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Comment by WheatMillington | Hacker News Reader

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WheatMillington

>People don't want everything tied to one identity, one service, one login.

This is EXACTLY what people want. Please remember that HN is not a cross section of the general public.

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> Please remember that HN is not a cross section of the general public.

Yup. I need to constantly keep that in mind, when I’m designing my software.

Very often, the fact that I like it, is a negative.

> Very often, the fact that I like it, is a negative.

Incredible insight. Too often I'm building something and it rises in complexity precisely due to me wanting extra features that might be very niche and technical in nature, so I too must remember to not bloat the product and make it much more streamlined.

SWEs build for maximum tinkerability. General users just want the software to work without having to tinker with it at all.

What this forum needs is for its members to volunteer their time at their local library doing tech support. It’d be a rude awakening for a lot of folks.

I can’t begin to count how many hours I’ve spent trying to help my mom untangle passwords for all of her accounts. I can’t help but laugh at the indignance over an approach that isn’t fully decentralized/anonymized/self-hostable/brushes-your-teeth-and-makes-you-toast/whatever.

I don’t need idealism. I need my mom to be able to figure out how to log into her bank without having to call me every time. The more that’s tied to a single ecosystem the better.

My mother actually writes them all down in a booklet. It's very old-fashioned, but it does work for her.

> This is EXACTLY what people want.

You made the same mistake as the person you're refuting, only worse because you added "exactly" as if case closed.

Here's another take: "People" want different things. They listen to different music, have different opinions, buy different cars, have different tolerances of when a car needs washing.

My non-technical Mum refuses to use online banking; my non-technical Dad loves online banking. My non-techie sister loves issuing verbal commands to her smart speaker; my non-techie Mum refuses to speak to devices & switches her TV off at the wall every night.

The only "EXACTLY" is in marketing efforts trying to convince you of that state.

You could fix iy by saying "this is exactly what > 90% of people want"

I think they want one login, but don't want it all controlled by one company. I think they either like or just don't notice that everything they do is controlled by one company at first, until they see something shiny and cool that another company is doing, and realize how difficult it is to switch.

What would they prefer instead? controlled by another company? controlled by many companies? manage it on their own?

I don't think they've thought it through that far.

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