Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.

Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.

Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.

I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.

Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.

[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.

> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.

This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.

You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made

Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).

Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.

So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.

Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.

Everyone wants to complain about the "bloat" in Windows and macOS (and fair enough, there is a lot of bloat and cruft) but blame it all on capitalism, when Linux has kept apace in growth rate the whole time. My Linux installs have been 'round about 50% the size of my Windows installs these last 15 years, never really straying far. If we ask ourselves, "Why does Linux need to keep growing?", I think we can easily see that OS churn and growth is not just "shareholder value gotta go up."

Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden nonsensical moves.

iOS 6 was peak smartphone and I will die on that hill

> Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.

And this is why the subscription model just doesn’t make sense for most businesses. I pay for a newspaper subscription because there is literally a brand new newspaper each day. A magazine subscription yields an entirely new set of articles every month. I pay for subscription access to data that is continuously updated. The subscription model makes sense for a product that is created anew on a regular basis. It doesn’t make sense for most software companies that are producing static software. What they are calling ‘subscriptions’ are really just rentals for their static products that get minimal surface changes to justify the ongoing rent charge. I’d much rather just pay a flat fee for the static software and upgrade it when I’m ready for the new features.

Honestly it’s the first iOS I like less than the last. A lot I’d consider neutral.

But now I’ve got several bugs (and I’m on last years flagship), liquid glass is ugly until you change a guy of settings, and I find myself accidentally triggering something (usually Siri) and being annoyed more.

Yes, but in this case, not only are you being force-fed new features that you do not want you are also billed for them as if you use them when in fact you don't!

Bell icon in corner. Colored dot on bell. No need to overthink the UX on this beyond what color to make the dot.

Can I dismiss that distracting little pip without having to click through a tutorial for every new feature? Can I just turn this off?

This is especially irritating when, say, you set up a new phone and the app treats you as if you've never used it before.

It’s funny because lately I’ve been playing Arknights which is a gatcha game which is unusually good for free players. It has a few icons that light up with one of those dots when you have something to attend to (say you got a token to upgrade a character) but there is the dark pattern that that dot is always set on the cash store which means it is always set on the “stores” section which has substores for in-game currencies some of which you have to attend to periodically. So I see the dark pattern there.

Really my complaint is anything that covers up content; if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px above or below the page to show me something I’d complain about lot less — but if I had my way anything unwanted that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don’t want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car or truck!)

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