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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...]

VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples.

Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are:

- Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of buggy software that nobody wants

- Autodesk -- expensive licensing and stagnant features and bug fixes in Revit, 3ds Max, etc

- Microsoft -- list of various user complaints over decades are well known [pedantic alert: MS took a little bit of VC money from David F. Marquardt but they didn't need it because they were already profitable with cash in the bank; they just wanted DFM as an advisor for their upcoming IPO]

The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that.

>VC is ripe for disruption.

The issue is the company founders, not the VCs.

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The real problem here is excessive governmental tolerance of monopolies and the lack of an adequate regulatory/legal regime to protect end-users from harms caused by vendor-lock in.

All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers.

Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets.

Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican.

Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose.

Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.

The main competition for Autodesk's Fusion 360 is SolidWorks. It's possible, although not that easy, to get models back and forth.[1]

There's FreeCAD. There are many low end 2D CAD programs. If you're building something bigger than a house or more complicated than a keyboard, though, you probably want a pro product.

[1] https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/

FreeCAD likely helps Autodesk's position - when freecad is so crap, you will likely just pay for autocad/or/other than even looking at alternatives, because you have been already so frustrated.

Having used FreeCAD, I agree.

Constructive solid geometry is hard, but it's all math. User interfaces for 3D CAD are very hard. Open source is terrible at hard user interfaces. Hence, no really good free 3D CAD.

Who exactly is suffering because of Microsoft? Surely not the normal users, Macs are expensive and Linux is garbage outside the tech crowd's needs (a big shock considering who it services). There's plenty of competition in cloud development, office software, and system administration as well. The only losers are European style mom and pop scale businesses but those are relics of a bygone time (probably why Europe likes them). Where's the damage?

Everyone is overpaying because of Microsoft's monopolies.

Office + Windows + Active Directory + Windows Server is the only viable enterprise-level software stack for white collar office work. There is no real competition in this space and, as a monopoly, Microsoft charges accordingly.

Microsoft's monopoly pricing is passed down to every business' customers and, ultimately, extracts money from all of our pockets.

I don't even see how European style mom and pop scale businesses even suffered because of Microsoft. On the contrary, the adoption of Windows is much higher in Europe than it is in the US, understandably so. I doubt there are businesses outside of tech anywhere outside the US based on the MacOS. And because Microsoft took a reaaaally lax attitude towards copyright enforcement, everyone in the old and developing worlds basically pirated Windows, Office, etc to oblivion.

In my books, post the antitrust case against it in 95, Microsoft has been the least monopolistic of the bunch, and a net positive to the rest of the world.

> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money.

At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed, and if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it.

That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints about the availability and usability of free software.

There are some free applications that can do amazing things, but are genuinely less intuitive than comparable commercial software. It's not surprising that users who aren't free software diehards don't want to use these tools.

There are also entire ecosystems where free software just isn't a thing, e.g. phone software and hosted user services.

This type of thinking has been a huge motivator to my side project as I try to envision what a more user-centric internet could look like. The core being self-hosted internet infrastructure--my project being an open-source, easy-to-run, _private_ blog. https://simpleblogs.org

That's not sustainable. Most OSS nowadays is produced by big companies looking at OSS as a way to retain or capture more engineering talent.

It somehow works for small individuals because having a nice github can be useful to get a job or bypass the ridiculous interviewing process of the day.

A few heroes barely live off donations from wealthy companies and patreons, others sell development courses on the side.

The real problem is that companies in our society grow too much and we end up with a few outliers companies and hordes of employees. Unfortunately, as soon as a company gets money or becomes successful enough to lobby the government for more regulations, they can effectively make it harder for competitor to pop up. The fact that starting a business is a logistic hassle because of corporate taxes is another barrier.

I'd like to see more micro companies and individuals providing value to society instead of giant corporations. OSS can be a part of that, but it doesn't have to be.

The parent comment was specifically talking about free software, not open source software. The latter is commonly produced by large companies, but the former is much rarer.

checks-and-balances.

free software puts pressure on the giants.

(lets see when the free software phones come out over the next year or two how they do)

Look, capitalism works. But unfettered capitalism could use free software.

> At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed

Sorry, but this is laughable. Instead of self-serving greed, you have self-serving "what interests the person writing it." That leaves us with open source software that has horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software. (For example, see the recent arguments about git's UI in this thread[0].)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374268

I think, personally, that it's because only the most iconoclastic individuals are willing to put in the effort to make truly free software (like MIT licensed, for example) since they have the raw, unfettered drive (based on their hatred of the mainstream) required to work through the years of programming for zero monetary returns that it takes to produce a feature-complete software project that does something worthwhile.

I believe we could partially solve this problem if we could better support the work-a-day developer with a great idea, who either doesn't have the risk profile to quit their job or doesn't have the free time to slave away in their home after their normal job. These people tend to be the programmer/engineer who worked in one or several companies in a similar industry, has seen the mistakes and insights from each, and can visualize a better data structure for a common operation in this industry, or perhaps even a new operational model that works more efficiently for optimizing some common problem.

However, those developers just don't have the incentive/drive/motivation to do it, and usually that's because their method of survival is to sell their time to another person/corporation in exchange for money that can be used to buy food, shelter, etc. and thus they are too tired, too demotivated, or perhaps they just want to spend some time with their family and friends. Whatever the reason, if you allow them some more of their free time to work on other stuff, these developers will come up with amazing things. There is an argument that some make about the "laziness" of developers who can't do a job and become a CEO of a startup and have a family, but why insinuate or argue that they're too lazy and unworthy when we could un-block their "laziness" and get great results for humanity? (My view is that no one is "lazy", just that some people have a higher "activation energy", but once they are "activated" most people will work as hard as the next.)

Also, I personally think software serving the interests of one person is going to be generally better than software serving the interests of greed, but I have no evidence, just a feeling from my life experiences.

No clue why you're downvoted because you are spot on.

The constant hustle culture is extremely toxic. We don't live to work. And indeed making something of value requires a significant investment of energy. That shouldn't come for free and shouldn't be expected of the "community" to always play catch up with big and dedicated -- and very handsomely paid -- development teams in a corporation.

It varies by the software. Some free software is a lot better than others.

Except that for free software, "the person writing it" is not preventing anyone else from being "the person writing it" so anyone with criticisms is directed to apply time or money to solving the problem they're complaining about. Because unlike proprietary software, you can actually do that.

This doesn't work well for UI improvements for a very specific reason, which is that most of the UI criticisms of free software are about how it's difficult to learn rather than how it's difficult to use after you've learned it. So by the time you've spent the effort to learn the existing UI well enough to know what changes to make to it, you no longer have a personal incentive to make it easier to learn, because you've already paid the time cost of learning it.

But that isn't user-hostile, it's newbie-hostile, which is different. In particular it means that if you're willing to put in the time to get over the hump, you end up with software that actually does exactly what you want, even if the incantations to get it to do that aren't always initially intuitive.

> laughable

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -- Misattributed

> horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software

This statement is laughable. A poorly designed UI is not equivalent to a UI filled with dark patterns. I was asserting that free software is a known solution to user-hostile software, not a solution to bad UI.

Do you really think being confused about how to rebase in git is the same as being tricked into creating an online Microsoft account instead of a local account when installing Windows? Or being tricked into buying some TurboTax add-on that you didn't want or need, and can't refund without wasting 2 hours on the phone?

The solution to the git problem is to read the documentation. Nobody is actively trying to prevent you from solving your problem, the designers are just bad at UI design. The solution to Microsoft's problem is to realize that it's intentionally user-hostile, and you have to find a workaround that they don't want you to use, like temporarily disconnecting from the internet. The solution to the TurboTax problem is to just be vigilant and paranoid and exhausted at all times.

The git situation is unfortunate. The Microsoft and TurboTax situations are stupid user-hostile bullshit. They're not even remotely equivalent.

I'm going to stick to my principles and continue working to create the software future that I actually prefer. I won't tell you to "just fork it and fix it yourself" like some other people might -- you're free to take the short term perspective if you prefer. You're free to laugh at me and others if you prefer.

But in the long run, your perspective is wrong. Free software is like a steamroller. It's slow, but it's slow because the people building it observe what's being built around them and tend to take the longer route of building it correctly rather than just cranking out whatever makes investors happy.

In the long run, the git UI will be improved, or an better replacement will turn up. Microsoft's telemetry, on the other hand, will never go away.

The Git UI will probably never be "improved" because it makes sense to people who understand how Git works rather than pasting command lines they found online, and the few real warts like status output telling you to use "git pull", which is a mistake in the workflows most people use, are too old and entrenched.

If you look at the discussions on the mailing list, you'll see people care a lot and make thoughtful decisions about the user experience, it just isn't aimed at the people for whom no possible user interface change would be helpful, because they don't know what's going on and don't read documentation.

This is empirically false. Git has added commands solely for the purpose of improved usability via git reset and git switch. Neither of these add new capabilities to git and were instead added to provide clarity.

Minor nit. I think you're thinking of git restore not git reset.

I mostly agree with you, but it was just the example that the parent comment used. The same could apply to the GIMP or Inkscape or Blender or FreeCAD or ... (etc.)

Well, GIMP breaking ctrl-S is actively user-hostile, but:

> if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it.

> At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software.

No it doesn't.

We have FAR too many pieces of open source software that are maintained by one person who gets no support.

Good software requires sustained support--generally from corporations.

Even something as venerable as emacs was just one of many until Lucid put a huge amount of effort behind it.

> At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software.

Imho, that's not the solution to the problem mentioned by GP. One needs to control self-serving greed, not give everything for free. I still need to live from something, but I don't need to earn six-figure numbers.

I agree that software can be free, if you happen to find people who support the idea behind it. But that doesn't happen that often. What does work for me is that everything I write in my sparetime is freely available. It's like other people do volunteering work.

Of course the situation is far better than with proprietary software, but there is plenty of free software that has user hostile privacy violations. For one example (Cura), the only reason the authors fixed the issue is that the GDPR forced them to do so. Most people don't have the skills one would need to discover nor fix these issues.

https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/2810

There is also plenty of free software for mobile phones and hosted user services.

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud

> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money.

Let's take this further and ask What is the driving factor for humans to want to accumulate more money?

I think the human founders are responding to external pressures that incentivize the accumulation of wealth.

R.e. "external" pressures. This explanation does not seem very efficient. There are tangible benefits to wealth accumulation. Wealth can afford its owner many kinds of different pleasures that are less available to the less wealthy. It also protects from many harms. All organisms in existence are avaricious to some extent or another, because the ancestral environment favors this trait.

There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill.

Never mind the loss of online privacy.

The problem is that raising these as the real issues they are puts you outside the dominant ideology.

If you don't do it anonymously you are in real danger of discrimination during job searches. And if you do it forcefully and polemically enough - to the point where you start getting an activist audience instead an audience of passive click-consumers you can monetise - you'll attract more direct forms of attention.

Humans are avaricious, but humans are not only avaricious. Our ability to cooperate and to look after each other is one of the key evolutionary developments that led to to our success as a species.

From this point view neoliberalism, nationalism, and other competitive/extractive ideologies are an unwelcome return to dumb competitive animality. Some individuals win big, but the species as a whole damages its long-term survival prospects - literally and eventually very tangibly.

> There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill.

These all seem like things wealth protects from, which helps explain why founders and all other humans will tend to want to accumulate it.

> These all seem like things wealth protects from

This sounds to me like Silicon Valley solutionism. Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures and the many other effects of global heating. [1]

When that happens I'd say it's only a matter of time before the pitchforks and guillotines come out...

“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

― Eduardo Galeano

[1] https://archive.is/mXJ1B

>Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures

How are crop failures a major problem if an area doesn't have a substantial amount of subsistence farmers and does have reasonably free trade? How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?

> How are crop failures a major problem if an area doesn't have a substantial amount of subsistence farmers and does have reasonably free trade?

Would you be able to rephrase your question to help meet my need for clarity? Maybe you could state your position without it being a question? At the moment it is not clear to me what you are asking.

> How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?

An example is migration. If large areas of land continue to be plundered and made infertile [1] by Global North corporations (or 'developed' countries' as you call them), by imposing harmful industrial agriculture practices then the inhabitants of those countries will have to migrate to other areas.

So we, as inhabitants of the Global North and members of the 1% wealthiest in the world (as everyone on Hackernews is), would do well to integrate Global South perspectives.

"We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. But this is only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Thus, anti-racist movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, but also build new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South. A new perspective on internationalism is necessary, where people of the North and the South co-operate to overcome the current colonial division of nature and labor, as well as what has been called the imperial mode of living. In this sense, it is important to question the dominant notions of what it means to live a good life, to think global when it comes to social welfare and to link up with movements such as eco-feminism or degrowth. Doing so could open up new possibilities to address fears of social relegation due to immigration, as they exist in the Global North."

— Miriam Lang

Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-10-17/integrating-so...

This sounds like another way of saying widespread subsistence farming is a problem, which was essentially my point, not that it is strictly only a problem within national borders. If people have jobs, and make money, and buy food instead of growing it, then they don't face starvation because of crop failures and don't have to migrate. You seem to be opposed to "industrial agricultural practices", that I'd assumed were by definition the solution to the problem.

Could be that vast crop failures in the US end up being a problem some day but the problem seems somewhat remote. Anyway, nobody claimed wealth protects from all possible bad things. That doesn't really do anything to diminish its attractiveness for preventing the things it does prevent.

What sort of "root cause" analysis goes for the human nature of a founders? Yikes, are we that overly-focused on the individual?

Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salaries) with those that do.

I.e. if you want to survive, the market will keep you in lockstep with the worst of your competitors on the market. So ultimately it still boils down to "problems of unconstrained markets".

VCs are here both symbolic of a system that seeks outsized returns and the catalysts of that system. VC funding is the accepted model for startup success and it's very difficult to find advice on starting a serious startup that doesn't anticipate VC-style backing. As a result, it's become the norm and an obvious starting point. Capturing the culture of early-stage startups in this way has lead to a monoculture where even communities like Indie Hackers advocates for VC funding[0]. VCs aren't literally the problem but they represent and reinforce the broken status-quo.

I'm interested in the properties of the system we've created and participate in and so this is a generalized observation. There are always counterexamples to generalisations but that's not to say that there isn't something valuable about the generalisation itself. I'm not arguing that without VCs founders would be perfect altruists but there could be other funding models that create fewer conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of technology.

[0] - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstr...

FWIW you can address all of your criticisms by expanding the problem from VCs to non-founder investors generally. All of your examples are publicly-traded companies.

> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that.

I'm not sure this one fits, because the universities are between a rock and a hard place. They've switched to "video instruction" but none of their expenses have gone away because they're still maintaining a campus and about the same level of staffing since they expect to switch back to it in the not too distant future. But if their costs haven't gone down, it's pretty hard for them to charge less without going under.

I have seen professors mention that their prep time has multiplied since they are now producing lectures rather than giving them live. They now need to deal with video production, remote homework and test submissions and returns, live lecture production, tech issues, etc.

https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?...

Here’s some more interesting discussion.

https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?...

https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/129713848913856921...

https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/130128164056044749...

Although I definitely feel for students, because prices for education are just insane in general. We should not be forcing debt upon our young people. But both professors and students are along for the tough ride.

> The issue is the company founders, not the VCs.

The issue is the veneer behind these IoT, Social media, Internet time wasters, and occasional productivity boosters are wearing off.

There is no competition (less VC money) to serve the community better and the real reason for these companies existing remains bare. All they want to do is monitor you, manipulate you, get your money, and kill your productivity.

The user always will lose outside of the occasional paragdim shift or productivity boost. As it stands now there is no vision to change existing platforms thus in this age the user will always lose.

There is no reason to contribute anything to the online sphere (outside of technical areas) as it is like pissing in the wind.

Capital and expectations for growth are the common denominator between these examples.

Building a business and making money doesn't mandate user hostility; hockey-stick or growth in a saturated market does.

Microsoft Office has become much better and more popular since they started focusing on subscriptions and they don’t have to keep forcing more useless features to convince people to upgrade.

Office 365 is a great deal for $99 - 6 users each with 1TB of storage and I can use it with my iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC etc.

I don’t agree on your “user hostile” examples outside of Intuit but agree with your take —- founders know what VC is. The reason they started the company in the first place is to get rich.

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