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You deserve an award for best "Get Off My Lawn" post of the day. Thank you.

Some of these are "power" vs "everyday" user optimizations. The one that jumps out to me is Skype. I had read some case studies of their redesign where they stated that 90%+ of Skype users only have two or three Skype contacts, and they use it to talk to their family members.

The redesign optimized for that and as a result you, I and everyone else with hundreds of contacts lost our collective minds.

I 100% get that it's worse for you (and me too) but I think it's important to look at what they were actually trying to do and it makes sense.

Ok, that could be the reason but I'd had appreciated if they were honest to tell us, the people that (used to) use Skype for work "thank you, we don't want you anymore, go find some other tool."

Note that Skype has now split into "Skype for Business" (whic is it's own form of weirdness in Office 365) and then normal Skype which is for the family/individuals.

Isn't Skype for Business Microsoft's old own Lync rebranded as Skype? [1] [2] It's seems it is about to become Microsoft Teams.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2014/11/1...

> In the first half of 2015, the next version of Lync will become Skype for Business with a new client experience, new server release and updates to the service in Office 365

Why not make the software flexible enough that the user can conform it to their own needs?

Let me guess: too much trouble for a developer to implement and maintain.

Some other recent Skype features:

Calls not connecting despite both users being online

Calls dropping suddenly

Calls seeming to connect but neither user can see or hear the other

Video freezing for one user while fine for the other

User showing up as online when not

User showing up as not online when actually online

I wonder if their case studies showed these would cause users to flock to this "walking dead" app. But hey, a UX lead got to put "re-designed Skype" on their resume, and their logo animates differently while connecting, so they have that going for them.

The TeamViewer thing will be deliberate, because they’ve sold a load of perpetual licenses for older versions so incompatibility is how they get more money out of you.

> I don't understand how the "modern" Windows start menu works they introduced in Win 8 I think.

The current start menu was introduced in Windows 10 though even the initial 10 version was a bit different. Windows 8 had a "start screen" where there were only tiles (that are now at the side) and took the entire screen.

Because the Windows 8 start screen and the initial Windows 10 start menu strongly deemphasized folders (submenus) everything was placed on the top level (in Windows 8 you'd see even subfolder icons on the top level). More recent versions of Windows 10 have the start menu show proper folders by default, but they use a tree-like "flow down" approach instead of an actual popup menu approach which makes navigating them harder.

These two combined makes the start menu a mess with tons of toplevel entries for applications that you are not going to use often or at all and a UI that makes it hard to create proper categories.

Nowadays we have more applications and programs than we ever had in the history of personal computing, yet the UIs for launchers are now being made as if we only have a handful of applications. This is true not only for Windows but also for launchers like those found in GNOME, elementaryOS, etc.

I've given up trying to locate the program I need via the tiles. Now I hit the Windows key and start typing the application name I need. Making the interface worse has actually made things easier in many cases. Except when I end up launching a web search by mistake.

I do the same, because for some reason only microsoft knows those tiles display the latest news and try to get me to launch candy crush instead of helping me to launch programs.

So I only use the search feature which works ok most of the time. Some days ago I fixed the printer on my wife's laptop which involved a restart as usual. Right after the restart I typed "printer" in the search field and all I got was web -search. So right after a restart windows "forgets" that it has a native setting for configuring printers (and basicly everthing else).

Windows 7 had start menu search, only without the web bits, so its still worse.

That stopped working on my machine, I found a ton of articles on the web about it but none of the suggestions fixed it. In the end I did a reinstall.

Linux Desktop launchers are much, much worse I think, if only because .desktop files are among the stupidest things ever designed.

.desktop files are just the equivalent to Windows .lnk files, if anything they can contain additional metadata. The issue is the DEs that use them (and not all are of the same bad quality).

If anything i'd say that .desktop files are among the few things that Free Desktop got right (though i think that is largely because they're basically KDE1's .kdelnk or whatever they were called).

Like the old Moore's Law of "don't do anything, your software will run faster in 1 year time", we could nearly apply this to software itself "don't touch anything and, by comparison, in 1 year time it will be awesomer than it is now".

I commend microsoft for maintaining older versions far longer than most. All the replacement apps from the windows 7 -> win 10 upgrade have been slower. Luckily , i still have the old ones.

Your point on phones is the odd one out for me, my fairly new $20 Nokia/HMD phone has really good audio even when making international calls.

Maybe it's a regional thing. I'm German and things are often shittier versions here than anywhere else. I haven't had a phone conversation that felt like a latency under .5 seconds in 5+ years.

I have made calls between France and the UK and not noticed a problem.

It depends on operator, BTS etc. and which codec it would negotiate with phone.

Recently I noticed that in specific location 3G UMTS call quality is much worse than 2G GSM...

(and there is that weird VoLTE, but it apparently requires specifically supported phone by operator with branded firmware..why!?)

With fear of starting a fire here, are you using an Android phone?

I'm asking, because whenever I hear people complain about phone software that just breaks, it's almost always Android, and with good reason: They have to support a lot more phones than iOS, and Android is a lot more open.

So I just wanted to air the idea that you could try with an iPhone. iOS may lack some of the feature Android users are used to, but in my experience, it's just more stable, and I don't at all share the sentiment that "phones are unusable" or that the audio quality is bad or anything of the kind. If there's one device I can always count on working, it's my phone.

In android, radio stack is chipset specific and the OS interacts with it via RIL, provided by chipset vendor. It has nothing to do with "has to support a lot more phones than iOS"; in both systems the OS does not touch the audio streams, just routes them from/to input/output.

I think you jumbled up the two paragraphs. Nowhere did I suggest that poor audio quality was because Android has to support more hardware.

I've switched to using Signal for voice calls as much as possible. Signal voice quality is very consistently excellent.

Unfortunately it does not help you if you want to use the regular dialer to access the telco voice networks and/or nobody you know has the app.

I have the most trouble with phones while driving. I have a cheap little Bluetooth adapter for audio, but when it's connected and I receive a call it insists on handling that too, which proves difficult. Occasionally my wife and I will end up on a phone call where both ends are coming through the car speakers, having a conversation that way is pretty much impossible.

Yeah, audio quality has made huge improvements, especially when you're lucky enough to have a wideband connection (which is still limited almost exclusively to calls within a single provider, in my experience). But cell phones did cause us to accept dropped calls, garbled audio, and other issues that we would have never tolerated in a traditional POTS system.

- windows 10 has no built-in media player that can handle a DVD.

- Android Studio... don't get me started.

Android studio feels like a skyscraper put together with glue and duct tape

> windows 10 has no built-in media player that can handle a DVD

It was something like ~$15-$25 per copy in licensing fees that they could save. Moving that to a Store purchase was purely a financial move to save Windows costs. For everyone complaining about the Candy Crush installer shortcut, imagine how many ads there'd be if they still included DVD playing out of the box, even though hardly no one was using it.

A year ago I had bluetooth headphones that would call out mileage stats during my run; pausing my audiobook in the progress. I recently replaced the headphones with a newer model b/c battery life degraded on the old pair; and also recently upgraded to android 10 on my phone. But now instead of getting a full report of distance, pace, and time, I get distance followed by 5 seconds of silence. Not sure if it is the headphones, Android 10, audiobook app or workout app, but yeah, it does totally seem like software just gets worse over time.

I will say this until it changes, but it is because 1) devs care only about developer productivity and 2) shareholders are the new customer. Nobody is focusing on the real customer.

What would be nice is if software were distributed in such a way that you could always pick up the security fixes, performance improvements, and other good stuff, and skip the UI re-designs, killed features, chat functions, and other awful stuff that always seem to come with updates.

Lots of software used to do maintenance releases but sadly this practice seems to have gone out of fashion. Software upgrades are almost always now "take it all or leave it".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsAllMyFault

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouAreBetterThan...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BetterThanNew

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResponsibilityTr...

And like that, millions of hours of productivity were lost.

Offtopic but your name reminded me to your comment from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008817

What's that app? I mean which one exactly? I have some OS/2 copies in VM

System Element software is for bringing up IBM mainframes. I rescued a Multiprise 3000 from a scrap dealer. It works, but I don't have any of the software to bring it up. Some folks are helping me piece together enough bits and pieces to, hopefully, act as a system element so I can stop trying to figure out how to get it up and running and start wondering what to do with a working 20 year old mainframe.

I've never gotten these "TVTropes rabbithole" memes. I've visited the site plenty, it's tickled my curiousity from time to time, but it's never really gotten me to spend hours on it. Wikipedia or HN have a much greater chance of doing that that TVTropes, for me.

Assuming most use windows 10 by now not win 8 so everything relevant for the start menu is back. Tiles can all be removed (I don't like them) The top 10 most used programs should be pinned to the taskbar. WIN+1,2,3,...0 will start them/lay the focus on them Everything else I start with WIN+"type some letters of the name" Right click on the windows "start"-logo brings up shortcuts to jump basically everywhere in the windows settings for example "event viewer" or "device manager".

Note that WIN+search orders results by hits so if you use it for a while it gets better. Also if you don't use file search you should turn it off as this makes search faster for starting programs.

Great list. Also twitter employs around four thousand people but throttles mobile users. They use multiple megabytes to deliver 288 characters.

Two things - pi hole or something like it is a godsend. It makes many sites filled to brim with nonsense become usable.

For phones, one plus seems to have done well with using fast CPUs and cutting down on bloat at the same time.

> Current Dropbox versions are incredibly invasive.

OT, but does anyone know if there is an API-shim for dropbox integrations? I use YNAB classic and that’s the only reason I have dropbox and it is utterly horrible.

edit: I just deleted dropbox. I’ll sync YNAB manually instead. Dropbox behaves like malware.

I don't know if it would help, but I use Mountain Duck ($) to map cloud storage as a network drive.

I've used odrive since it launched, and have never installed any native sync tools since. It's exactly what I want cloud sync to be.

Would be fine with payware, but sadly that is not how ynab sync is done :/ I have nextcloud and tried syncing the YNAB files directly, but that just breaks tons of things.

Doesn’t YNAB have its own sync?

No, classic has only dropbox as an option and uses some kind of Dropbox api to manage it :/

I guess what we see is in part due to the transition towards more and more ”highlevel”. Now don’t get me wrong here, ”high level” in general is supposed to make life easier for developers, more rapid development and for corporate a better ROI. The downside is that it requires less understanding of the underlaying foundations (it hides it on purpose) from the developers/engineers.

Now I’m not saying that ”high level engineers” are less engineers than others, but it’s not surprising that we’re moving in the direction we’re moving. It’s by design.

(Now this doesn’t explain everything, far from it, but IMO it’s why we see an image writer weighting in on 300MB compared to a C/C++ version at <1MB)

That would put form over function , and would be dangerous. There is no reason to go "high level" just to convenience the engineers (except perhaps being able to hire cheaper, less qualified ones). The tradeoffs can be dangerous. Imagine this kind of fragility being installed in robocars.

> - The new Reddit layout is borderline unusable. They will lose the rest of the core users when they disable the old. subdomain

While I agree with you here, there is also a point that it might attract new and younger users with its more 'modern' look.

Personally I like sites like HN or the old style wikipedia for its information density and out of the way design. But that might just be the age talking here. People that grow up now that mostly scroll by touching the screen with their fingers have other requirements and ideas about good UI.

I doubt age has anything to do with it (unless you imply younger people prefer shitty interfaces) since Reddit's new site is awful even on mobile. I always switch to i.reddit.com not only because it is much faster, but also because the new layout just unusable with somehow combining both oversized (even for mobile standards) elements and tiny elements all over the place, needing a ton of taps to just read comments (which means you'll often mistap something and the slow loading takes ages), popups getting in the way, etc.

It plainly sucks.

At least unlike other sites, they have the decency to leave the old UIs around, so not everything is bad.

When a pocket supercomputer takes 10 seconds to display a list of comments in your website (and your previous version did it in 0.5s), it's time to stop and reflect how it went so wrong.

I have yet to come across a normal friend who doesn’t think HN is a super ugly site which essentially means if they had interest in the site, they prob wouldn’t use it.

All the HN comments here about Reddit are talking about how they feel and their bubble feels. Which I personally agree with. But I’m not representative of every day user.

There is no such thing as "every day user" though, every user is different and if anything a major source of those UX issues people have is "designers" who come up with imaginary "every day users" (usually to justify their own preferences) instead of performing actual usability tests on real users (and accepting when their ideas are bad or wrong) or just sticking with things that we already know that works and perhaps tweaking them (but again accept when they screw up and users say so and revert their changes instead of doubling down on them).

How about users who don’t know too much or don’t look too into the internet, web dev, or web design. And don’t read up on tech (not gadget) news specifically.

That keeps my point in tact and covers the vast majority of the population

If anything, ADHD-ed kids will find the older interface snappier. The newer interface is literally for dummies who don't even know how to use reddit-markup. Kids don't care about this stuff

Surely everyone likes a fast interface though.

I felt puzzled by Reddit's redesign until I started using the mobile app. Then as I was just scrolling and scrolling infinitely, just seeing what it would offer me next -- THAT is when I think I understood what the new Reddit interface was likely optimizing for.

To be honest, I actually don't mind that so much. The thing that annoys me about Reddit is the whole ads-that-look-like-posts thing.

> Imgur is a joke and became what it was literally founded to avoid

It literally fails utterly at the singular thing it is supposed to do. Makes me feel less bad about my own managerial driven development.

What does it fail at?

> Current Dropbox versions are incredibly invasive. They popup when opening a word document. When pluggin in my Camera. And now started showing a glowing red "error" because I "only" have a Pro account and no business account (when using 0,4% of my storage). Also they still have no way of ignoring folders.

Have you tried Nextcloud? It is not invasive and is able to ignore folders. There are paid providers available though I have never tried them, I host my own instance.

Newer Dropbox features like smart sync are pretty cool and useful though.

They give you more free disk space with little extra UI.

This has happened to me with Firefox. Thankfully there is Waterfox.

Recently this came up in discussion with a software developer who was overly concerned with openssl certificate minutiae. I advised the only durable solution for his concerns is a method to change the entire implementation, not only the certs.

I’m slowly moving away from graphical applications and towards FOSS software. It’s a giant pain but once done, it’s done until I want to mess with it again.

Eventually I may get to the point where my whole operating system has a lock file. That would be nice.

> I’m slowly moving away from graphical applications and towards FOSS software.

That's a weird statement. You can move from graphical apps towards text-based ones, or from proprietary software to FOSS, or even from graphical, proprietary apps to text-based, FOSS ones, but the combination you gave mixes up two mainly unrelated factors.

- Skype, everything

- Vizio Smartcast. I bought it as a simple display plus Chromecast. Later, updates turned in into a household ad billboard every time I turn it on.

The "Photos" app in Windows. Thankfully the old Windows Image Viewer is still there, just need a registry hack to enable it back.