Hacker News Reader

> users in general

Blaming users is part of the problem. Yes, they vote with their wallet, but their vote is usually made in ignorance and is often mislead by companies that are so used to dissembling and exaggerating they call such antisocial behavior "best practice".

That said, it is true that this is largely a problem with the economic incentives. Capitalism optimizes for businesses that are financially efficient, so the business that sells the lowest quality product they can get away with is "successful". This becomes even worse in software, where quality is harder to see directly. Even the people that write software can have a hard time evaluating "quality".

The solution for this situation is simple, but it's basically taboo to talk about it: liability. If you sell software, you need to be liable for any damage it causes when "used normally". For a decent sketch of how this might look, see Dan Geer's explanation[1]. There may be other ways to implement liability. I suggest that the software industry should find a way to implement this as soon as possible, if they want any say in what "liability" means.

Yes, this will raise development costs; spending more for better development practices was the goal.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=1531

Software companies are sued all the time for damages.

Do you have any citations for this?

Even sites who clearly deliver malware through their ad network don't get sued.

While custom software typically comes with guarantees (if it doesn't work, the provider is generally liable to fix it for free. If it's not "finished" on time, it may even pay damages —determined by contract); shrink-wrap software (free or proprietary) generally comes with a nice piece of text saying that if it shreds your hard drive, or lag so much it makes you mad enough to throw yourself out the window, it's not their fault.

Liability towards one customer is also not the same as liability towards thousands, or even millions of users.

"I remember what software, and the internet, used to be like 20 years ago. My user-experience, and expectations, has increased in almost every way imaginable during this time. From a 10,000 foot view, I'm extremely pleased with the way things have changed in the past 2 decades."

I have to agree wholeheartedly with this statement. I'm relying on software to basically help me run my life. Thanks to software, I can accomplish more than I would otherwise. (OTOH, I also take on more, which is a whole other post on making ourselves crazy by trying to do too much.)

Still, there is room for improvement. The problem is that no single point of failure exists. It's a layered problem involving economic incentive, unskilled people jumping into development to shore up the shortage of labor, an immature consumer base, a dizzying array of tools, methodologies, and standards for developing software, etc.

At present, I don't see any way out of the dilemma.

If you think that software/service X sucks, why not see this as an opportunity to do something about it?

A lot of the examples in the blog post are about sucky corporate websites. You aren't going to set up a competitor to IKEA, let alone an electricity company, because the quality of their IT is poor. That argument works in only one case:

• The product is pure software

• It doesn't have any barriers to entry

• The quality of the incumbent is so dire, and the chances of improvement so low, that it makes sense to replicate their entire product investment just to "do it right this time"

Unfortunately such opportunities are rare.

Yeah, that's basically it: software sucks for economic reasons. It's insanely expensive to create good software, and even if you spend a lot of money, you're not guaranteed to get it.

I think there are some tragedy of the commons situations though, where everybody is relying on extremely underfunded common infrastructure. It was only after a bunch of expensive security holes that the users of this software started to pay more attention:

https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/

But there is plenty of other stuff that needs to be done, that would benefit everybody, and doesn't involve security holes.

> If you think that software/service X sucks, why not see this as an opportunity to do something about it?

I try very much. I try to report any issues I find like this (I spoke to 5 different people at NPower trying to explain their issue, and nobody cared or understood).

I have a job/family/life. There's only so much time I'm prepared to put into trying to make silly things like these better, and I'm certainly doing far more than most! :)

Reporting technical issues to non-technical people does not work.