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Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to go out on a limb here and wish the project the best, on grounds of the hacker mentality that doing something just for the sake of it is the entire point. Which is great.

At the same time, in the real world, I expect it to go nowhere at all. For that to happen, the technical implementation matters not a bit. You’d have to provide _anything_ new, different and “better” as compared to what is. To be an alternative, it has to provide similar functionality but improve on it in some regard. Instead, this is a worse experience in every regard.

Maybe it’s just way too early to release anything. But I believe the entire idea is deeply flawed, if targeted for general public use.

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> the technical implementation matters not a bit

This was the hardest lesson I learnt, it doesn't matter how polished and amazing your code is, or what technologies you use, end users really don't care at all.

It's definitely true that they don't care directly about it, since they aren't exposed to it at all, but I would say they care transitively about it, as the decisions made to build systems impact the reliability & performance of the product, and its ability to be maintained and improved. I've seen too many products that start of usable but due to maintenance issues end up becoming bloated to the point where a sleeker competitor comes along and solves those problems for me.

Yeah I was going to say something along those lines.

End users care about features and code quality, but not in the way developers think.

Users deeply care when their application keeps crashing (but they don't care at all when it doesn't crash)

Likewise, users care when the app is too slow, too.

And, they care about the app having all the features they want or like (even if they don't know it and can't articulate to you exactly what they want).

Users don't care how maintainable the code base is. Whether a new feature takes 2 hours or 2 weeks to make is completely irrelevant for them. Now, they care about the second orders consequences of this: an unmaintainable mess will probably never have all the features they want, or will be too buggy, etc.

But, code quality is just a lever to achieve the things that users want. It's a means to an end. If you don't pull the lever correctly, it's wasted

It’s not surprising that people who care about the tech would care about its execution.

At the same time, if you‘re looking to create a solution to anything beyond scratching your own itch, users are key.

The job essentially becomes dealing with irrational human wants and desires when it’s quite possible that one of the reasons you went into the profession was to precisely not having to do that.

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