Good software knows when to stop
ogirardot.writizzy.com
ogirardot.writizzy.com
not quite in the same area, but this advice reminds me of blizzard and world of warcraft. for years and years, people requested a "classic" WoW (for non-players, the classic version is an almost bug-for-bug copy of the original 2004-2005 version of the game).
for years and years, the reply from blizzard was "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."
they eventually caved and launched classic WoW to overwhelming success. some time later, in an interview, ion hazzikostas (the game director) and holly longdale (vice president & executive producer), admitted that they got WoW classic very wrong and that the people "really did know what they want".
anyways, point being that sometimes the person putting in the feature request knows exactly what they want and they have a good idea. while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to ignore feature requests, it is worth recognizing that you may be doing so at your own loss. after all, you might not not be able to fully understand every underlying problem of every user of your product -- but you might understand how to code the feature that they asked for.
Jagex thought they knew better than the players what the game should look like, and overhauled the whole game to the point it was unrecognizable. It took a massive loss of paying members to get them to finally release 2007 version of RuneScape back.
Even now, OSRS has double the amount of players that RS3 has. Lol
Turns out the 2007 version of the game was ROUGH for a lot of reasons - they picked the time because, IIRC, it was the most complete backup they had.
OSRS has now had nearly a decade of consistent updates, a large team, and typically 10x the online player count of the "modern" game. The catch is that OSRS is not the 2007 version of the game, it's an alternative update timeline which broke off at the 2007 version of the game.
But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so agree to disagree.
I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys have phones?).
sometimes users want something. that something might be a feature request, or it might be a feature removal. it doesnt really matter for the sake of my point(s):
a) ignoring your users requests can sometimes be a bad choice.
b) you might not necessarily understand every underlying problem that every user has. worse, you might think you understand the problem when you dont.
expanding on b: blizzard thought they understood their player base and the underlying problems of retail WoW. on multiple occasions, ion explicitly said stuff like "you think you want this, but you dont". they kept making changes to retail WoW to try and stop the hemorrhaging of players.
eventually they said "fuck it, we dont know why you want this, but here" (not a verbatim quote). it ended up being very profitable.
Unfortunately Blizzard has had a problem for a long time where they are too stubborn to listen to player feedback about WoW. They will put systems into the game that people hate, and for years they will insist that the system is fine and meets the team's design goals, despite all the people telling them that it sucks and isn't fun. Then, finally, in some future expansion they will go "yeah guys that really did kind of suck" and remove or overhaul the system. They really don't have a culture of listening to player feedback, and it drags their games down.
You'd think they would have learned by now, as they repeat the same exact mistakes over and over again. It's like they hate their playerbase.
It’s really questions where I delight the users. They know something is wrong but they cannot articulate it so they assume it’s them and ask how to do something. Which tells you that the feature is missing or not discoverable. If four people ask you the same question it’s a bug not a feature and you should fix it.
Classic WoW is also not as successful as OSRS, which is why they're exploring Classic+. Even OSRS, which was born on nostalgia, also gets significant new content updates (albeit polled).
It wasn't only a "we want WoW classic bug for bug," it was "the modern game has become so unrecognizable that it's basically WoW 2.0, you ruined it with the modern systems"
Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.
Classic will only save them for so long without them making new content, but using classic's systems. So in a way, I think the point still stands, you have to understand what the underlying problem is. Users do generally know what they want, but they don't always know how to ask for it.
100% nope. Classic is what we wanted. All of what you just said is you saying: "you think you want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."
Classic WoW wasn't perfect, but it was amazing, and it's NOT all just nostalgia-glasses.
engineers love announcing that nobody but engineers knows what’s important in software; that’s complete and total bollocks. wow classic is a perfect example because it is exactly the sort of thing that the business unit and the engineers and the designers would not want to do. We don’t need to assume that because we have hundreds of Internet posts indicating exactly that. Not only did they not want to do it, but they argued that users didn’t know what they wanted for the sheer fact that making it was not something that was desired by either the business unit or the engineers.
Also, the point is not that classic saves them from making new content. It’s probably the case that the more content they make the more of a value proposition classic appears to be. Is there some new race in the new expansion that’s stupid? OK hop on over to classic.
Kill the part of your brain that makes you assume users are stupid.
Right, and that's my point. When you take away the nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a good game, to those players, in the first place.
So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all, but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success continuing that Classic formula with new content. Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely different game.
1. Advancement over time.
2. Player interaction. Hard content should be hard in order to push players into working together to overcome challenges.
3. The world is a character in the game. Even when you eventually got mounts later in the game, they made it so mobs can knock you off & daze you. The world is big and full of wonder. Especially at earlier levels, just getting from point A to point B can be a journey in itself. Wanna play with your friends who started in a different zone? Fine, but just getting there will be an epic journey.
They abandoned those principles later on. Eg, by adding "sidekick" characters you can summon when you're playing on you own, to overcome hard content. The point of that content was to push you into making friends with other players. Flying mounts made the world small and safe. Just point in the vague direction you wanna go and go AFK for a few minutes. They also added more and more teleports, so you don't have to schlep overland yourself. And the LFG system.
It was a really different game back then. I didn't get that much out of classic wow. But I'd enjoy playing a new MMO built around those same principles.
The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.
So if you played for that, you got excluded.
They also sort of killed build diversity, but there was no build diversity in classic either, at least if you wanted to raid.
The grinding... I don't miss it. That could have used toning down.
I started playing Anniversary vanilla one year ago. I played through it all and now I'm playing Anniversary TBC. I visited many dungeons. There's no LFG system, yet I didn't find any social interactions in dungeons. I'm pretty sure the whole social interactions thing is overblown. 99% of dungeons is like leader silently invites you or you write "inv holy pala GS 1400" and he silently invites you. You silently run through dungeons, silently leave. That's about it. There are no interactions. Zero. Some people write "hi" and "ty", some don't bother.
If you know you're not likely to ever meet those people again, you don't bother.
as someone who has played since 2004 with only a handful of month-long breaks, this is simply not true.
I do think Blizzard is big enough they can maintain multiple experiences. One thing that is challenging is a vocal group of players really feel like they need to do everything in the game. It's compulsory (some game design choice did also force that at times). This leads to them not enjoying the content not designed for them. Blizzard has a challenging line to solve.
Classic was the right move, I do agree with your idea of someone making a similar game with the original principles. It probably can't be Blizzard anymore, their have a 0-1M user problem. Anything they make has to cater to everyone or they get flak. So a smaller outfit needs to do it. Challenging in this funding environment.
I played WoW precisely because they dodged the first bullet, which is inflationary or deflationary economies caused by each content creator trying to leave their mark by making better gear for their quests than are already available. The whole thing with used equipment only being for to be scrapped guaranteed that low level characters weren’t all carrying the third best helmet in the game.
But they still had the same problem with expansions - the need to change things in order to declare, “I made that”. They wouldn’t have needed classic if they followed your conclusions.
However, without those changes would they have stayed on everyone’s radar as long? Hard to say. Balancing in LoL and friends seems somewhat easier because the mechanics change less frequently. So maybe they would have been fine or maybe they’d be on WoW 2.0 now.
I'm reminded of the 1995 interview in which Steve Jobs elucidated the fundamental reasons that Xerox missed its golden opportunity to own the computer industry and why former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley later ultimately failed at the helm of Apple.
It's fundamentally the same issue with a number of gaming conglomerates nowadays. These companies are more interested in increasing the sales of sugar water than making great games. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising in the least to learn that former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick was on the board of Coca-Cola for a decade.
That would be a tremendous failure. There are millions of players who love LFR/LFG, who love somewhat balanced nature of the game, etc. You would lost all of them in favor of Classic players.
The truth is, a lot of changes Blizzard made to the game, were good ones. If you would browse WoW Classic forums, you'd find plenty of players requesting retail features to be added to Classic game. They want LFD because they're tired sitting for hours being denied for dungeons, because their class is not very good. They want class homogenization, because their beloved class is genuinely lacks tools to be useful.
When you make any change to the game, some player will love it and some player will hate it. Over time more and more players will feel alienated. But other players will come and they won't know other game. There's no simple solution here, other than maintain several versions of the game for different players. One size does not fit all.
E.g. the older ver may well be better, and even what most users want, but pulling off the optics of selling both without damaging the modern variant is difficult if you're not c-level. The internal champion would basically be ending their career with "yeah I messed up the product let's roll back". Also sends a very interesting signal to shareholders and competitors about the direction of the corp.
In this case it was the producers (not the users) that were wrong in wanting to throw away something that already worked.
I believe his point isn't exactly about users not knowing what they want, but instead the tension between evolutionary design vs. "keep piling features".
this is similar to the comment by treetalker, so i dont want to just copy/paste my reply to them, but focus on "add" vs. "remove" is sort of beside the point(s) i was trying to make.
Still, by volume, there are thousands of examples of bad ideas and feature requests on the wow forum too.
There are also shallow wants and deeper wants. I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, but they justifiably knew they couldn't trust Blizzard not to add anything without messing it up. So the only practical way to satisfy the desire was to just roll back all the way to the classic version.
In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW. But that would be really hard to get right, and distrusting players would fight it (with very good reasons for their suspicion), and you would have a giant mess of different people claiming that they know what to keep and what to discard, except nobody would agree on the same things, etc.
>In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW.
this is exactly what they put a lot of effort into for 5-10 years or so. years! blizzard convinced themselves that the players asking for classic didn't really want classic, they just wanted some of the feeling of classic bolted on to the current game.
but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug classic.
and it worked out great in the end! classic is thriving. retail is thriving. no balancing act between the two player bases needed.
You're speaking in the same manner of absolutes like most gamers tend to speak on discussion forums. It makes you unbelievable tbh.
Get this: The playerbase for retail is still larger than classic. And those who advocate world PVP have their servers eventually trend towards one faction. These are the just effects of the vocal minority. It doesn't mean the vocal minority are right for all instances. Just that the incentives lined up.
get this: this is completely irrelevant to the point of my comment.
>It doesn't mean the vocal minority are right for all instances.
good thing i didnt say anything close to this!
Yup.
In contrast, if a user has been rude, entitled, and high maintenance, I may end up not even trying to reply in the first place because I know they’ll just be combative every step of the way, and giving them what they want just makes them demand more, seldom being appreciative. These tend to be users who want something a very specific way and refuse to understand why the thing they are asking for is profoundly selfish and would shit the interaction for everyone else to satisfy their own desire. So I don’t do it.
This has been a bigger sidetrack than I originally intended. I guess the moral of the story is don’t be a prick to the people you’re asking something from.
Especially if you try to address their core need but their imagination doesn’t extend quite far enough to see how your effort would help, because they love their ideas.
To the first kind, in contrast, I’m happy to answer any question, no matter how silly it may seem, because I can be confident they’ll trust my judgement, that they’ll learn from the interaction, and that the next one will be even better. Just about the only thing I’m sad about regarding those users is that as they grow they start interacting less because they don’t need it as much, as they are able to help themselves.
Now that I think about it, that seems like a good way to differentiate: The good users delight you and demand of you less and less; the bad users drain you and demand of you more and more.
By and large I’ve gotten better feature requests out of looking at patterns of frequently asked questions and turning them into tasks instead of reacting to negative feedback.
Do you just explain or do you start by asking a question?
What I usually go with is _asking_ what they want to achieve. Because usually, the user describes features/functions/forms instead of explaining the business case. And while the user describes a business case (a thing that generates him money/...) it becomes obvious how/why to implement the request.
So often, people forget to just ask and listen.
get paid. Stop this nonsense. You shouldn't work for free it makes you disagreeable (I am the living proof).
> I guess the moral of the story is don’t be a prick to the people you’re asking something from.
This is your salary. That's how you get paid. In power. Power over what? "I am a latex maintainer". I'm not impressed. You're wasting your time. Show me your Ferrari instead.
The release of Arc Raiders captured that original UO social dynamic perfectly. Players flooded forums with requests to make PVP optional. In that case, the devs knew better than to listen.
Involuntary pvp is the long term death sentence for a game. It punishes new players by making them easy prey for veteran players. Player numbers will fall hard and fast, like every other involuntary pvp game does.
Many live service games that are punishing for new players are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new players mostly with each other.
It's OK for a game to exclude entire demographics of players. A PvP first game shouldn't try to force itself to appeal to PvE only players.
But I'm just an interested outsider, waiting for the crashing player numbers for the devs to come to their senses.
That’s the core draw - and it’s not necessarily for everyone.
Trying to make ARC Raiders into a PvE shooter would require every map and enemy to get reworked for low-population gameplay. The game just isn't built for it, and their effort is better invested in catering to the preexisting playerbase.
Everything doesn't have to be for everyone.
None of them are easy for new players, with Dota 2 in particular requiring at least 2000 hours to have a chance of not being horrible at the game. Yet it isn’t causing any fall off. Instead it is binding people’s lives to these games, achieving retention rates that easier games can only dream of.
In most cases it's probably driven by falling new player acquisition numbers, and so the equation switches to favoring player retention or luring back veteran players.
Every profile of player has their own preferences (some just want to see big boob textures, etc.) but that doesn't mean they are driving product decisions, except in the case that this demographic becomes core to the business model. But it has nothing to do with the particular preference.
The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep the software that we build.
but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they all have a thousand settings.
and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just so much stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up with a thousand settings.
Economics & business wise it is very simple while it is popular: monetization.
what?
i played vanilla in 2004, and i played classic when it released. your description is extremely inaccurate.
Drastically? What are you talking about?
According to Blizzard, they don't even have access to the original source code. Instead starting from some version they happened to be able to recover.
When you say "nigh identical to the old version in all the ways that matter", what you are saying is that the game is identical in the ways that matter to you. Some of us actually value the original 1.0 experience. Just for example, the original WoW never had server transfers or "layers" in the game.
And the team failed to do that multiple times
Is this wrong ? Probably
no. retail has more players than classic. they just had a massively successful expansion release.
>So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really want is "give us a nice version of the game"
no, they want classic. you are re-learning what blizzard finally learned. people literally just wanted classic wow.
People do not want "classic": people want a "good" game that has some specific characteristics
as long as those "specific characteristics" are literally and exactly what classic wow is, sure.
blizzard tried to do this with the retail version for literal years while people kept saying "please, i just want classic wow."
now, if you mean that it is plausible that those same people would play a different non-wow mmorpg that shared some aspects of classic wow, sure. but that is drifting pretty far from my original point.
I also wonder if maybe they were generally correct. What percentage of people asking for WoW Classic back in the day actually ended up there?
It's kind of like if my dad encouraged me at 17 to get a minivan because I'm going to want a minivan. And then I'm 35 with kids and I get a minivan and he says, "see? I was always right!"
Another way of reasoning about it is to reframe it as a shared problem: "What should we do with the resources we're committing to WoW?" "Do WoW Classic!" probably was a wrong answer for a long time if the goal is to make the most people happy (and make the most money) rather than make the loudest people happy. This quickly gets into how users (especially tech savvy ones) generally have no clue how things work and have zero sense of the associated cost. WoW was constantly full of people with quick opinions on how hard it should be for a multi-dollar company to do certain things. No appreciation for the mythical man-style difficulties associated with distractions and pivots and whatnot.
And it basically came down to "classic WoW was simpler and for new players provided something that modern WoW doesn't/can't really - especially the spontaneous community.
WoW started out as an MMORP, but it's really a massively single player game until you're top level anymore.
The demand for classic wow got much, much stronger after cataclysm, because then you couldn't even "pretend" anymore.
And eventually the situation got so "bad" that players realized they actually didn't want any of this (a lot of people have lengthy commentaries on how more in-game friction somehow makes the game better), and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming. And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail. Probably just two different player bases.
blizzard is notorious for not responding to player feedback, as my original comment serves as just one example of, so i am not sure where you are getting this idea from. there is probably a super compilation somewhere of ion telling the player base that they are wrong about wanting X.
(to be fair to blizzard, they have been better at listening to feedback in the last ~2 years, but that is a very recent change.)
>and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming
this is the point in time where my comment starts. demand for classic became overwhelming, and yet they ignored it for years, while telling everyone "no, you are wrong, you do not want classic".
this is the key part: blizzard eventually released classic, and publicly admitted "we should have listened to you guys. you really did want classic.". turns out the player base did actually know what they want.
>And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail.
i am not sure what the relevance of this is.
You hear this story over and over about every kind of software.
There are two audiences every successful developer needs to cater to: the "I wish this did X, I want new features" side and the "I liked it the way it was" crowd and they're distinctly different groups.
For a long time I produced a popular technical art asset for video games and even I realised I needed to include every single version of the tool with every single installation. If a developer has to go and find out how to get "the right version" at all then I'm 90% likely about to lose a user.
Focusing on the "we did this right just keep going like that" and really understanding WHAT you did right and WHAT people like is really important. It's really hard to be impartial when you made the world rather than consumed it, but always take the win.
(you could also note that in the first ~10 words, i say "this reminds me of blizzard" instead of "this is exactly like blizzard".)
If I recall correctly, at some point a pirate server running an old version of RuneScape became more popular than the actual game. So then they made their own official "classic" version of the game. I think it's more popular than the "main" one now.
if you read my comment and came away with this, you have completely misunderstood what i said. my comment is not about whether having more features or less features is better.
Just build the feature is the wrong lesson to learn. The right lesson is to expend more effort to understand; and yes, part of that _could_ involve shipping the feature in order to get data/feedback.
good thing i didnt say anything remotely similar to this
in fact, i very specifically say almost the complete opposite! "while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to ignore feature requests".
And the people owning the product were convinced players wanted more features.
my comment isnt really about number of features.
the main point of my comment isnt even about WoW.
That sounds like good advice on the surface but it should be "understand what the user is asking for" then see if it is a valid thing, after which you can decide how to accomplish it. Users usually come to you with the last bit. They ask you to do it in a particular way.
You can't really map b2b enterprise software tropes onto b2c entertainment products, as ActiBlizz would discover.
>You can't really map b2b enterprise software tropes onto b2c entertainment products, as ActiBlizz would discover.
you appear to be another person who decided to stop reading my comment before reaching the last paragraph.
its only 3 sentences long, so i cant really condense it much more, but here is a copy/paste from another comment i made that is formatted extremely clearly for my two points:
"[...] sometimes users want something. that something might be a feature request, or it might be a feature removal. [...]
a) ignoring your users requests can sometimes be a bad choice.
b) you might not necessarily understand every underlying problem that every user has. worse, you might think you understand the problem when you dont."
"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.
Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)
It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.
Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of confusing the existing user base. Not good
For OSS it’s more psychological: admitting you’re feature complete is cutting off the dopamine hit of building new things.
Companies wrote software and sold them in boxes. You paid once and it was yours forever. You got exactly what was in the box, no more and no less.
The company then shipped a new verson in a different box 1-3 years later. If you liked it enough, and wanted the new features, you bought the new box.
The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on new OS versions or devices.
However, SaaS has the potential to "freeze" features while remaining functional 20+ years down the road. Behind the scenes, developers can update server dependencies and push minor fixes to ensure compatibility with new browsers and screen sizes.
From the end-user's perspective, the product remains unchanged and reliable. To me, that’s very good!
In the old days there was no expection when and if users would upgrade anything, so vendors had to take extra care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business. People in a single office could be running 6 different versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be viewable and editable on all of them. A company could decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure that newer versions would work on an older OS.
Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or the app won't work". Don't want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come with the newest version of the software? Too bad.
Even Windows is doing it now with CUs, bundling feature & vulnerability patches together, then deprecating the last version. You don't have a choice anymore, it's "accept the features or else"
Before 10/26 I have to re-work my desk position manual and a deposit sheet which use Publisher and which MS Word is _not_ suited for. Probably will do them in LyX or LaTeX.
We have great emulators and virtual machines these days. As long as something runs offline and isn't doing anything weird you can just install it once and keep using it and it will never break.
I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my camera maybe once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of R6 mk II that I'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years.
Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete for me for a very, very long time. For about the price of 1/year subscription, I could have purchased a fixed version of Lightroom with support for my camera and not had to buy it again for another 10 years.
We are getting milked for every nickle and dime for no reason other than shareholder value.
It actually discourages real improvements. Before the subscription model, if Adobe wanted to sell me another copy of Lightroom they had to work really hard to make useful features that people actually wanted, enough to the point they'd buy thew version.
Now, they don't have to. You have to keep paying no matter what they decide to do.
That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion. It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.
I was one of those people that disliked switching to subscription. I stayed on CS6 for years. I'm also only a relatively casual user though. I once tried Affinity Photo for some work. Their workflow, for my needs, would have made me take ~6hrs more time than the similar workflow in Photoshop. So I paid the $120 a year for photoshop/lightroom because $120 is way less than 6hrs of my life. If of course that was my specific case. It might not be true for others. The point was though, $120, at least for me, is not that much money relative to what I charge/get-paid. So I gave in.
Further, Photoshop is a good example (to me) of software that can't stop updating. New formats come out HEIC for example. New cameras with new raw formats come out. New tech comes out. HDR displays are ubiquitous at this point (all apple products, some large percent of Android, PC, and TVs) (which BTW, Photoshop does not yet truly support so expect an upgrade).
So? Anecdotally, the vast majority of Adobe product users are still upset about the subscription model (but not upset enough to switch to worse software)
> It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.
Illustrator-filmmaker-animator-publisher-photographer-web-designers everywhere rejoice!
The subscription model irks me because it's a bit overpriced and they keep trying to shove subscription features on us. No, I don't, and will never care about ridiculously overpriced cloud storage nor generative AI tools. How about adobe fixes issues in the core product first? If given the choice, I would definitely choose a pay-once, no-upgrades licence. But adobe saw their opportunity and started squeezing us for more on a product that was fine.
The plus side of this is it's motivated me to consider building my own photo editing software.
What about it ended up not working out for you?
There was no real backlash against Adobe. They added subscriptions and grew revenue. Some people grumbled online, but they paid, which means they don’t like the old model, they like the new one.
But people hated that. They considered it “unmaintained”. They moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more “actively maintained”.
Absolutely not the case with enterprise software. Zawinski's law is truer than ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602
I’ll pick on AppZapper here. It doesn’t need to do much, it’s a Mac app that finds the files related to an application and deletes them, for a complete uninstall. It released in 2006, with v2 coming out in 2010. The website looks like it’s still from that era and the last update was in 2020, almost 6 years ago. To be fair, it’s a cool app, from the “delicious” design era. It makes a ray gun “zap” sound as it uninstalls an apps, for no reason other than to be fun. It’s great.
Is it still in active maintenance with nothing to do, and there have been no meaningful changes in how apps are installed in the last 6 years, or has it been abandoned? I really don’t know. If I’m a new user trying to decide if I should pay $20 for this app, what do I do?
I don’t want updates for updates sake, as that leads to enshitification, but there needs to be some sign that a user isn’t throwing money at a dead product. Or in the ls example, developing a workflow around a dead tool.
A ran into a similar question with Yojimbo. It also launched in 2006. When v2 came out it was a paid upgrade and seemed fairly minor for how much was being charged (at least to a broke college student). It felt like they didn’t really care about it. But here we are 20 years later and it still seems to be going. But it was 14 years between v2 and v3, and the last release was in 2023. With 14 years of support, maybe that v2 would have been a worthwhile upgrade for me in hindsight, but when they go years without an update, I start to question if I should be looking to something with more support. Should a new user buy and invest time in putting their data into something that hasn’t been updated in 3 years, or is that a red flag?
These are the things I struggle with.
If it’s something that will become critical to a user’s workflow, that can be a big problem. Why invest in an app without a future?
You've honed right in on what's changed since the old days: Platform vendors (such as Apple) now continuously inject instability into everything.
You might argue that developments such as "changing processor architectures" justify such breaks from stability (though I myself have qualms with one of the richest companies in the world having a general policy of "cutting support and moving on"). But I would point out that Apple (and other vendors) create instability far beyond such potentially-justifiable examples.
To me, it appears as if Apple actively works to foster this modern "software is never finished" culture. This is seen perhaps most clearly by they way they remove apps from their iOS store if they haven't been updated recently (even as little as 2 years!): https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/04/27/apple-older-gam...
Shouldn't we be demanding stability from our platforms? Isn't the concept of "finished software" a beautiful one? Imagine if you could write a useful program once, leave it alone for 40 years, and then come back to it, and find that it's still just as useful. Isn't this one of the most valuable potential benefits of software as a premise? Are the things we're trading this for worth it?
I keep looking for more useful DOS applications. Have had a git repo for 15+ years that has my config and virtual C:. Once something is installed it will just keep working and I sync that repo to all my machines so it have the exact same things running with the exact same versions. Binaries from 40 years ago still run fine. Just wish more modern applications supported it.
I also have QEMU installations of some Windows versions and old Debian versions (I like Debian 3.0, since the entire library of packages fits neatly on a single DVD ISO... that was the last release that small). Those are also useful for having stable platforms to run offline applications on without having to be bothered by upgrades.
The only problem is he never updated it to roll forward to future iOS version/iPhone models and it hasn't been usable for years (and years).
This made me search it up - the world moves so fast it's difficult to find any information on it whatsoever.
> Dropbox were perfect in 2012
You mean that dumb app that forced you to move files into a single folder instead of adapting to your workflow was prefect?
Yeah, no, we shouldn't normalize that, we should push for improvements
> You mean that dumb app that forced you to move files into a single folder instead of adapting to your workflow was prefect?
Users in 2012 were overwhelmingly of the cohort who's metaphor for doing work on a computer was the filesystem. You opened Files with Programs, worked on them, saved them. You wanted your latest Files on all your computers (1), and you wanted to Share them (2).
Unless users were on a system managed by a sysadmin there were only really two solutions for problems (1)&(2): you would Email the File (A), or you would copy it to a Floppy/CD/USB (B) and physically move it.
Note the caveat of "in absence of a sysadmin". So either on a school or corporate work environment, or if you happened to have a geek in your family/social group who did it as a passion project. Or y'know, if _you_ were the geek you could roll your own.
So of course when Dropbox was first introduced to a technical audience they didn't get it. See the infamous thread ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
While you're there, note the tag line in the title of the post "Throw away your USB key"
Now rereading your comment it is clearly an example of exactly what OP was referring to:
> It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.
If Dropbox did not "adapt to your workflow", then just _don't use Dropbox_.
Instead you attack it as "dumb" and demand it change...and those users for whom Dropbox _was_ perfectly adapted don't have their solution anymore.
Software doesn't have to be forever changing and chasing user growth; it's not a zero-sum game. The bits don't care if no one uses them. But _people_ care if you take away their bits.
> ...we shouldn't normalize that, we should push for improvements
Agreed, you should create a new solution and put it out there! Just as suggested by the post you've replied to :)
So when I first started dealing with the actual code, it scared me that the standard json library was basically in maintenance mode for some years back then. The standard unit test framework and lot of other key pieces too.
I interpreted that as “Java is dying”. But 6 years later I understand: they were are feature complete. And fast as hell, and god knows how many corner cases covered. They were in problem-solved, 1-in-a-billion-edge-cases-covered feature complete state.
Not abandoned or neglected, patches are incorpored in days or hours. Just… stable.
All is quiet now, they are used by millions, but remain stable. Not perfect, but their defects dependable by many. Their known bugs now features.
But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript.
There must be something inherently human about changing and rewriting things.
There is indeed change in the Java ecosystem, but people just choose another name and move on. JUnit, the battle tested unit testing framework, had a lot to learn from new ways of doing, like pytest. Instead of perturbing the stableness, they just choose another name, JUnit5 and moved on.
Hell, the main feature I needed (bulk CAS get) didn't even require the meta protocol or recent memcached features - spymemcached just never bothered to implement it. I ended up abandoning the change I was working on, because the upstream never looked at my PR and it wasn't worth forking over (bigco bureaucracy etc).
There are also quite a few legitimate bugs open for years that haven't had so much as a comment from maintainers.
I think that people are just afraid that if they use a library in maintenance, they will run into a bug and it'll never get fixed. So they figure it's safer to adopt something undergoing further development, because then if there are issues they will get fixed. And of course, some people have to deal with compliance requirements which force them to only use software which is still updated.
I think people are mostly just cargo culting tbh.
The reality is that it was just a small piece in a larger ideal build chain. So for the past 10+ years, we've seen an explosion of more complete build tools that do everything.
Browserify now sits there "finished" and receiving bugfixes. Nobody uses it anymore, even if it popularized npm for the frontend.
I do not understand.
I have a very capable colleague/friend who uses nano. Unix hacker type, so I think it is what he is used to from growing up. I still find it strange, but such is the nature of preference.
Vim is very powerful, but also very unfriendly.
The difference in effort required to pick up Nano vs Vim is HUGE
(jokes aside, if I had a choice I'd use vim/neovim, but when I ssh into a remote system that has minimal installs, vi it is)
The amount of hacking required to even be allowed to re-associate text files with that particular exe on Win11 was shocking to me. I get that windows is extremely hostile to its users as a general policy, but this one felt extra special.
It’s a strong bad example, i.e. an example of software with doesn’t know when to stop.
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/01/21/notepad...
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
Only 15 years later - now a couple of years back - I started to realize the importance of this. The apps on my smartphones seemed to get slower and slower by the year. The fast software experiences were a real joy amidst slow apps. I now have an appreciation for their opinion on 'evergreen' things like the speed of software.
But also, most of the modern software is in what I call "eternal beta". The assumption that your users always have an internet connection creates a perverse incentive structure where "you can always ship an update", and in most cases there's one singular stream of updates so new features (that no one asked for btw) and bug fixes can't be decoupled. In case of web services like YouTube you don't get to choose the version you use at all.
For me, the turning point for Obsidian was their Canvas feature. That was a big move beyond the initial design of it being an excellent editor for a directory or markdown files that supported links and all the other cool things you can do with a basic directory of files and a few conventions. Nothing proprietary, nothing much beyond the directory of files aside from a preferences store. IMHO, Canvas and beyond should have been a new product.
If Obsidian was open source I would have been tempted to fork it at that point.
Your accountant was calling you at late hours asking you what the hell was going on with your note taking expenses?
We should have a system where we continue paying for software that we keep using even if it doesn't change, but that's never going to happen, we will start wondering how we will replace it and cut costs.
The result: very few features. Which is exactly what I want.
There are great exceptions to this rule, even in paid software, where the authors are significantly poorer in exchange for producing better software. I imagine the authors of BeyondCompare or Magnet (for example) could have done a lot better financially for a while using a recurring license model.
There are also really stupid applications of this rule, such as what has happened with AutoMapper and MediatR in the last year or so, where the only meaningful commits since going commercial are the bits that check your license and try to fool you into paying :/
It seems like this shouldn't be a problem. It often only takes one developer willing to make a sacrifice to make a particular class of software available that actually attempts to solve the problem and nothing more. But in reality what we see is over time those developers that did make a stand start to look out for themselves (which I have no problem with) and try to take what they can while they have market share.
How do we find a way to live in a world where developers can build useful things and be rewarded for it while also preventing every piece of software from turning into shit? I'm not sure what the answer is.
Of course, any AI smart enough to apocalypse us would also know about these.
Software’s constraints are not arbitrary, they are attached to specific use cases and any new feature that benefits any of those use cases should be considered.
The real issue is when these companies (especially VC backed) add new features and BS that no user has ever asked for. Features that exclusively benefit the company’s bottom line or support some quiet pivot to a new audience leaving everyone else to the curb.
On a third-party that changes. Making software for a specific hardware like a game console or a specific e-reader may still technically rely on a third-party but doesn’t carry the same risk and you can definitely say you’re done.
Specifically he rolled out a "cave" system with procedural dungeon generation where players could mine through walls and other advanced systems, then undid all of it and ended with ~30 static layouts and very simplistic interactions. The entire game feels like a demonstration that simple, predictable and repeatable interactions with software have more longevity than cutting edge dynamic systems.
> It predicts which ones you meant.
> It ranks them.
> It understands you.
This is so good I want to know whether someone generated this or wrote it by hand.
It grows and grows and eventually slows or grows too much and dies (cancer), but kinda sheds its top-heavy structure as its regrown anew from the best parts that survived the balanced cancer of growth?
Just forks and forks and restarts. It's not the individual piece of softwares job (or its community's) to manage growing in the larger sense, just to eventually leave and pass on its best parts to the next thing
is to begin naming;
when names proliferate
it’s time to stop.
If you know when to stop
you’re in no danger."
It is "their" distribution, to do with as they wish. If this would happen to your workstation, you are a fool, for not following release notes.
I already jumped distros for several reasons, marketing BS was one of them. I do not need latest scam or flag of the month!
When chatGPT first gained traction I imagined a future where I'm writing code using an agent, but spending most of my time trying to convince it that the code I want to write is indeed moral and not doing anything that's forbidden by it's creators.
Even `ls` gets news flags from time to time.
I think "stopping" is great for software that people want to be stable (like `ls`) but lots of software (web frameworks, SaaS) people start using specifically because they want a stream of updates and they want their software to get better over time.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.htm...
ls: usage: ls [-@ABCFGHILOPRSTUWXabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy1%,] [--color=when] [-D format] [file ...]
I don't think it knew when to stop.
"Writers like having residences."
The backstory is they hire two writers-in-residence, who keep making more work and excuses for more work for themselves... so they can continue having a residence.
The same is true for writers of code, it turns out. So we bit twiddlers sometimes gin up excuses to change things, so we have an excuse to be employed and having a residence.
How many times I've heard that...
Good software is made by individual people, nonprofits, or privately-owned entities.
Not getting paid is less good.
Which is great because it means whenever I can I should go with the underdogs and SMBs.
So does robbing a bank. But it’s far from the only option. Plenty of indie developers thrive without any VC funding, and I thank every one of them for it. VC funding is essentially a guarantee that if the software isn’t shit now, it’ll be in the future, and that the creators care more about the money than doing something good. Case in point, the deterioration of 1Password.
> Say no by default — every feature has a hidden cost: complexity, maintenance, edge cases
AI-assisted development is blowing up this long-standing axiom in the software development world, and I am afraid it's a terrible thing.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
Of course it is important to do stuff that doesn’t make money.
But if your goal is to make money you need software that people will pay for and people will use 20% of features but each one person will use different 20% of the features.
Money printer go brrrr.
The generative part of the AI hype is getting in the way.
But the decision has been made. And if AI remains in databases after the AI hype, the next generation of developers will no longer know databases without AI. That's why I said it will become the norm. But that's just my guess. Unfortunately, I can't see the future. I don't know what it will actually be like in a few years.
I skimmed the video and the presenters said "Oracle AI Database 26ai" multiple times without even a glint of self awareness on their face. They must've picked the only people on the team that could say that without laughing.
a lot of times people with "we MUST have features XYZ to buy" and then when they actually get set up you see they use only 50% or less of the features. was it useless to build them? they wouldn't even consider you in the first place if you didn't tick the boxes for some higher up decision maker.
probably applies more to people who are already bought in. you have that "luxury" at that point, buy in, cost to switch, etc.
agree with this point. new developers should care about this.
I will say the music discovery on Apple Music is lousy compared to Spotify, but oh well.
> expertise on some other subjects. See also Musk
what expertise?
If anyone's curious about what the (informal to date, probably soon to be formalized) rules are, we don't allow either generated comments [1] or AI-edited comments [2] on HN. We want commenters to write in their own voice.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Yeah...