The Rise of User-Hostile Software (2021)
den.dev
den.dev
Point being, the playing field must be level for ethical business to exist. If you try to act ethically on your own you will lose to a less ethical (but still legal) competitor. Sure if you're dominant enough or niche enough you can get away with being ethical, but if you have hard competition, good luck. You'll maintain your virtue, and they'll maintain their profits, and we'll see who's still around in 5 years.
Granted it is possible to overstep and cause a customer revolt, but hoping your competition is that stupid is not an effective strategy.
Edit: As a brief aside the Fireside Chats are pretty remarkable pieces of public communication. I just can’t imagine a public leader speaking with such a blend of clarity, compassion, and force as what he did. They’re not particularly shallow or short on details, either! He spoke like an adult to a nation of adults - really refreshing.
This is not true for just "unregulated markets".
Regulated markets operate the same way, see: Banks. Credit Cards. Healthcare insurance by state.
But that's why we have laws specifically to break up anticompetitive behavior. The problem is they are not properly written and leave a lot up to discretion.
I’m a cynical person but this is way beyond what I think. You don’t have to go far to see counter examples where someone has done something pretty great for which they get little return but spent a lot of effort. Skimming the front page on HN today has some examples.
The examples I found: the WLED link, the large format camera blog post and the thing about Tolkien.
Sure, OG hackers don't want to waste 30 seconds walking to the printer if their print job isn't ready.
But OG hackers solve that problem by spending three hundred million seconds writing an entire OS from scratch.
And in the end, I'm not even sure if that solved the original problem.
Of course you wouldn't be wrong by seven orders of magnitude in the more common cases. But I strongly doubt that Haiku, the Quine that works in dozens of languages at once, or Gnome 2 started their work to fatten up for the coming winter months.
Cutting corners and monopolizing makes sense for a business when absentee profit-seeking owners are the ones calling the shots and taking the spoils.
An alternative corporate structure where decision-makers have different incentives coughsoughworkerco-ops might choose different and less destructive behavior in the same free market.
(Of course, worker co-ops are still good things, even if they're not going to solve every problem all by themselves!)
Just a poorly disguised fig leaf covering 'take from those with less, and give to those with more'.
I don't mean this a sarcasm. The point of good regulation is to try to change the incentive structure so that the system seeks to a different peak in the possibility space, avoiding various hill-climbing errors along the way. That's hard, but the approach of mandating how can be easier to write but much harder to implement (less stable, expensive, and requiring a lot of government effort).
A good example is exchange trading schemes. Instead of requiring a huge bureaucracy, the European trading system issues a number of emissions permits and then lets the market decide whether to upgrade or buy permits. As the number of certs sinks predictably over time, people can plan ahead to commit to building better plants (or retrofit) vs eking a couple of extra years out and then shutting the plant down. Less paperwork, fewer regulators, and letting the market seek to the point you want.
“Imported totalitarianism” is the new child labor and slavery.
(I'm not arguing against anti-child labour laws here; I'm arguing against this reported argument for their introduction by FDR. And, to be fair, it's only the reported argument here that I'm responding to; it might not be a faithful representation of what FDR actually said.)
Another one is the capital markets. The most popular stock markets tend to be the most highly regulated both internally (that is, by the markets themselves) and by government (e.g., the SEC). Why? Because strong regulation enables consumer trust. Look at all the foreign companies that list on the NYSE, for example: https://www.nyse.com/listings/international-listings
Smart businesses support things like standards, certifications, and good regulations so that they are competing in a fair arena and don't have to compromise on their principles.
Businesses support regulation if it gives them a permanent, competitive advantage over potential competitors.
Child labor laws hurt my ability to pay for college and advance my career, and it also destroys mom and pop shops, because the school system has to give the 15 year old kid a permission slip to help stock shelves or open up shop.
That's not to say we shouldn't have them, but child labor laws were primarily about children being exposed to the nature of industrial manufacturing work circa 1930 - not anything to do with today and thus using them as an analogy for other incentives problems (especially when solving them creates a principal agent problem) is misguided.
Only because it's still illegal today.
Chimney sweepers used (often sold to them) boys, 5 to 10 years old (sometimes as young as 3) to climb in the chimneys to clean them (quite dangerous work).
A minimum age of 14 (then 16) was put into place in 1834, and started to be enforced in 1875.
(Note that this might have taken much longer if innovators hadn't been lobbying for child-free technics to do it.)
That’s why we as users (and yes, we’re all users to various degrees) should push for more robust regulation. If, as you correctly note, most competitors are only going to operate in the legal-but-unethical space, change the law until the legal avenue and the ethical avenue are the same.
The libertarians will come out of the woodwork to say more regulation is not the answer, but when it comes to alternatives, watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical.
Try an example of a regulated ethical business. Exxon? Verizon? Amazon? Nestle? UnitedHealth Group? Pfizer? General Motors? DuPont?
Regulation is just as much a pipe dream as libertarianism
No one has suggested that regulation will produce ethical business. The proposal is to impose regulation to limit the unethical behavior of business, which is something quite different.
You’ve brought us back to the theoretical world we were trying to avoid…
I grew up in East Germany and I can tell you what positive impact free markets had on my country. It's not perfect but without these freedoms nothing would have happened
Of course. You can't just blindly follow an ideology but you have to constantly think about the proper balance of all factors. Overregulation is not good and neither is underregulation.
I don't disagree. I'm more an Adam Smith guy. Low regulation is good, but that doesn't mean zero. Zero regulation is just as terrible as the government picking winners and losers. These discussions require a lot of nuance. I, and I'm assuming many others, read your comment as a very typical libertarian "free market" (but like communism, has "never really existed"), as your comment doesn't even hint at a nuance. I tried to allude to this in mine with my comment about the incredible complexity of our modern world, but I guess this too was missed. So I hope that is abundantly explicit now.
So I have doubts that regulation is the answer. I would be more comfortable with putting my support behind people or small organizations that actually care about the specifics of this, then with 90% of politicians that mostly want to stay in power, and benefit off of their political position.
Now that there is a way apps can reach the coveted iPhone user demographic without having to go through Apple's strict privacy review, I fear that apps will slowly migrate their functionality/offer discounts for using alternative stores and will increase their abuse of user data.
Since USA is not part of EU, and USA is a giant market then I assume that USA citizens have no reason to get scared by your FUD, and if you are from EU and want the wall garden I am sure Apple will let you opt in in the USA version of the store.
Also as I said the USA is not in EU, so Meta/Facebook will still have no choice then put a iOS app of WhatsApp in the Store.
I am 100% sure that this is FUD, reality shows that there is no must use app that a developer refuses to put on the Google Play store because they are evil, the apps are either not allowed in the store because ToS or the apps are small side projects.
This is why I get frustrated with people who say we should influence businesses with our wallet, by choosing not to shop at stores who behave badly.
However, my individual buying choice won't make any difference; for example, if I hate Walmart, my only two choices are to not shop there and not get the benefit of the cheaper prices, but still have Walmart around doing bad things, or I can shop there and get the better prices, and Walmart is still around doing bad things. My individual choice does not change whether Walmart is around or not, but it DOES have a big effect on how much money I save. There is no rational reason to pay more when there is no benefit. My individual spending is not even a blip on their bottom line.
Of course, I would be willing to pay more if it meant the type of abuses that Walmart does would stop, but that is not the choice I am given.
Or I can make a negligible dent in global carbon emissions and my kids can take on thousands extra in student loans. I'm happy to do my part when we're all (or at least most of us) playing the same game, but I have too many people directly relying on me to be an ineffective martyr.
Back in 2016 I read a "human interest" story about some janitor who saved his pennies for months, keeping track with an excel spreadsheet, so he could make a multi-hundred dollar donation to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The article was clearly trying to frame this as some noble sacrifice from someone who doesn't have much to begin with, I just saw a poor person getting fleeced by an aristocrat, and she lost anyway.
But I also agree with your main message, that it is hard to encourage collective action if we are not willing to first go after the main contributors to the problem. Individuals who contribute to the problem several magnitudes above the median individual (e.g. independently, Gates and Musk both produced more emissions than the median American, in a single week, purely do to their aviation admissions). We get mad at those who are above the law, and it is unsurprising that we would be mad at those who are above our moral codes. How can we have collective action while we let hundreds or thousands of people like this persist in their actions?
The reason I get upset with this is because the world is so complicated that it is really difficult to determine if something is ethical or not. Or rather, which options are the most ethical (the world is so complex that nothing is completely ethical, so I think we should make an analogy to harm reduction. There will almost always be harm and if we seek zero harm through purity testing, we give advantage to those that do the most harm). While I agree that we should vote with our wallets to put pressure on the market, it is clearly not enough. It never will be enough because we can't peer behind the curtain and no one really knows how to make a pencil[0]. If no one knows how to make a pencil, then it follows that no one knows if pencil making is ethical to begin with, let alone pencil usage. I think what we must do instead is be willing to have these complex and nuanced conversations without religious vigor and instead make sure our passion to advocate for or against a system is proportionate to the time we are willing to put in to learning about the complexities of said system.
Are there no small, family-run businesses you could patronize, since you said you're willing to pay more?
Me choosing to shop somewhere else is not even a rounding error in Walmarts profits. My choice will not bring about any change, but it will hurt me.
I said I was willing to make the sacrifice IF IT MEANT WALMART WASN'T AROUND ANY MORE. I am not willing to make the sacrifice if it doesn't do any good.
I'm pointing out that you don't rule the world, and Walmart will exist whatever you do. Some people seem to like it.
Your only other option is to lobby publicly for the changes you favor.
My only choice is whether I get to enjoy the cheap prices Walmart offers; you say "some people seem to like it", and I am clearly agreeing... everyone likes cheaper prices! I hate the way Walmart treats its workers, but I love the cheap prices... so I either shop there and get the cheap prices or I pay more to shop somewhere else, but either way the workers are going to be treated the same way. Given that, why wouldn't I choose to shop there? If they are going to be abusing their workers no matter what I do, I might as well at least get cheap prices.
And that is why "the free market" will never stop the types of abuses that Walmart commits.
Your last sentence is EXACTLY WHAT I AM ARGUING FOR. I am saying if we want to change Walmarts behavior, we can ONLY do it through legislation; we can't "vote with our wallet" and expect Walmart to change its behavior. We have to vote with our actual vote.
My argument is with people who think we shouldn't regulate businesses because we can use our wallet to change them; I am saying we can't use our wallet for all the reasons I laid out.
.. and yet, millions of people do exactly that. Consumer boycotts happen every day. Sometimes they even have an effect.
This is the point
After all, almost no election is ever decided by one vote.
(If it did happen, they'd have a recount because there are probably counting errors.)
You are absolutely right, though, that pure game theory says voting is not important, and I believe that is why voting is not how we make changes to our society (at least not directly). It takes organizing.
This isn't really true, either, though. Even a small mom-and-pop shop won't be kept in business by a single customer choosing to shop there. Unless we are talking about a speciality shop that only has a few customers, one customer is never going to make or break a retailer.
Now, of course you can argue "yeah, but if 50 other people do the same thing then the store will survive!", which is true, but again, my choice doesn't really change anything. My choice to shop there or not doesn't have any affect on the other 49 people, and if the store would survive with 50 customers, it will survive with 49. My choice doesn't matter to either store.
It’s just good ethics hygiene. And shopping at locally-owned stores always pays off in the long run. You meet interesting people who actually care about where they live and their neighbors.
The effects only add up if a significant number of people make the same decision.
On the individual level, the cost of the local shop is detrimental compared to Walmart. The rational choice for any given individual is to go with the lower price. Choosing otherwise doesn't gain you anything other than that the local spot is a nicer place to visit.
At the macro level, nobody wins unless everyone cooperates. At the individual level, you can only win by not cooperating. It's just the prisoner's dilemma.
Happy thoughts don't really factor in here, it's not really an ethics problem, it's an economics problem.
It's the problem of collective action. A person wishes everyone would behave as he prefers. They have the difficult task of persuading enough others to follow their lead. No one said it would be easy or convenient. Why should it be?
We can find plenty of examples of people who do exactly that, today. There are boycotts active against thousands of organizations. It doesn't take "everybody" - just a loud minority who are organized.
As for "the rational choice" -- that's the myth of Economic Man, which has been thoroughly demolished by behavioral economics. People make choices all the time that do not maximize their financial return.
It's easy to see how if you take an example. Imagine there is a company selling a widget that really makes your life better, but manufacturing it really pollutes the environment. If everyone buys one of the widgets, in fact, so much pollution will occur that our lives will be MUCH worse off than if we never had the widget at all. So my (and everyone else's) preference is that no one has any widgets and we don't have the pollution.
Now here is where it is a prisoner's dilemma; if no one buys a widget, the company goes out of business and there is no pollution, but I also don't end up with a widget. If everyone else doesn't buy a widget, but I do, then the company goes out of business (yay!) and there is no more pollution AND I have a widget anyway (double yay!). I get the best of both worlds - no pollution and this awesome widget. If I don't buy the widget, but everyone else does, then I still get the pollution but I don't even have a widget (the worst of both worlds). If everyone buys a widget, then we have pollution but at least I also have a widget.
Just like a classical prisoner's dilemma, I am always better off defecting. If everyone else is buying a widget, I might as well buy one, too, because the pollution is happening no matter what, might as well also get the benefit of a widget. If no one else is buying a widget, then I might as well buy one because I can have the widget AND no pollution (which is better than just having no pollution).
Everyone has this same incentive, which is why free markets don't solve pollution - it only is solved by regulation, forcing people to cooperate.
I feel similarly, actually, and my gut reaction is revulsion to this fact, too. I hate the idea that my consumer choices actually don't have any affect on what type of business succeeds or fails. I want to believe that my choices matter to the world, but logical analysis clearly shows that it doesn't. We can't deny it, we can only ask, "ok then what do we do?"
My entire point is that we can't rely on the free market to fix these sorts of problems, because the free market relies on incentives, and those incentives won't solve problems like mistreating workers, polluting the environment, and any other externality of that sort. We can't simply hope that spending our dollars ethically will change anything, because it simply can't.
You might think I am immoral for pointing this out, but I feel like it is the opposite. The people who WANT us to believe that 'voting with our wallets' matters are the one's who want us to NOT do anything else. They know that our consumer choices aren't going to effect any real change, but they want us to think it can so that we don't do anything that could ACTUALLY make changes, like organizing politically. They want to promote the narrative that the free market is the way you change the world for the better, when it clearly isn't.
Honestly, this is the same as voting. People in power who want to maintain the status quo love to push the idea that you change the world by simply voting, but it isn't enough just to vote as an individual and hope it works out, for the same reason that an individual making a purchasing decision can't change things.
This is called the Paradox of Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting), because no individual vote actually matters.
We can only make change by organizing and coordinating action.
In Catch-22, Yossarian says, "I don't want to go out there and get shot at," and they say "What if everyone did that?" He says, "Then I'd be a fool not to do it." That's intended to be funny.
Everyone didn't act like Yossarian in WW II for some reason, and some paid with their lives. Voting is voluntary in the US, and yet large numbers of people do vote.
So you need to figure all that out.
So you are saying you can make a measurable difference. It's not a super hero story where you save the world on your own.
But this only works when the customer has some reasonable choice. If store A is the only store in town, it will have customers, no matter how bad it is.
With a lot of daily-use software, there is a network effect: you have to use it because everybody else uses it, and you need to interoperate. Here choice wanes, and you're stuck with the same 2-3 choices. Each of the mega-businesses can inconvenience you, or screw you over, but you have little to gain by switching to a competitor, if it even exists.
Google and Microsoft are AT&T and Standard Oil of our day.
I've had people unironically say to me (in person) "if you die from drinking tainted liquor your estate can just sue the shop; this is a deterrent so they won't do that".
I think that would be a right thing to do, and the shop would likely be sued out of existence, with a felony charges for some of the personnel and owners. This is one reason why shops try to keep things sanitary: a customer with an estate to speak of would ruin them if hurt. (But those without an estate may have been hurt for some time with relatively little consequence.)
Another reason is, of course, inspections (they don't need to be strictly state-operated, but may have to be state-mandated), where the inspecting agency would sue / fine the shop out of existence if for presence of dangerously tainted liquor. An ounce of prevention, etc.
" Hey bandits! Do this:
- Don't mug people
- Be ethical
- Treat people with respect
- Threatening bodily injury and death is bad too!
- Instead of robbing banks, earn money through an occupation
"- Education. People who didn't use computers in the earlier age of full user agency might not even imagine a world where they fully control their devices.
- Advertising. One should not be allowed to advertise "selling" something without handing over full control.
- Law. Shrink-wrap licenses should be neutered, software patents limited, DMCA abolished; these are legal moats around developers' power.
- Technology. Open software, open hardware, open data, self-hostable services.
- Platforms. It's time to treat software as hostile by default, the way an Internet connection is now de facto hostile. The OS needs to be hardened not only against hackers, but also against developers.
These are vague generalities, not concrete suggestions, and there are huge obstacles to each. Perhaps others have useful suggestions.
One must cultivate one's own garden.
"I will not sign off on your design as specified. Change the design, or Do Not Operate". Any attempts to implement and operate without sign off will be reported to the authorities, because the Public's Interest, and my continued licensure are more important than your empire building."
At this point, I think I'll suffer the burden of licensure to keep unethical groups/impls in check.
(I don't know how many software developers have P. Engs though. The regulators try to extend the coverage of their regulation to encompass software and tech, but at the same time ignore a lot of tech companies and workers operating without license. They also tend to write rules with an implicit assumption that all engineers are working in big utilities or mining companies, making it very hard for tech workers to jump through those hoops and get licensed.) /rant
Want an offline installer? Easy peasy, just
- find one in a cobweb-covered thread in an obscure subforum on a vendor's site;
- manually compile a list of thousands of workloads your build tools would need, including optional ones, and create an offline installer yourself - using another machine that still has to be online - which will fail anyway if your target machine happens to be really offline;
- be told to basically GTFO for being an outmoded Luddite who opposes The Progress.
from google chrome to visual studio: loads of software is extremely difficult to install offline
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346
https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-o...
The main challenge with VS is trimming languages and features you don’t need. But if you don’t care about size you can just download everything. And it has support for incrementally updating the installer and pruning obsolete packages.
which is not my default expectation possibly because I was raised in the late 80s/early 90s.
vs_buildtools.exe --layout c:\where\you\want\the\entire\installer --lang en-US
I wrote more about this here: https://notes.npilk.com/radically-user-centered
> "I mean it as - software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer."
No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work.
Malware, in it's broadest sense, has become an industrial scale venture. Technological abuse exists at a system scale.
In some ways that's positive, because developers and end-users, being much wiser in 2023 than in 1993 can unite against a common foe. But that won't be easy. The key lies in building relations between developers and end users that completely bypass the "at scale" bandits.
It's prioritizing value extraction.
It's capitalism in it's worst, most naked form. Advertising spend is worth more than a quality product - because we've inverted the classic information problem: Information is no longer scarce and valuable, it's flooding out everything and is mostly worthless noise.
Making sensible, educated decisions becomes increasingly harder, and you're presented with an environment designed to cause choice paralysis until you finally cave and just buy the item at the top of list presented to you by Google/Amazon/Apple/Walmart/Etc.
That item will be terrible, but it's paid the right protection money to the monopolies (sorry! advertising spend) to keep its spot.
--- Can developers win in those situations? Sure - sometimes. But most times they're some poor contracting team paid literal peanuts to create this product, then immediately go through "staffing reductions" to the bare minimum needed for legally required product support. The developers are not the root cause of this - although they are also not absolved.
The stuff people complain about is all the rest.
But maybe the reason they are complaining about it has to do with how the purveyors figured out how to get it into people's hands. Enough hands to sustain the product.
We can almost entirely blame this on the end users. Users vote for software and hardware with their purchase and use decisions.
Whenever you have a problem with anything, you're a victim of the poor decision making of a million unsophisticated consumers who voted for that piece of crap to have the revenue stream and funding so that it garnered your attention too.
Consumer behavior itself basically creates a barrier of entry to the existence of viable alternatives.
It seems like we need to create enclaves of positive potential to reboot humanity.
its reductive to assign or reject blame.
“developer” is the same to the user, if its the product manager of the company, QA, the CEO or the person writing the code.
it would be easy for me to point blame on the person writing code for a variety of reasons: because ultimately not pushing back on bad behaviour is making their lives easier, see also: using electron, sticking in all the analytics systems under the sun, using framework du jour, etc.
but i wont; in this context “developer” is the company that produced the software; not the individual: customers do not understand the distinction
TBH I never actually liked that word and have previously attacked it - or rather us using it about ourselves for the reasons you point to here... it's deflationary.
Eh. It's implausible to me that we're simultaneously both highly paid geniuses and clueless tools.
Fundamentally, I think we need to decide whether we are professionals or minions. Professionals being people who have not just a duty to the paycheck, but also to the profession and society at large. See, for example, the ACM/IEEE code of ethics for software: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
If somebody wants to say, "Yup, I'm a minion, just going to build the volcano lair and the atomic rockets, and I'm not going to worry about where they'll come down," I will at least commend them for their honesty. But otherwise, I think we need to act like professionals and take responsibility for being clueful about the impacts of our work. Between the need for software and the rise of remote work, our negotiating power with employers has never been stronger. Let's use it for something beyond foosball tables.
It can happen to the best of us [1].
"" I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military
service as a member of this country's most agile military force,
the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second
Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most
of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for
Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a
gangster for capitalism. "" - Gen. Smedley Butler
Why does the difference matter again?
If you are an engineer employing dark UX patterns _today_ you must look at yourself and evaluate the ethics of your work _today_. This will likely have direct personal and financial consequences.
So the stakes are completely different.
Well said.
I think there's a lot of work to do before we can even figure out what those impacts are and how to work in such a way as to minimise the harms. Something along the lines of a Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm".
Force users to update apps even if they dont want to and with each update introduce hidden new privacy flags set at your desired default option, guessing correctly that the average user will likely miss it
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/s31m8o/micro...
It’s the economic system that needs to change, not the devs.
This one has to be an iPhone and iTunes. Absolutely nonsensical levels of obfuscation to getting data on and off. iPhones can't connect to network disks on the local network, they don't appear as mass storage devices if connected via USB, and the software they require--iTunes--is an absolute cluster. If only Android weren't its own complete disaster for different reasons.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devi...
I haven’t tried this
https://helpdesk.macroplant.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600190272...
Shall we not forget the software that only cares about aesthetic aspirations of its UX designers
There is a market solution to counter the financial motive of making User-Hostile software: Make the lack User-Hostile software a MARKETED FEATURE.
- It should be promoted on product description details
- Hardware review sites should actively make note of it
- There should be curated sites / lists that feature products that are not User-Hostile
- There should be a certification body that has a logo that gets plastered on devices / software that has been certified.
Don't blame the guys whose design products to maximize consumer LTV - they are just doing their jobs.
Mmmmm... how about oil and tobacco CEOs? How about patent trolls? How about actual professional criminals? Where do you draw the line?
ACM doesn't seem to care though – they just want membership dues.
Probably my least favorite phrase. If you help make a bad thing knowingly, you have done a bad thing. Period. There’s no 1 evil dictator CEO that deserves all the blame, devs have agency, product managers have agency.
[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
thats why its really regulation who going to change this, and probably not any individual actions.
Twenty years ago, it was rather difficult to suggest to clueless users to use a FOSS-based system. Today, it's quite realistic. Not everything is in an ideal state, but still.
Your privacy is simply too valuable to allow you to keep it.
Users are all too willing to give up their privacy for cheaper products.
Simulation and CAD software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price, clunky user interfaces (often as a result of glueing together acquired software from a competitor) seemingly to up sell training, and awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!)
In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager.
> awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!)
For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.
Companies like the MathWorks seem to make licensing straightforward. Even Adobe make it easy to push someone out of a session so you can get work done. Others make is a chore. Ansys, Solidworks etc have awful user experiences in comparison.
Yes, but how about the software other people want to use or need? Can we make their effort easier with our software and make a business out of it adding value to both? I think it is one area everyone needs to think about.
You help your social circle, try to understand their problems and think about solutions they need to make their business successful, and if you are capable of delivering that, then great. Else you become a consultant. I believe this is how the businesses were built in the early days.
The rise of user-hostile software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291478 - Aug 2021 (283 comments)
Even with an entire top-down team dedicated to serving the user and not corporate interests (which would be all but impossible, except in the world of open source), you'll always have a few stray users asking for features that not everybody wants, and there will be perpetual arguments about which features would benefit most users.
At the end of the day, the problem isn't that software is user-hostile, or written for engineers or corporate surveillance, but that nobody will ever agree 100% on what features should go into any piece of software.
This doesn't work... Unnecessary user accounts, telemetry, inefficient electron app etc etc: It's possible to genuinely argue they all ultimately benefit the user (e.g market research, developer efficiency). Some people would use this to push their agenda. It's also not a good idea to reject ideas that do not directly benefit the user, because many of those are good.
What's missing is quantitative and qualitative assessment. Sticking to the decision tree format, that node needs to be a continuum. e.g "does-it-benefit-the-user" changes to "cost-to-user/benefit-to-user > x". You can also distinguish between quality of benefits and costs by weighting the inputs... and while we are at it "cost-to-bottom-line/benefit-to-user > x" would remove a lot of busy work.
But realistically this is reasoned about in non mathematical terms, effects are nuanced and the more you dig the more you find. The best approach is human and imperfect, but can at least be considerate of the user experience as a whole. This I believe is the heart of the problem: Decisions being made in the abstract when not appropriate, e.g a department only considering the direct effects to that department and ignoring effects to the ultimate purpose of the department->company->service/product. Perhaps it's just the result of over siloed workers without any empathy or concern beyond their short term personal benefit.
Good luck getting patches accepted upstream that remove such malware features.
Open source does not provide a remedy, as without an Apple Developer account I can't run a forked client easily.
The Bitwarden client on F-Droid has no telemetry at all, not even to opt into. https://github.com/bitwarden/mobile/issues/649#issuecomment-...
That is probably the hardest piece of advice to follow. The temptation to cut corners in subtle manners can get really strong.
Yes very much. Bare ethics, like monatomic hydrogen, doesn't exist in "room temperature" reality. It's relational. There have to be two of you. Technologies that destroy the relational undermine ethics because all consequences are divided through by infinity.
Want to use a dashcam for your car and sync the data to your local computer? You need to create an account and connect an app, even though you just want to do local sync.
This seems to be a feature of the more expensive models only. All the cheap and generic ones just record to a memory card.
Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device. You need to install another app, that will be used just for this one device, to sync things.
I think this started with Apple and the iPod. Meanwhile, all the other generic media players were indeed USB mass storage devices. I remember a friend choosing to get a cheaper lookalike clone of the iPod Shuffle specifically after reading that the real thing wouldn't just play files you copied to it, despite how it looked like a USB drive. As a bonus, the clone even had an FM radio.
Another counterexample is my experience with an unbranded drawing tablet ---that even came with driver source code on the CD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060411
It seems that whenever companies grow big enough or get some sort of grand "vision" to "disrupt" or something similar, they become user-hostile. Those which just focus on making product and don't try to make a name for themselves, and possibly are so small they barely have resources to even do so, are not. They won't have the resources to spend on setting up and maintaining services to keep users on a leash.
In the flow chart I would make the "Yes" of the "Would any user benefit from this?" question go to another question: "Are you sure users will benefit or are you just thinking that to justify it yourself?"
If you take anti-trust, wiretapping, and other existing laws like the constitution and applied it rigorously you wouldn't have these issues.
These companies have been allowed to spy on their customers as an indirect arm of government without being held to the same laws governments are held to, and worse to make a profit off it (i.e. 4th Amendment).
If you take government money out of the monetization game, and enforce existing laws like anti-trust, this behavior goes away almost immediately because there is no financial incentive and many disincentives (i.e. prison and fines).
Its not like this hasn't happened in the past. Read up on the Stasi, and other socialist systems. You see the same fundamental problems going back thousands of years on that side of the economic system.
You either have one of two factors driving economies. The division of labor which historically protects and rewards people for being ingenuous with strong property rights, and Corruption which offers incentive to a small group of people to make a system work.
The former is self-moderating as long you don't have a Ponzi or Fraud going on, and the latter is unstable over time because people get old, age and die eventually, and competence isn't rewarded.
The author of the post seems to use Windows which is the worst in term of crap software and abusive practices. Just use Linux, you will have less but at least you will not be abused.
Is it possible that we on Hacker news are out of touch with regular users who _prefer_ cloud accounts because they can’t maintain a NAS array to store their own dashcam footage?
Maybe people prefer low cost apps that include ads to higher cost apps without ads?
That said, the subscription pricing thing IMHO is predatory, like gambling.
Also they seem fairly oblivious as to why these hardware apps are poorly made and require accounts. It’s because it’s expensive to write software and you already bought the product. Whatever keyboard light program you’re using costs real money for the company to make and maintain, and they’d like to keep costs down.
True, but it is also one of the easiest. We have known for decades that you can get much better products with little effort. E.g., by doing basic user testing with 5 users and then iterating. We did that at a consumer-facing startup in 2010 by getting 5 people off Craigslist every Tuesday, and we learned useful stuff every week. By the following Tuesday, we'd have new things to try out. It worked great. And all of this was old knowledge even in 2010.
Is it true that there are user problems and needs that can't be settled with a quick user test? Sure. There are all sorts of harder problems, with fancier research techniques to match. But given that so few places are even doing the basics, I say we should start there. Just build what (we think) the user needs, and then as soon as possible see if it worked.
Then just release the hardware specs and let motivated users maintain it past it useful (to the manufacturer) life.
Like, I have this Govee thermometer I bought to learn about Bluetooth that needs an app to read out the data stored in it. Last I looked nobody reverse engineered the protocol and they don’t have technical specifications because they want to keep you inside their ecosystem. Someday they will just give up the ghost and all these gadgets will be mostly useless (said thermometer transmits current readings so can always be read with a little work).
Yet another of my “when I get motivated enough” projects…
—edit—
Counterpoint:
I have a couple Bluetooth button things which did provide specs and it took me a couple hours of fiddling to get it to fully work with an example program, I push the button and the computer knows it, computer tells it to beep and it beeps, its built in “alert on dropping signal” (so you don’t lose your keys) just works, easy peasy.