Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?
I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.
I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.
And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.
That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.
So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them
I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page
The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.
People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.
How many people read these pages?
But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.
Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...
- more likely to use ad blockers.
- more likely to critically evaluate any advertising/propaganda they encounter.
- more likely to use VPNs and other technology that makes them more difficult to track.
- more likely to be "power users" of the service, thus consuming more resources than the average user.
Many more points like these apply, but the bottom line is that the ROI for such users, from the service provider's point of view, is terrible, so alienating them makes perfect business sense. And since competition has almost disappeared from the technology industry, there are no unintended consequences to be expected in most cases.
- more likely to recommend your service to friends and family when they ask their power user friend which service to use.
A move like that is shortsighted at best, not good business sense.
In my experience, non-technical people don't ask power users what to use, because they'll get answers they don't want and conflict with all the slick marketing they've been brainwashed with. So instead, they'll frequently try to coerce their technical family members into buying the mass-market stuff they like instead, particularly iPhones.
Companies are then safe to ignore you recommending against their products when the users have no other viable options. Until they do. Then they become Kodak or Blockbuster Video because someone else makes a better product than theirs and they're so unaccustomed to customers having a choice that they lose the market.
Then you have the people at the margin, who would be better off with a laser printer, but only by something like tens of dollars a year. At which point the opportunity cost of the time to evaluate whether they would actually be saving money is on par with the money they would be saving.
Whereas if there was actually more competition, someone would be selling a cheap printer that takes cheap cartridges instead of your options being a cheap printer with expensive cartridges or an expensive printer with cheap cartridges.
Unless they live in a place with the right level of humidity where once a month is exactly the right interval to print so they don't dry out. Or they print once a week, but still not enough pages to justify a more expensive printer. Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit, so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
Usually, they are.
>Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Such as here. Doing this is stupid, because buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a set of cartridges for the same printer.
>Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit,
Or here, because they couldn't manage money and earned themselves a bad credit score.
>so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
If you have credit that bad, you don't need a printer at all. Plus, you can get a B&W laser for $100; less than the cost of an inkjet + a set of cartridges.
Sorry, but every way I look at it, inkjets are nothing more than a scam designed to prey on people who aren't good at long-term thinking or money management.
I have family that wont tolerate any changes on their smartphone, wont create or use an email account and such... they arent even very old. But it kinda reinforces your point: they dont really take power user advice either, especially if it conflicts with something they already know.
Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
Exactly. They can go to the Apple store and talk to one of the "geniuses" there.
The last time someone asked me about search engines was probably 20 years ago.
When I was at Blekko we had a tremendously enthusiastic librarian user base who loved being able to curate the sites searched. But product was so focused on ads, nobody seriously considered a paid service. (Libraries subscribe to all kinds of services for example)
Most users however would not even provide an email address which would allow them to elide spammy sites from their searches.
It was an interesting thing to observe.
VPNs, privacy tools. You name it. These so called self-proclaimed smart people were trained like a sheeple to buy stuff.