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Comment by sagivo | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Signal missed the opportunity they had after the WhatsApp fiasco. Every person I've tried to convert to Signal opt out after a day or two due to lack of usability. Most of them either went back to WhatsApp or moved to Telegram. While the tech is great and the privacy is good, if they won't invest in usability and UI they will not win the masses.

EDIT - if you downvote, please explain why. If you disagree it's not a reason to downvote.

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Downvoting for disagreement has always been allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

also: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I certainly defer to HN's expertise on community, but I always took an upvote with no comment as a "yes I agree with the facts or feeling as they were stated."

I usually took a downvote with no comment as an information dead end. There are many reasons one would downvote, maybe factual error, in which case the correct answer is greatly appreciated.

On the HN guidelines page the word "down" is not mentioned. Just curious, do you all feel that up and downvotes are not different beasts? Or is that page just for users who cannot downvote?

My personal anecdote is the opposite of yours: it was easy for me to convert people to Signal.

Concerning your edit: I thought it was a pretty established part of the etiquette on HN that a downvote is used also for simple disagreement. It means "I do not agree", not "you are wrong and should be shamed".

I may be wrong, but comments are meant for that. Ideally when there's a disagreement, people can openly discuss it. I thought downvoting is to flag unproductive comments.

I had that impression too, but I just read the guidelines and can't find anything to that effect. They do say that we shouldn't be commenting about the voting though ;).

Maybe on Reddit, but on HN downvoting is supposed to be a moderation tool. That’s why you need a certain amount of karma to access it. It should be used to flag content that breaks the rules or is unproductive in some way. Please don’t use it like you do on Reddit.

You are making a couple too many assumptions. For starters, I do not use reddit. I wrote my message above with the caveat that I am unsure ("I thought"), but you are presenting a front of certainty without backing it up with evidence (and evidence rarely exists when talking about common culture).

Downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN, and always has been - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314. What you're describing is more what flagging is for.

When substantive comments get unfairly downvoted, it's good to give them a corrective upvote. People mostly tend to do that and that mostly fixes the problem. Not entirely—but close enough that there's no globally better solution that we're aware of.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I've always thought downvote on HN was for comments that are inappropriate, incompetent/harmful, or not following rules. In other words a vote that a comment holds no value on here. Anything else is just a discussion.

I’m surprised downvoting isn’t even mentioned in the guidelines. Assuming they didn’t want to mention downvoting unless you have enough karma, they could just display the clause for those with downvoting capability.

It is! ""Commenting on voting is boring"" or something. Like this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Near the bottom

Sometimes I upvote people despite disagreement, because good points are made regardless.

That's even better of course.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 here at least pg argues for downvote for disagreement

And the mods have consistently upheld that since then (although quite a few people don't like it, or think that it is against the rules - but such a rule exists on reddit, not here)

They poured a ton of investment into it right after they saw the uptrend, but their mission was to drive steady adoption of secure messaging; other features were nice-to-haves that weren't core to their initial function. The massive run-up in users relocating from WhatsApp reprioritized their PI plan (I'm guessing), but up until that moment, they had no good reason to prioritize those things since 1) they're a non-profit with steady funding thanks to Brian Acton, and 2) they have a core mission.

Iterative development is a thing for a reason.

Also, in regards to your edit:

> EDIT - if you downvote, please explain why. If you disagree it's not a reason to downvote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html grep "voting"

Hm, some of the bug reports report unencrypted databases, some report encrypted databases. That suggests something is going very wrong with their sqlcipher+encryption handling/encryption parameter handling/key handling.

Those are pretty terrifying bugs, the fail-open can be disastrous in the wrong situation, and the others easily result in catastrophic data loss. Because that's what encryption is supposed to do in some situations.

I wish we had a great app with an open protocol so that you could use whatever UI you wanted and not have to deal with network effects every few years. It’s too bad there’s no app right now with that openness and also sufficient usability to get everyone switched over.

Isn't that what Matrix is supposed to be?

I’ve heard it doesn’t have any clients with sufficient usability for the masses, which is the other critical part. But yeah that’s what I was alluding to.

Have you looked at the flagship element.io client?

Honestly, Signal's UI/usability used to be a valid critique, but now it's pretty much up to par with WhatsApp/Telegram. The only minor quip I've heard from friends transitioning to it is the lack of bold/italics/etc, which Signal announced they're working on by implementing markdown.

I find it on par with WhatsApp but still not on par with Telegram.

Same experience for me. It's like Open Office. Somehow open source can not produce delightful user experiences

I found it's frequently because they let perfect be the enemy of good.

Because something has potential caveats, problematic corner cases, or philosophical nits, open source projects will often end up sticking with a worse solution out of pure bullheadedness.

Yeah the UI just doesn't feel polished or full featured enough

> If you disagree it's not a reason to downvote.

That's not set in stone; reportedly pg said downvoting for disagreement was fine, but I don't have the quote handy nor a source.

(I hate to meta-comment, but the sheer meta-ness of people downvoting my comment has me delighted.)

All the FB alternatives had crazy spin-up problems for a few days. Prominent cancels on the right and the WhatsApp fiasco freaked out some on the left at about the same time.

Signal did as well as anybody. They bounced back after about 48 hours, and usability seems as good as FB Messenger. Not nearly the roller coaster of Parler.

Disagreement is a fine reason to downvote according to ‘pg

Didn't downvote, but I disagree with your "If you disagree it's not a reason to downvote." Downvote is my liberty, I can downvote for whatever reason I see fit.

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