The National Design Studio is a scam | Hacker News Reader

The National Design Studio is a scam

chrbutler.com

196 pointsdelaugust53 comments

IMHO UK currently holds the gold standard for this https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Most/many government services use the standard design architecture and, although it is not perfect, it is several orders of magnitude better than I've seen elsewhere.

As mentioned in the piece - the designers at 18F were explicitly following the UKs lead here and were attempting to do just that before being DOGE’d in favor of some political hacks with no understanding or appreciation of the task at hand.

Thanks! Guilty as charged of not fully reading through the piece before commenting :)

Was 18F working?

Yes

Aside from all the actual success stories with products they rolled out, they'd built comprehensive guides for software procurement that were making every part of the government more efficient -- and then the ~arsonists~ experts at DOGE came through and deleted all of that work because some 'move fast and break things' toadies decided they didn't want to spend so much time on planning and they'd rather just build baby build.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250201222157/https://18f.gsa.g...

The guides have been archived on the "18F in exile" site for continued reliable public access [0][1]

[0] https://guides.18f.org/

[1] https://18f.org

Former CTO of a country here. Anything GDS did filled me with deep envy: it was beautiful and made so much sense and I had none of it at my disposal. Then Brexit. I was there in GDS offices a few weeks after the vote and the organization was being dismantled under my very eyes. See, the trick with such endeavors is not what you can drive centrally, it’s what you can make others implement. Reporting to the Man is a good way of creating pressure, but as the current examples in both UK and US show, you can’t sustain that pressure for, say 30 years. Also, centralization neither scales very well nor is democratic as it centralizes control and removes responsibility from the service owners. So how do you have something placed fairly low in the government working horizontally effect meaningful change in other organizations? Have tried it in a few countries, have a few answers and many questions, AMA.

I've done the same for a multinational with 1000 franchises-like subcompanies - trying to get them to conform to horizontal guidance. It is an impossible task, noone takes it that serious and are focused on imminent kpi and okr's.

My only success has been internal reviews of wcag compliance and the threat of fines if found lacking.

But for non digital design its embarrassingly hard

They are using a non-Arial font which already makes them better than 90% of what you see online.

> They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not [Craigslist]. This is important: the very first act of creation was an act of piracy.

Unless Craigslist owned the building they lived in, this is a ridiculous assertion.

It's poorly written but you've misread the intended meaning. It says that they learned from illicit transactions on Craigslist. And then wanted to replicate that on their own platform.

They've edited a correction:

> They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig. Good on them, but renting a space is regulated differently than selling a used couch for many good reasons. What you could once attribute to the same quaint naivety of setting up a lemonade stand, you can no longer. The people who funded them knew better, and eventually, so did they.

Even so, "piracy" is rather hyperbolic. The correction definitely clarifies the point.

If you even remotely agree that Airbnb is a simply a clone of Craigslist, I think it’s perfectly sane to absolutely disregard every other opinion you have on running an organization. Absurd thing to imply, and especially absurd that it’s being digested at all on HN.

the author didn't write anything like that

Direct quote from article:

> They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig[slist]. This is important: the very first act of creation was an act of piracy. What AirBnB does today is no different

Doesn't commit to it being a clone.

America by Design Fail

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45032186

  This is important: the very first act of creation was an act of piracy.

It usually is, as with Spotify, any AI platform, Uber. While you're under the radar, do the illegal shady stuff to bootstrap, then scale, then regulatory capture (fight piracy).

None of their sites are 508/WCAG compliant, that's how you know things are getting bad.

> President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as “Chief Design Officer” of the United States is a sickening travesty

Can we reserve words like “sickening” and “travesty” for things a little more serious than this? A war crime is a “sickening travesty”. This is, at worst, a pointless waste of resources.

When politicians of certain stripes wanted to spend money on renaming SF schools to atone for "past trauma" and canceling math because it's "not equitable" - that somehow wasn't a travesty. Spending some money on design is apparently the most evil thing imaginable though.

Thankfully the tiger moms of SF stood up for their kids and got the grifters kicked out. Let's stand up to lowbrow idiotic articles like this one too.

The swamp overfloweth. How do we cure the intractable corruption of Trump and his administration? Will the nation be worth a fragment of what it was once we do?

Sites like these that bury articles like this sure aren't helping. What our administration is doing is beyond just political, it's immoral, dangerous, and plain old fascism. This submission will be flagged within the hour.

It's already been flagged and un-flagged. I'm sure that will keep happening.

Unflaggers generally cannot win. The flagging kills vote momentum and when it reemerges unflagged, it's already dropped from the front page and from the new list, its only chances for revival.

I still see it on the New list.

It's on the front page.

1. It's flagged not because it isn't true, but because that's not what HN is for.

2. Increasing the visibility of articles like this anywhere, but especially on HN, is unlikely to change anyone's mind. At this point, I don't think anyone is going to change their opinion about the current administration no matter what.

3. There are more effective ways to mobilize voters.

Edit: typo

What is happening in the US now has happened in other developing countries in the past.

The US will be paying for this for decades. For reference, in the Philippines, the effects of the Marcos regime still resonate some 50+ years later, and the changes imposed by it (and the corruption as a consequence of it) have solidified and have become normalized up to the present day. There is no going back.

>Will the nation be worth a fragment of what it was

America was worth something during Biden's days?

Proofreading nit: "soundbyte" should be "soundbite".

hero

Putin-style capture of government institutions by autocrat-aligned oligarchs.

absolutely savage. no notes.

"AirBnB’s present dominance isn’t the product of real innovation. He and his friends stumbled upon an idea after listing their apartment on Craigslist for under-the-table sublease during a popular conference."

Does the author wish he thought of it first?

envy isn't necessary for legitimate critique you know

This barely qualifies as a critique; it's a hit piece with no constructive criticism and some anti-capitalist rhetoric thrown in.

> The National Design Studio is a clear case of nepotism, and they're greatly overpromising. Dismantling 18F was a massive mistake.

There, I just said the same thing but cut out the personal attacks and the ridiculous take that Airbnb was somehow built by thieves (does anything actually believe this?).

I'm surprised this article has stayed up this long. Have the mods read it? It's low signal-to-noise ratio.

> Dismantling 18F was a massive mistake.

Mistake to me implies unintended consequences that differ from the original goal. I've never heard anyone say "Opening Auschwitz was a massive mistake", as its consequences were exactly as intended. In the same way, dismantling 18F is not a mistake.

One of the things about the Apple Store, is that folks want what it sells. Because of that, they put up with it.

Personally, I find the Apple Store to be a pain in the ass. The online version makes me a clickaholic, and the IRL version is very confusing.

Government sites are very different.

I have no opinion on the new position. I don’t know the guy, and don’t use AirBnb. I just find that the insistence on making govt sites “like the Apple Store” to be weird.

In a local mall, we have an Apple Store on one end, and a Microsoft Store on the other.

Aesthetically, they are quite similar.

But the Apple Store is always packed, and the Microsoft Store is always empty.

[UPDATED TO ADD] As was pointed out, this was reflective of a long time ago. Microsoft closed all their stores a few years ago.

> But the Apple Store is always packed, and the Microsoft Store is always empty.

Perhaps because more people associate Microsoft with software and Apple with hardware? Also there are way more stores selling Windows-based hardware equipment compared to Apple stores.

Why would I ever go to a Microsoft store? To buy a Windows CD?

It looks like I’m dreaming of a glorious past, but they seemed to sell XBox stuff.

for a while they were making a play to be in the devices market.

> Why would I ever go to a Microsoft store? To buy a Windows CD?

To get into the back of the line leading into the Apple Store which is ALWAYS packed.

AirBnb has one dark pattern that I'm aware of, that I absolutely despise: the search listings don't display the actual price, but instead the price minus the fees (so not what you'll actually pay). Thankfully some jurisdictions made this illegal (e.g. if you use the Australian AirBnb website you'll get the actual prices), but it's a horrible pattern presumably designed to get people to commit to initiating a booking and thus less likely to not proceed when they see the final total.

I have zero faith that anyone who was okay with that should be in charge of anything for the public good.

This has changed - at least for me, in the US, Airbnb shows all-in pricing.

This has started to turn around in the US, and states like CA and MN require it, with MA to follow in a few days.

The problem is that if you don't use that dark pattern, you take a double digit revenue hit. So you revert to the dark pattern while shaking your fist at why the customers "just don't understand?"

I think that was one of Biden's FTC initiatives about hidden fees in things like airlines, car rentals, hotel rooms, etc.. Honestly one of the better moves by the FTC, here's hoping it survives.

And for me, not. Hate to say it, but it depends. On what I can't say.

> In a local mall, we have an Apple Store on one end, and a Microsoft Store on the other.

I had to check if I had opened an old thread. Microsoft closed all of its stores in Jun 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Store_(retail)

Shows how long it’s been, since I’ve been past there. I don’t really do IRL stores, much, these days (but I have been to the Apple Store a couple of times, in the last few years).

s/have/had/g

My bad. Thanks for pointing that out.

Not all stores closed in 2020. We still had one as of May 2025 around here (which is also mentioned in the Wikipedia page you linked) https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-closed-ex...

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