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Comment by Algemarin | Hacker News Reader

What I find notable whenever something like this is in the news, is that these user-hostile features don't just manifest through abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation.

User-hostile features are created by people.

Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).

I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.

Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")

Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")

Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.

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I had an experience in another industry similar to what printers are doing. We used to use standard, easy-to-source-from-3rd-party 6-port valves on one of our instruments. Customers loved it, since the valve would need servicing now and then with replacement parts but the company president only saw lost recurring service and support revenue. To complement that perception, the VP Engineering decided "our systems should use our parts". So we embarked on "designing" our own new 6-port valves... Which consisted of putting the original 6-port in a welded box with a manifold and calling it our own. Since it was "new" we charged more, while paying less, and obviously telling people that to not use the new system was to void the warranty, and oh by the way, only we can service it. Naturally it came with a firmware that would be recognized as "official". When one of the clients discovered the truth, and provided our support team with evidence proving the new, more expensive valve system gave a slightly poorer performance, management's answer was to threaten to sue. They sold their instrument and went to the competition.

So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design

But they did not raise a stink on teh interwebz ? Bummer.

So many people willing working jobs that explicitly make the world a worse place to live and we wonder why everything is going to shit.

For the record I disagreed with the decision, and eventually left them shortly after (not just over this) but you're putting a very unfair statement out there. First, it's basically every company that's doing this, and it's the logical next step when growth is the target. Even at the time, they used Apple as an example to be emulated with their anti-consumer practices.

Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights. The only reason lawyers were able to threaten that client to remain silent was because the law in his jurisdiction was on my companies' side.

As an employee, when a big decision maker makes such a decision, uses the beacon of tech as an example, and has the law on his side, what do you do? Majority of people can't just up and quit. And even if they do, odds are extraordinarily high that the next job will present the same enshittification.

So no, I disagree that is the "willing employees" causing everything to go to shit but the corporate and governing leadership that have worked together to enshrine the protection of predatory business models over consumer rights, which itself is rooted in the Greed is Good dogma that's ruled since 1980

>it's basically every company that's doing this

It's useful to distinguish between ideas, decisions, and actions. Every idea, no matter how good/bad, far-fetched, that would make your company money has been considered. It doesn't matter which company. When a company decides what to do, they reject most ideas for a variety of context dependent reasons. Reputation is one of those reasons. Unfortunately the meaning and importance of reputation itself has been undermined by enormous reflowing of attention by screens and the remarkable credulity of people.

>Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights.

Greed is unbounded, restrained first by character, then by law. This basic assumption is part of the fabric of the US, itself based in part on the analysis Adam Smith. There has always been tension between greed and character+law, and modern fashion has weakened the meaning and importance of character to almost 0, so greed feels ascendant. But I propose that greed is the same, only the countervailing forces are weaker.

This might seem like splitting hairs. The value in the distinction is that you can let go of worrying about intrinsic human qualities like greed getting worse. If that were true, it would be unsolvable. You can instead worry about a fixable problem, like how "character" itself can rise back to prominence, and how the public's BS meters can be improved.

(Getting a big population to a reasonable standard is a lot of work, so any help appreciated.)

If you're legitimately going to be on the street if you don't work this job, that's what malicious compliance is for. Sabotage this bullshit, if you can. Put in a backdoor and release the details online. If you can't, well, that's a tough place to be and I won't judge, but the majority of the time people in a position to make the world worse aren't.

Your reasoning illustrates the problem of "no individual snowflake is responsible for the avalanche". When you're making fat stacks it is a very convenient narrative to tell yourself and perpetuates the status-quo of suck.

We don't have to keep going along with this shit.

I totally get what you're saying, and you're right on how individual choices add up, (concentration camp guards were also just following orders after all) and tbh younger me would be like "let's blow some shit up!"... But I have a mortgage and kids to support, and this shittification hasn't reached the point where guerilla subterfuge makes it on my to do list.

Having said that, I do try to fight back in whatever capacity I can by not supporting those decisions at work, and as a consumer by avoiding crap, DIYing and repairing as much as I can, and "fuck your new streaming plan, I know how to download shit" while making sure my kids also know how and why dad does it this way

prisoner's dilemma

How can it be the exact same valve, and yet also be cheaper, and yet also perform worse?

Not op but I imagine:

Increase tolerances to reduce cost at scale, sometimes doesn't fit perfectly or requires a little jiggling to line up right.

But now you can't do the jiggle or try to manually quickly realign it, instead you need to call a tech to do it for X bucks and a wait time of longer than a few seconds.

Fair question given a lack of details.

Cheaper: we got rid of the supplier mounting, so even counting the BOM of the new box and manifold, we saved about 5-10%

Worse performance: The extra connectors on the manifold increased the total volume the sample passed through, which gave a lower resolution (this was a chromatography system). Nothing that wouldn't pass spec, but visibly degraded compared to the original system. There's also more potential for minor leaks because with the manifold you now have an additional 12 connection points to worry about

I’ve seen these kinds of decisions being made.

They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost.

They believe businesses want OEM.

They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.

They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product.

By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their data analysis also says on some level.

Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.

> They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.

this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!

I don't think that "makes mistakes -> dumb" is a valid conclusion. People make mistakes based on limited time, limited information, and various other reasons.

As an example that isn't too far from third-party ink cartridges, as a user I'd like app store owners to apply quality control measures to the contents of the app store so it doesn't contain malware. Sure, you could argue that users aren't dumb and can decide which apps to install on their own, but in practice the amount of knowledge and time needed to decide whether an app is malware is incredibly high, up to disassembling and analyzing the code.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: I wouldn't actually like third-party ink cartridges to be blocked. But the limited resources of the customer are a problem that should be recognized.

Do you think they really believe those things or are those just the things they say to convince themselves and each other that what they are doing is fine while deep down they know that it's wrong and that they're acting out of greed and are making the world worse.

> Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.

Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy which means sometimes they have to come up with insane and unconvincing excuses to justify their evils. They are bound to feel uncomfortable when someone tells them the truth by advocating for the customer. They can still take the money by screwing over other people, but it means they can't do it while pretending that it doesn't make them assholes.

Yes, there were some true believers (particularly owners of regional distributors.) There were also people who were detached, but for other reasons (work to travel, overwork, weird attitudes due to headcount games, contractors only seeing dollar signs.) There were objections but perennial objectors weren't welcome in these meetings. Successful objections, moral or not, were couched in language of customer personas, market trends, market position relative to competitors, questioning the perceived value of OEM, potential alliances with other manufacturers.

When I heard the truth blurted out I don't think it was the actual truth that made them uncomfortable. What was uncomfortable was that a person had gotten into that meeting and did not know how to operate in that world. The time for long, candid talks about what the hell the industry is doing to itself was during dinner later at night--but while some of those conversations probably changed careers long term, they didn't at all change the results the following day.

Makes you what's possible if most companies were Open Source down to the hardware level.

LumenPnP (https://opulo.io/products/lumenpnp) is fully OSHW, and that I think really aligns the interests of the developer and users. I really dream of a completely open society!

On one hand you have this abstract concept of a diffuse group of people getting a tiny bit worse off, and you’re not totally even sure who they are or if they care that much or notice.

On the other hand you have granite countertops, more security for your children’s future, a vacation, increases to your own social status, and higher quality food.

It’s pretty easy to see which option we are wired to choose, and which one takes a higher level of personal integrity and effort.

> Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy

That's assuming a lot right here. I know way too many people who flourish in being bad (and will you tell so explicitly)

> Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature

We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.

The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.

Taking this point even further … at the point which user hostility starts to affect their brand in a way that costs money, they’ll stop doing it and be heralded for listening to their users.

At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.

I'd argue there's still some interesting math going on there.

PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.

Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?

> PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"

I don't think that applies to HP, and suspect that most of their customer base are big businesses who prefer business type reasons for their purchasing decisions

I’d wager that 10x more printer decisions are advised by “whoever is wearing a Staples shirt that day” than by an “enthusiast kid I know”.

Regular people don’t want to research a printer; they want printed pages. If that means buying a $100+ OEM cartridge every so often, that’s what it costs and they don’t think much more about it.

The thing is you'd expect companies should also compete to remove such anti-features in order to claim market share from competitors. It's strange how rare that is.

People don't care. They talk about caring, but when push comes to shove 90% of consumers will buy whatever is cheapest at that moment. If your $200 printer that will let you use whatever ink and whatever cartridge you want is competing with a $189 HP printer that will lock you in to its nonsense, HP is going to eat your lunch all day every day.

Because the simple fact of the matter is that if people did care, what you're describing is exactly what would happen. HP (or someone else) would do something like this, a competitor would start buying ads talking about their open source ink cartridges and HP would start losing market share.

It's not like it isn't talked about on general TV.

In the UK here I remember it being a question on the panel quiz show QI, about being the most expensive liquid on earth.

People don't even have a simple way to find out. How are you supposed to get reliable information on what printers block third-party ink? How are you even supposed to know that blocking third-party ink is a thing?

BTW whenever these "how are you supposed to" things are pointed out, people are quick to say "just use ..." with several conflicting recommendations, which actually doesn't counter but support the point that finding out isn't easy.

Shopping for the optimal product is nearly impossible today with fake reviews, swapped product listings, silent part swaps without model changes, shrink-wrapped EULA-like devil bargins (can't use the dishwasher without installing an app requiring your contact list), etc. Not to mention the number of times a company is actively deceiving users with misleading language (eg I no longer know what TDP means).

I find this is why I am increasingly outsourcing my purchasing decisions to Costco. It may not be the best option, but I typically only have to pick from ~3 models, and it was good enough for them to stock it on the shelves. More skin in the game than just a digital listing.

They do. You can see people recommending Brother printers right here in this thread. I also switched to a Brother black and white laser printer years ago and never had another printing problem. Later I found a Brother color laser printer at an estate sale and used that for years (didn't really need color, but it was a good deal).

I don't know what the actual numbers are, but if I had to guess I'd say Brother has been stealing market share from HP for a while now, because their products are better. It's one of the top comments practically every time there's a thread like this.

And apparently they are now doing a face-heel turn and joining the lockout party. Hopefully mine lasts forever, even though I keep feeding it eBay toner!

If every company can make a lot more money by screwing over consumers then every company will do it. Sometimes it will always be more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they're asking for than it would be to make a better product that everyone is happy to pay for no matter how much market share it might gain them.

Companies exist only for themselves and for making money, and not for serving the people or making the communities they operate in better. They will happily hurt people and destroy the environment to get even just a little bit more wealth.

We grant them the privilege of existing as legal entities though, so maybe we should start demanding they start doing more for us in order to keep or attain that privilege.

Competition forces companies to optimise for the average/majority consumer preferences. The reality is that most of the user hostile features we talk about here on HN - vendor lock-in, non-repairability, monetisation of data, etc - are not important to most consumers, who value low cost and convenience above all else.

The problem is not that consumers don't value the right things, the problem is that they are not always informed enough to make the decisions that back their values. And this lack of information is intentionally achieved by underhanded business tactics, such as selling printers at or below cost but locking them to overpriced ink in order to make them seem low cost while actually having a higher total cost.

> The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

And what is astounding is that we, as a society, have accepted this backwards rationale.

The only reason we should allow companies to exist is to serve the societal interests, and making the money should be the side effect.

So are you going to be the one that's going to open and run a printer company at a loss for the "societal good", or are you just expecting others to take on that burden?

Who said anything about a loss? We allow corporations to make a profit as motivation to actually do things, but if the things they are doing are not in the best interests of society then we should dismantle them.

The phrasing of your statement is quite illustrative of the problem, I think. We have had it drilled into our heads that society should serve the corporation, which exists only for profit, and that this is natural and good.

Which is bullshit. Society is what permits an entity like a corporation to exist in the first place, and we do it because it is (theoretically) in our interest to do so. When it ceases to serve this function it has become a cancer and should be excised from society, but since it is such an effective cancer it has convinced us that we exist for it and not the other way around.

"Dismantle" "excise" - funny words for unemploying thousands of people because you don't like their approach to selling printer ink.

I think we should "excise" cancers that are callous about sweeping societal and economic effects based on their personal whims.

> "Dismantle" "excise" - funny words for unemploying thousands of people because you don't like their approach to selling printer ink.

We put people in prison because we don't like them selling drugs. If that makes sense, so does this.

Besides, those people can (theoretically) get other jobs. And if we're really worried about it, then 'excise' in this case can just mean nationalizing the company.

To say that we should continue to employ people to make the world worse for the sake of economy is just the broken window fallacy.

> The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.

Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.

Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."

In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."

This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.

> Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature

I worked for a large Telco and wrote and maintained the software and system(s) that calculated internet usage, and charged overages monthly. (The home internet plans sold by this telco that service a massive landmass all had hard usage caps. There is no competition).

I saw many, many monthly internet overage bills that were $5k+. Hundreds a month that were $1k+. That system alone made many millions in profit per year.

Why did I do it? It was my job, I needed to pay rent and buy food.

Longer term, I decided to "stay on the inside" because I genuinely thought I could improve things. Over the years I had meetings with basically all the VPs and even the CEO, and sent many a passionate email on behalf of customers that many told me were "Career Limiting Moves".

I'm not there anymore, and it's many years later, but that Telco does now offer unlimited internet plans (introduced very recently). I was the first at the company to run the numbers on what it would look like and start to push for it at all levels, so I like to think I did actually make things better.

FWIW, there was one guy in my department who refused to work on/with that usage system, and made it clear that from a moral standpoint he would quit if they forced him to.

Telstra?

No, imagine zero competition. Not a single other possibility of internet in a building, except for one company, tens of thousands of customers, many, many, many towns.

(excluding Hughesnet... which was catastrophically bad)

Bell Canada or Telus? 2nd most massive landmass.

In the case of HP, I think it makes sense from a business point of view. The "big money" in printers is not the printer but the refills. They are kind of the petroleum lamps of IT. One of the biggest problems from the POV of a printer company is the fact that refill/replace from different brands cuts into their profits.

The inital strategy by all companies was to point out that original ink is better in some way, then most of them tried some sorts of firmware based restrictions. HP actually tried a pretty interesting approach with their ink subscription model. They have a decent price/page with that and you don't ever have to worry about running out of ink because you automatically get a replacement cartridge if you subscribe for x$/month. The downside is that the number of pages that you are "allowed" to print each month is limited which seems pretty ridiculous at first glance for a tech person. However, if you think about "normal users" I think they actually found a good way to force them back to their ink by selling "peace of mind".

So basically, while I completely disagree with the approach because I want to use a device I buy any way I please I think HP is actually making the right business call here. The average customer cares about having an ok price/page and having a printer that always prints when they need it. I think HP is targeting that with their subscription model and also making cash flows a bit more reliable.

Mostly money - We're in the midst of implementing a new payment model. It makes us (the programmers etc) uncomfortable, but generally these sorts of things come from up high, usually with the intent of extracting more profit.

By and large I expect most workers know and dislike that, but ultimately it's a small compromise for them personally - in most cases they may not even use the product they work on. The best they can do usually is object to it, but if people want it done then it'll be done; after all, that's what you're getting paid for.

Haven’t been in the exact situation you describe, but I have worked at some b2b saas companies and when I didn’t like the pricing schemes and the way management was making us squeeze customers I left.

I’m not really in a a financial position to just say fuck it and leave at a moments notice, and it feels a bit different when you’re making Adobe for example pay extra money.

I think we can all imagine the actual reason people in charge do it though: money

I saw a PM during a large company meeting Q&A eagerly talking about how we're not leveraging our existing customers enough to sell more products and how we should have advertisements in product A for (largely unrelated) product B because we have a large enough user base. The VP's face lit up and our product has ads now :(

The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be (the PM since moved off to another team to continue innovating). This made me angry and sad, but most of my peers didn't care at all, and some even expressed interest to "work on the high impact feature" to get a promo for themselves as well :(

More eyeballs on ads, it's the future, we have our best and brightest on it.

> The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be

Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.

Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate?

I'd say that's 99% of the tech workers' mentality. Especially if they need to stay employed to stay in the country, better to just lick the boot than give any impressions of opposition.

> just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people

These questions should be posed to executives at shareholder meetings.

not cogs in the machine. When was an evil feature ever stopped by rank and file workers?

Regardless of any feelings one might towards Google, they rather publicly lost a big contact with the military due to worker revolt.

End of the day the sentiment shifts to "people are not forced to buy my products and if they do anyway, why wouldn't we extract as much from the market as we can for the work we already did", which is a fair position to have. You did some work, if you can sell it for 10 instead of 5 and make them come back to you instead of a random when they need help, why not?

You'd be surprised how easy is to change your mind when it's your own work or company, yet still be outraged at others when they do it. It's very common.

They say actions speak louder than words. Well, the corollary to that is that incentives speak louder than rationalizations. What exactly do you want to hear? Would you rather be lied to, have a window into how some poor schmuck lies to himself, or indulge that schmuck’s hand-wringing?

I'll bite. I've implemented user hostile features before.

> what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.

The people who make the decision to implement these kinds of features are bad people. Full stop. They want to punish people, and believe a technological solution provides a fool-proof way to punish the people around them. It's about control, and spreading hurt around. It's about being able to exert control on others, without them having the ability to push back. It is evil, and I hate it.

I have implemented user-hostile features in the past because it was my job at the time, and I would be fired if I didn't.

When I've had to create this sort of anti-feature, I do a shitty job on purpose. It barely works. There are workarounds that defeat the punitive nature of the horrible thing I've had to create. It'll work on paper, but be shit in production. In every case I've had to do this, the people who ask for the anti-features are not capable of testing that they work right. They gleefully take their new pain toy and go off to hurt people with it. I never hear from them again. Then I start updating my resume and begin to look for a new job.

Are the user-hostile features you're talking about different than the third-party tracking that almost every Web site includes (selling out their users' privacy)?

> "Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons"

Could you imagine if the defense industry adopted this? Manufacturer loses follow-on contract, soon the entire inventory "Sorry, this missile will only interface with genuine <contract loser> parts"

I do wonder whose fault it is though.

Companies exist to make a profit. I'm sure some extra returns are caused by 3rd party laser and ink cartridges. I've personally seen a 3rd party toner cart have some kind of internal failure and strip the drive gear in the printer.

Just like the EU is requiring USB-c to charge a phone, governments should consider requiring a standard ink and toner cartridge. It would reduce inventories, increase volumes, amortize R&D over a greater number of printers, and increase competition for the standard cartridge. The standards committee (like the USB committee) could set the standards, have branding/labeling for particular features, and talk with industry about desirable features for the next generation.

I just hope they avoid doing something insanely stupid like making dozens of USB-c cables, visually identical, but incompatible.

I've had a job that I felt bad about - they bought old, non-collectible debt for pennies on the dollar and called and sort of tricked people into making payments on old debts to "renew" the debt so that they could legally collect on it. They did it under the guise of "here's a chance to build your credit!" but I doubt the most people who signed up realized they legally didn't have to pay.

I got paid all of $50k to be a financial analyst there. I was young and straight of out school with a shit job economy and needed to pay rent and buy food. I also took comfort in working there for a year and a half doing virtually zero work.

At least one printer that demands original ink has an option hidden in the setup menu to turn that off, which isn’t very well documented. I suspect a mole in the company (or the detection itself is bugged and tech support needs an override).

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