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Comment by mr_mitm | Hacker News Reader

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate people who don't even know what a browser is, for whom a smart phone is nothing less than black magic. The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.

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> The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.

Nooooo they do not do this. If they did, modern UIs wouldn't confuse my elderly parents much worse than old ones did.

Dear all tech companies (but looking at you, Google, since they won't stop buying cheap Android phones): every time you decide to have some full-screen horseshit notification pop up on an action, instead of doing the usual thing (say, a "hey, update this for new stuff!" thing) I get a fucking phone call to help "fix it". Goddamn stop it, the rest of us hate that too (my intent was to open the app to do something, so don't get in my way) but it's usability poison for the olds.

That includes those new tabs in Firefox every time there's an update. It's confusing. Stop it. Oh, and FF, bring back normal-ass menus, because my parents (unfortunately) use Windows. Browsers have proven Apple right all along with forcing the top-of-screen "file, edit, view..." menu, since apparently even major vendors can't be trusted to do the sane thing with those instead of cramming it all in some mysterious kitchen-sink button-opened dropdown.

> something like the Twitter interface.

Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

> Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people.

So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too.

Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.

> Stratechery explains why.

I have experienced it myself, and anyone else can theorize all they want, but they can't invalidate my experience.

As an example, I can no longer use YouTube for tutorials, because they have no dislike signal visible to me, and as such, I can't judge whether they are worth watching.

I can not stand Reddit's new UI. But even with the old UI, the massive amount of users attract a lot of heavy-handed moderation, which also turn me off. I use it for "entertainment" and not "research" or "speech".

Even though HN has much fewer users, it is among the few platforms where I can use it for real speech, like deep insight.

Many platforms have such a low signal-to-noise ratio that I am wasting my time on them, and don't find them useful for neither entertainment nor speech. I don't care what Stratechery says I like, when clearly I know myself better.

So true, 100% on the tutorial videos. I found myself watching this super basic tutorial video the other day that had a lot of polish and shine but lacked a huge amount of substance. I wondered how such videos would operate if the downvotes were still visible. Yes downvotes played a strong role in signaling tutorial quality.

> I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.

Endless scrolling is nothing like a sci-fi gadget. Grandma probably enjoys reading books. She knows what a page is.

Endless scrolling is an explicit rejection of skeuomorphism.

Old UIs were designed exactly in the way you describe. And old people liked them. The traditional desktop experience has never really been dethroned.

> > modals and other horrible UI features

> and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood

Y'all, with your expert knowledge, know there's a dialog element in HTML, right?

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