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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that dreads new product updates recently? I used to be super enthusiastic about every new update for everything(cool! more stuff!) but Android, Youtube and Windows 10 updates especially have made me extremely jaded - it feels like every update I either lose some functionality or something I used every day has now moved to a completely different place for no good reason. I seriously consider disabling firmware updates on my phone for that reason( if not for security updates, I think I would have done it already) - I don't want to re-learn my devices every time there is an update. Youtube interface has changed several times in the last year for me, every time moving some links that I use all the time elsewhere - "my videos" for example is now hidden 3 layers deep, when previously it was on the front page. Just why. I don't want your new shiny interface, I want to keep using the stuff that I know.

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I resist updates because so often they are driven not by the need to incrementally improve a product in terms of features and design, but by some "high up the chain" decision to turn a perfectly good product info a "platform", or a tool for ensnaring you ever deeper into the wider platform. See: iTunes, Skype.

These updates are particularly maddening, as they usually involve slick and chirpy new design accompanied by the maddening confusion of trying to figure out if the features you liked are dead or just obfuscated, and the feeling of disempowerment as your previously reliable software starts coercing you into all sorts of stuff you never asked for. It's a rather Orwellian feeling.

I'm not looking forward to trying to figure out what agenda this Gmail overhaul is going to try to push on me.

Each year the internet and its services are less and less for hackers and more and more for the general public. This is reflected in how everything is designed.

The average person has totally different needs and usage patterns than power users. If you want to avoid this phenomena, where the services you use slowly degrade and lose features, favor products that specifically target power users. Products for the general population, like Android, Youtube, and Windows, will over time degrade more and more towards some lowest common denominators.

>Products for the general population, like Android, Youtube, and Windows, will over time degrade more and more towards some lowest common denominators.

There's a problem with this theory though, that the utility of some of these programs is in how many users (and thus content, etc) they have

So we can't really "favor products that specifically target power users" as YouTube or Google Maps alternatives -- or, rather, we could, but they'd be weaker in the polish, content, user base department (e.g. Vimeo or some advanced Maps platform)

"The average person has totally different needs and usage patterns than power users."

There is no average person. Different person have different use cases and preferences. No person wants known liked things to be removed or made less good.

Apple devices are meant for Apple power users. I use Windows and Linux (KDE) and I am uncomfortable and constraint on Mac OS.

There is a reason why people spend (or spent) hours to discover and learn even their phone or TV software.

> No person wants known liked things to be removed or made less good.

Have you missed dozes of HN posts and threads about git being overcomplicated and overengineered? A lot of software engineers would love for git to remove a lot of features they don't use because they find it too complex. (For the record, I personally don't agree with them at all, but it is a very popular opinion).

Hell, many routinely rebase and squash commits for the sake of simplicity, throwing out a truthful development history.

>There is no average person. Different person have different use cases and preferences

Even so, most people are more alike than different.

Nice thought, but what would be the alternatives for Android, Gmail, GMaps ?

Alternative for Android? puri.sm phone. DIY rpi phone. Gmail? Fastmail. GMaps? OpenStreetMaps/OsmAnd

Purism phone still doesn't exist. You can't buy it.

It annoys the fuck out of me when someone says that a phone that still doesn't exist and isn't available for purchase is mentioned as an "alternative".

It will become an alternative once it's out. Until such time comes, stop mentioning it when discussing alternatives.

A DIY RPI phone? Is that a serious suggestion? Is anyone actually doing this?

And what’s the point if the baseband is not open?

LineageOS is pretty good, I've been using it since the Cyanogen/Lineage split.

For example, my setup:

Gmail: any email service

Android: root it, use a custom launcher and utility apps.

GMaps: Waze (lets you provide your own speech samples, even)

You don't have to secede from these whole platforms - just extend around them and reach into them.

Pffft

You’re examples:

Google

Google.

Your examples are all fucking google.

Could you explain how "any email service" means Google? Is ProtonMail a Google service?

OP's question was about how power users can keep UX control while services degrade their features to cater to average users. That's what I care about, not ideological purity in my software stack.

People like you are the tech equivalents of the militant vegan.

So? These are still different products, even if they happen to be acquired by the same company.

So why can't we have the option of using 'power user' interfaces? Also I doubt that Youtube has ever been for powerusers..

>So why can't we have the option of using 'power user' interfaces?

Because that means more money and effort spend by the vendor to maintain 2 sets of interfaces (and extra flags and features they could just cut entirely),

and that for the benefit of a tiny sliver of its user base, and the worst and most picky at that.

Power uses can utilize native clients, which they actually do.

You're assuming changes have any utility towards people in general. There are times changes will be made because they benefit the service provider at the expense of the user, because the service provider's interests are not at all the same thing as the user's interests.

I realize it's axiomatic that 'to serve the customer is self-evidently the best thing for the service provider, because capitalism', but by now I think that is obviously marketing spin to cover actions in self-interest… no matter who claims it. Starkly, obviously false.

Customer: a person who buys goods or services from a shop or business.

Gmail users are clearly not customers, they are not paying anything for it. Your cynicism against capitalism is unwarranted in this case.

less and less for hackers and more and more for the general public

I think this is the "excuse" but to me it seems like it's as much about "locking down" as "dumbing down".

History moves in cycles [0] and I'm seeing something like how we transitioned from Home Computers to game consoles in the mid 90s.

Hackers are experts at getting value out of equipment that the manufacturers never expected, and this is what you want with a nascent technology, to help build a market. But as things mature, as a business you want to lock down more and more of this creative potential for yourself and lock in the revenue.

We've seen it with music like this: Vinyl (locked down) -> tapes (hackable) -> CDs (locked down) -> CD Writers -> MP3s (hackable) -> Streaming (locked down) -> ... (tapes? [1])

We've seen it with home computing like this: Pong & Atari -> Commodore, Spectrum, Apple II -> NES, Master System -> Amiga, Atari ST -> SNES, Genesis -> PC -> Playstation -> The Apple Renaissance -> The Ripened Apple

Even on a smaller scale I can see Apple's pivot from "Rip, Mix, Burn" [2] to doing away with personal music altogether over the course of 10 years [3]

Or my PS4 where I'm more and more likely to just download a game now than go out to the shops and buy a disc.

At each stage there is a trade-off. You get a slightly more polished product, but you lose a certain degree of agency over it. I guess it's cyclical because the "locking down" goes a little too far and then people loses interest and then you need to bring in the hackers again to jump start the community once more. I'm sure there's some tie in with the innovators dilemma [4]

I think the only popular industry I can think of that has resisted broad-scale hacking is the movie industry. I can only speculate that the scale, and political importance meant they had to always stay ahead of the curve.

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/06/cassette-tapes-are-back-ki...

[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/2934175/think-retro-rip-rip...

[3] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/06/apple-shutting-i...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

fucking normies

I feel like every design update any online service had in the past 5 years could be shortened to one sentence - "See less.".

> Am I the only one that dreads new product updates recently?

I think that's a symptom that the person you're getting your updates from doesn't share your interests.

I like updates to libre software, because the makers share my interest in having the best tool. Updates to Android, not so much.

Or maybe you just want a stabler release channel — Debian stable instead of Rawhide — which, of course, web apps don't have.

  *cough*systemd*cough*

  *cough*gnome3*cough*

  *cough*git*cough*

Excuse me, I think I need a drink...

This is why I use specific apps for critical things in my life and very rarely change them (even though I regularly try alternatives, just to see if grass is greener on the other side!).

For mail, Apple's Mail.app can't be beat: nothing else works as fast with my E-mail archive dating back to 1994. For programming, I still haven't found anything that beats Emacs.

Using apps instead of letting Google read my mail solves at least part of the problem. The other part remains, however — I dread new Apple hardware updates, as recently their "pro" laptops took a huge dive for the worse. I'm stuck on a 2015 model, waiting for them to regain their sanity and produce actual "pro" laptops with decent keyboards and ports that I can actually use.

> Apple's Mail.app can't be beat

Uhm, I think there are some great 3rd party apps out there that are much more powerful. But I concur that an actual email client is the way to go, especially as soon as you have more than one address.

I tried them all (not joking: I buy every seriously-looking E-mail app). They all failed in one way or another, the biggest problem usually being speed.

My #2 is Spark, which I actually use on iOS, but on Mac it's a bit too slow, plus it actually failed to send an E-mail without notifying me or returning the E-mail (I did report this as a bug), which I consider a showstopper. So Mail.app it is.

For gmail I use Apple mail ever since and I don't care at all about the web interface. Hence everything stays as it is because Apple Mail is probably the less updated software in the world.

And yet, it has had several major updates over different OS X releases, with new features that had been touted in the "new OS X release highlights" each time.

Calling it "the less updated software in the world" shows why companies do even more frequent updates, even when they aren't needed. To avoid appearing stale.

A lot of this discrepancy is rooted in the fact that Apple does not actively try to destroy people's workflow. Changes are incremental, not decrememtal, and they do not happen to please some middle manager's itch to "change something".

They have understood something other tech companies are yet to learn: Noone uses your product because you're so modern or progressive or slick. Your product is a tool, not design porn to wank off to. Apple fanboys are overwhelmingly fanboys because Apple produces reliable tools they use to create stuff themselves, not because they dream of glossy icons at night.

We can see what happens when a company decides to degrade a "useable, reliable tool for creation" with stupid design/UX decisions in the Thinkpads, which had a fanboy group that is currently diminishing because anything post-T520 is just a sad excuse to the "reliable tool"

Unfortunately mobile Mail app still has issues with push notifications from Gmail — they come a few minutes late at least.

When I first heard DHH say that they had "versions" of Basecamp, I thought it was silly. Apparently, you can stay on older versions if you want to, and only get things like security updates. But feeling the way you describe I now think that it's an admirable approach.

It's a mixed bag. Blender/Unreal/Unity3D updates are always awesome. Windows has objectively reduced functionality, like it's now nearly impossible to associate my favorite image viewer with the image files - every few weeks it resets to the windows photo viewer, which is garbage.

Unity also releases with bugs, sometimes even major regressions (75%+ performance degradation on all default UIs in initial 2017.1 general release, for instance) -- so I'm not sure I can fully buy in to your argument, but I do understand what you mean.

We usually bite the bullet just because the pros outweigh the cons -- they do indeed ship a lot of great stuff -- but a lot of problems come with that, too. We still jump when we can (so long as the cons != 75% worse performance on all UIs)! ;)

There's plenty of Google developers creating nonsense to justify why they should be promoted.

It's not their fault. When you're hired to work on Gmail, what you are supposed to do? You have to innovate. You have to justify your choices. You have to support it with testing. It's not enough that you invent something and write "I feel that...".

Moreover, Google developers, just like all developers, work on things they don't believe in, or sometimes find useless. It's just work like any other. Criticizing developers for changes in how Gmail works is not really fair.

Eventually you become the thing you hate... In Gmail's case, that will eventually be Wave!

Agree with you in principle, but it looks to me like most of the new 'gmail' features are actually the most successful elements introduced with 'inbox' a couple of years back.

If this is actually the way that google wants to introduce new features ie. with a thorough, long term, and importantly separate process of testing and vetting. I think that is a pretty good way to go about it.

I hate update and always have.

New products are exciting.

Updates are what product managers do when they don't have any idea for a new product and want to justify their existence. It's like "reforms" in politics.

Successful products should be left alone.

Of course they never will, and we suffer. I understand that complaining about it is like complaining about the weather... yet I can't help myself.

So... do you like that Google released a dozen of IM programs so far instead of working on one single product and regularly updating it?

Upvoted! You got me... ;-)

I guess by "new product" I mean something addressing a new problem in a new way. A new function, not a new skin, which all these updates seem to be.

"Successful products"

If you define success by the numbers of users, i guess tweaking the UI makes sense to try to get even more users.

> Am I the only one that dreads new product updates recently?

It comes with age.

It comes with experience.

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