets that the developers
| are supposed to "close" 10 of every "sprint"?
| dend wrote:
| OP here. I should've clarified in the article. "Developers" is
| not meant to single out engineers. It's the collective "people
| who build, promote, and maintain the software"
| kstenerud wrote:
| You'll notice that all of his examples of user-hostile software
| lack a universally accepted standard. This is not new.
|
| Do you need to install special vendor software to use your
| bluetooth devices? No - everyone follows the standard, so your OS
| just knows how to hook up your headset. With USB it's different,
| because the standards are insufficient for the gadgets that we
| use, resulting in specialized software for your extra buttons,
| light shows, sensitivity, etc.
|
| Two prime older examples are graphics cards and printers. There
| has never been a driver standard for either that was universally
| accepted (after VGA and VESA local bus), and so the only
| alternative is bespoke software. Remember when game controllers
| needed specialized drivers (Sound Blaster)? I do.
|
| And it's not like this is limited to software either. There are
| plenty of standards and lack-of-standards in construction,
| automotive, even electrical in some cases. One of the most
| expensive explosions in history was the result of a mismatch
| between metric and imperial measures.
|
| Want to get away from this nightmare of custom-implementations-
| for-everything? Push for sane and comprehensive standards.
| danuker wrote:
| > everyone follows the standard
|
| Try sharing a file via Bluetooth between an Apple and an
| Android device.
| thefr0g wrote:
| So everyone except Apple?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Do you need to install special vendor software to use your
| bluetooth devices? No
|
| Logitech and Samsung would like a word...
| l0b0 wrote:
| Oh? The Logitech G613 Bluetooth keyboard and M510 Bluetooth
| mouse were plug and play on Windows, Arch Linux and NixOS.
| Back in the day, sure, but I don't think custom drivers are
| much needed for anything but GPUs by now.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| The medium to broadcast ads has simply shifted over time. It used
| to be expensive tv ads, billboards, and print. All very expensive
| and you could not target population segments precisely, it was
| limited to what time or during what tv show the ads were shown,
| or in print political leanings. Retargeting was almost impossible
| and expensive.
|
| Then people started watching less tv and reading less
| newspapers(or did so online). Then JS got mature enough to track
| users and then the marketing departments started instructing the
| devs for maximum efficiency. At the cost of user ui/ux. Almost
| every web page loads ads via ajax , consents popups, email list
| ctas with a lot of bloat. Nobody knows how to fix it, or the
| financial incentives are just not there.
| zonabey wrote:
| I couldn't stop laughing whilst reading the entire article.
|
| The one that really got me was the Electron-based "launcher". I
| had to take a break for ten minutes.
| dend wrote:
| OP here. Sadly a true story with a "shall not be named"
| software for optical media management. I just want a Win32
| binary that does it's job. Instead, I had to wait 45 seconds
| every launch until the server "spins up" from working in the
| background.
| bo1024 wrote:
| This strikes me as extremely generous.
|
| I agree that on an individual level, developers may be just
| following an industry-trend path of least resistance. The trend
| is putting the developer first.
|
| But as a general phenomenon, it's exploitative. The goal is to
| capture as much of the user's time, attention, and data as
| possible.
|
| Sometimes I feel silly for prioritizing FOSS highly, but
| sometimes not. At least I don't ever put up with this kind of
| stuff.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Ultimately, a developer's or a company's objective is not to
| provide good software, but to succeed financially (or in some
| other metric). This is somewhat aligned with the user's needs -
| if a user wants a calculator app, it should do arithmetics. But
| beyond that, The Dev is not a benevolent entity, and users are a
| means to an end.
|
| It doesn't have to be cynical and exploitative, but when push
| comes to shove, The Dev will act in their own interest and not
| that of the users.
|
| Maybe sad, but really that's how everything works. Are energy
| companies interested in a world with plentiful green energy? No,
| they want to make money and pay dividends.
| kevincox wrote:
| Of course there are other motives. For most Free Software the
| motive is "Make something that is good _for me_. " Still not
| optimal for other users but closer aligned.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Sort of. As much as I like Linux, I don't use it on my own
| kit. Linux is made for tinkerers, or people who know it's
| internals well. For me Linux is always slightly broken.
|
| I guess that's because the devs building it don't care that
| much about 100% seamless work on all hardware; 95% is good
| enough. But that remaining 5% means I just can't use it. By
| contrast, Mac is a non-free, limited walled garden (prison?),
| but doesn't need the trackpad be debugged or kernel
| recompiled.
|
| So here, libre devs' work is less aligned with my needs than
| the commercial operation, whose key selling point is seamless
| UX. (Not complaining, just saying)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This flowchart is true for many things... even webpages:
|
| How many users actually wanted to subrscribe to your newsletter
| the first time they visited your page, before they even read the
| first article there?
|
| How many first-time visitors actually want to donate money?
|
| ...
| city41 wrote:
| I don't understand this. I visit a site I've never been to
| before and immediately a popup takes over along these lines. Do
| those really convert? I can't imagine they do, but they are
| also everywhere so they must be effective to some degree?
|
| I feel like The Guardian's approach is better, after a while
| they bring up a banner down at the bottom that says
| (paraphrased) "hey you've read x articles, we want to stay
| independent, can you help us?"
| thewebcount wrote:
| > they are also everywhere so they must be effective to some
| degree?
|
| I wouldn't assume that. I would bet most people enter a fake
| email address just to make the thing go away because they
| don't know you can just close most of them, or don't realize
| the passive aggressive "No I don't want great deals sent to
| my inbox every day because I hate great deals" text link is a
| button they can press to dismiss the dialog because they
| don't read it and it intentionally doesn't look like a button
| to discourage users from pressing (or reading) it.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| How many users want to have to have the inconvenience of paying
| for the software too!
| denton-scratch wrote:
| If you want users to pay for your software, put a price on
| it, and stop pretending it's free. Nagging pop-ups -> Close
| tab.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I do. I would much rather pay than see ads or be required to
| give up personal information. I can understand that not
| everyone wants that, but I do. I also have been very
| disappointed with usability of FOSS to the point that I
| rarely consider using it anymore. So yeah, I'm happy to pay
| (once per version I actually use).
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I recently left iOS over the surveillance stuff and I was looking
| at a Nokia device to replace my Apple Watch. I read in the Amazon
| review that you had to create an account and their privacy policy
| explains that your location data will be synced with Nokia and
| you can't opt out, the device can't be configured without
| accepting that.
|
| Nope.
|
| I'm at my wit's end with ALL of this stuff. Most software, apps,
| digital life, everything related to technology or a computer or a
| phone - a good majority of it is frivolous. I will no longer
| exchange my privacy for these idle conveniences.
|
| > Browsing a site through the browser and not the app? Half of
| the functionality is not available, just to force the user into
| the app for no good reason. I just want to read a comment.
|
| reddit you absolute POS.
| kibblesalad wrote:
| That seems to be the end result of companies seeking untapped
| income from harvesting and selling customer data, besides
| offering everything as a subscription service without any kind
| of end-user ownership or guaranteed ongoing functionality. Why
| just make money off the sale of the product when you can
| continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track
| their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their
| photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?
|
| Most people don't think twice to hit that "Accept" button
| prompting for permissions, allowing the envelope to be pushed
| further and further. The increasing ease of processing huge
| data sets allows all of this information to be aggregated, sold
| and used for whatever purpose whoever is willing to pay for it
| sees fit.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Yeah, this whole thing has been a big eye opener for me and
| you've the nail on the head. Moving from iOS to Calyx
| involved reading up and a few things and that's a community
| that's much more disposed to discussing privacy related
| concerns that I simply haven't been aware of. It's a bitter
| pill to swallow and infuriating, the degree to which we're
| surveilled and manipulated. Went back and paid attention to
| the Prism disclosures. It's all just fucking mental.
|
| > Why just make money off the sale of the product when you
| can continuously gather telemetry, personal information,
| track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts,
| their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?
|
| This is the key issue, it absolutely makes sense for them to
| do it. I'm one of those people who just hit "accept" but no
| more. My new answer to any company that continues to ask that
| question is simply... because if you do that, you lose the
| sale. It's frustrating that basically amounts to spitting in
| the ocean but I simply can't participate any longer.
| Paianni wrote:
| I don't think their S30+ (dumb) phones have that sort of ToS
| imposed...but then I can't imagine you want to revert to that
| sort of thing.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Ah, sorry, maybe a bit unclear - I was referring to a smart
| watch that Nokia makes. From iPhone 12 with iOS 14 I moved to
| a pixel 4 with CalyxOS.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Aaand if you follow the steps on the flow chart, your product
| will immediately be dead, forgotten; replaced by some
| competitor's product who, while being likely technically inferior
| to your product, did not hesitate to do all these types of shady
| things in order to gain that bit of extra market share.
|
| "Natural selection" at work. Sad, of course.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I notice someone else mentioned that software is a zero marginal
| cost product. This is an element that drives the cost down to
| zero when there is competition. But software is more than just
| zero marginal cost. An additional passenger on an airplane is
| zero marginal cost as well, but they can still charge for a
| ticket because it is trivial to keep someone off of an airplane.
|
| The bigger problem with software is its a public good. I don't
| mean that as some kind of normative statement saying it should be
| or deserves to be provided free of cost to all users of a
| particular state. I'm saying it is non-rivalrous (some sequence
| of bytes copied onto person A's disk does not prevent person B
| from copying the same sequence of bytes onto their disk) and non-
| excludable (due to the nature of disks and bytes, you can't
| prevent a person from doing it.
|
| Not all goods that are public goods by the economic definition
| need to be publicly provided. Media has this same characteristic,
| and they solve it by:
|
| 1) Making money off of live performances or theatrical
| experiences rather than the content
|
| 2) Selling ads
|
| There is an analogy to selling live performances in the software
| world. At the company I work for, every product we make is 100%
| free-to-use, open source, self-hostable, doesn't require an
| enterprise edition to unlock features, and doesn't include any
| kind of user-tracking to sell ads. Instead, we sell support, and
| also embed developers as consultants into client organizations.
| This is why I currently work for the Air Force. We're monetizing
| the developers rather than the software, the same way rock bands
| monetize live performance.
|
| The only other options are to either figure out some unnatural
| gating mechanism to prevent people from using your software
| without going through a payment gate (i.e. don't open-source it
| and only host it on your own servers, or distribute some of the
| software in encrypted form only and require a paid key to unlock
| it, or you sell ads.
|
| In traditional media, ads were fine. They were annoying,
| manipulative, I don't think anyone really liked them, but some
| were entertaining (arguably a draw of the Super Bowl), it was
| always easy to avoid them, and they were entirely targeted based
| on context.
|
| The problem with ads in the software world isn't the ads
| themselves. It's that companies relying on ads to monetize are
| never happy with the returns you can get purely from contextual
| ads. You can learn so much more about a consumer's purchasing
| behavior and preferences by installing spyware on every device
| they own and logging every action they ever take, all the better
| when most of them don't even know you're doing it.
|
| But this is the classic Jurassic Park dilemma. All of your
| machine learning researchers were so preoccupied with figuring
| out _what_ human behaviors they could predict given enough data
| that they never stopped to consider whether they _should_ collect
| all that data. Market research used to be conducted on paid
| volunteer focus groups and paid volunteer Nielsen families. They
| _consented_ to it. They knew what data you were collecting and
| how you would use it.
|
| But not happy with the limits of profit margin imposed on what
| data can be voluntarily collected from consenting research
| subjects, we have instead built a panopticon to turn every single
| person in the world into an unknowing research subject.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I suspect this is mostly driven by the economics of the software
| business. The cost of software is driven by fixed upfront costs.
| The marginal cost is now pretty close to zero. This means that
| unless you have some kind of lock in like Photoshop or Office
| then competitive pressures are going to drive your prices down
| towards zero.
|
| If you can't make any money selling your product then you will
| start looking elsewhere. That will include transactions that are
| against your customers interest like selling their profile to
| advertisers.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| This is a really serious problem and a nice set of principles to
| go by. There's a big "but", however: Most of us here are hired
| employees and aren't really making the products for the end
| users. What really could be helpful are not some "oaths" but the
| strategies for dealing with our managers and employers and ways
| to uphold the ethics (and in some cases, aesthetics) of our work.
|
| The mere market clearly don't work here, as the demand for these
| values is overshadowed by user's convenience, network effect and
| marketing brainwash.
| fleddr wrote:
| This article needs a part two. It does a good job of pointing out
| the misalignment between user needs and organization needs, but
| fails to address why this misalignment exists.
|
| The flow diagram assumes the naive situation that this is a just
| a matter of awareness, education, or people becoming somehow a
| "better" person.
|
| Whilst I don't have all answers, it's a complex problem set,
| allow me to speculate.
|
| When you look at the type of products discussed, say a mouse,
| they are low margin products. Ultra quick time to market, yearly
| iterations, and hardly ever built to have a long time span.
|
| That's not us though. We're "Good Corp". We do it properly. The
| mouse comes with a basic driver, no app needed. We do build an
| optional app for the lights. It's a native app, built from
| scratch. Smooth and fast. We build this app for 2 or 3 operating
| systems, natively. And we respect standards, the app can also
| control lights of devices from other manufacturers. Our enormous
| test lab tests every possible combination across operating
| systems and competing mouses, and will keep doing this as these
| underlying systems are constantly updated. Finally, we build our
| mouse to last, from better materials, and also design for
| repairability.
|
| Our good corp mouse costs 120$. The evil corp mouse costs 50$. It
| has the exact same features, just a lot of cutting corners, but
| functionality is comparable.
|
| Which mouse will customers buy? Will they recognize quality? More
| importantly, will they pay for it? Or will they just go for the
| cheapest and tolerate the annoyances, and buy another one 3 years
| from now?
|
| I think you know the answer. When the market does not reward
| quality, quality will not be delivered. There will be no magical
| moment where developers turn "good", they cant do good, because
| good is expensive, and nobody buys it.
| anovikov wrote:
| Natural selection will quickly weed out everyone who tries to
| follow the suggested path. Simply due to cost of traffic becoming
| lower than revenue.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not
| everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect
| example of why some things _shouldn 't_ be services, just plain
| old downloadable software.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all
| services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally
| working and probably much more featureful calculator app.
|
| People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a
| bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of
| countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest
| microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in
| this www query would be able to do hundreds of these simple
| multiplications _per nanosecond_. But no, people query
| google.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The Windows calculator can take seconds to launch, if you
| already have a browser open C-t and then entering a quick
| calculation is _much_ faster. Even on systems like macOS
| where the calculator opens quickly, again if you already
| have a browser open creating a new tab and querying is
| faster for any short calculation.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > probably much more featureful calculator app
|
| Hum... I've got out of my way to install qalc, but Google
| is much more featureful than anything you find on Windows
| or that comes by default on most Linuxes.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Convenience. You can google the answer faster than your
| calculator app can even open.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| If this was true for _any_ platform I would immediately
| throw it away.
|
| But the point is that there is, for some reason, a
| pressure for platforms to be this way; convenience is not
| the cause.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Unfortunately it is true for almost any platform I've
| tried. Calculator applications have become as bloated as
| everything else.
| anovikov wrote:
| By cost of traffic i mean: cost of acquiring users/clients.
| Nowadays it makes everything which is not a clickbaity,
| addiction-based scam, pretty much futile. Slowly but surely,
| Internet becomes a land of sociopaths, no one else gets to
| make much money.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope,
| it's not a mass storage device.
|
| MTP exists, Windows and Linux can use it... but OS X still
| doesn't have a native MTP client.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Vendor lock-in absolutely figures into a hell of a lot of user-
| hostile tech. Even before Apple went full spyware, I refused to
| buy iThings on principle, just due to Apple's abuse of its
| customers and developers (ever-changing connectors,
| unrepairability, needing to get Apple's blessing, revocable at
| the drop of a hat, to even write software for them, etc.).
|
| Android is very far from perfect, but for now it's at least
| still usable, except that manufacturers have decided to follow
| Apple's lead on unrepairability. But at this point I'm
| preparing myself to do without, as I'm not optimistic about the
| future of smartphones. I was a holdout for a long time anyway,
| and the whole "Install our app! <small>which, by the way, also
| sucks down your contact list and mines cryptocoins</small>"
| thing has gotten out of hand.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > ever-changing connectors
|
| iDevices have had only two connectors over their life time -
| the bulky 30-pin lasted thirteen years (2001-2014), and the
| Lighting connector from 2014 to this day. The iPad Pro has
| USB-C, so I won't complain there.
|
| Macs also have only used standard connectors since the Intel
| era.
|
| > revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for
| them
|
| You don't need a paid certificate to write software for your
| own Mac/iDevices, you don't even need Xcode to create
| software for Macs (as evidenced by Homebrew/Macports).
|
| Fully agree with you on the rest, though.
| abraxas wrote:
| > they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the
| customers.
|
| Oh this kind of software takes care of the needs of customers
| alright. Except their true customers are advertisers not users.
|
| This adification of every single item we use every day is
| tiresome and will hopefully lead to a wide pendulum swing in the
| opposite direction once consumers truly have had enough. We're
| not there yet but I think it's coming.
| danuker wrote:
| > I think it's coming
|
| Unless you _make_ it come to yourself by boycotting adware, the
| fact that adware is everywhere is proof to the contrary.
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