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Comment by denkmoon | Hacker News Reader

To what end? Pleasing a few nerds? Nerds that are just as likely to have ripped out the OTA modem or not be using a car like that.

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What you really mean is that there is very low value to the company in appeasing this minor vocal audience. What you forget is that you are posting on a message board to an overlapping audience.

> To what end? Pleasing a few nerds?

It's the nerds that the non-nerds/normies go to for advice on tech-y things. If you can generally make the nerds happy, and earn a good reputation among them, you'll have a customer base from which to expand from.

Or as Tim O'Reilly recommended back in the day, "Watching the Alpha Geeks":

* https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/081119-stanfo...

* https://web.archive.org/web/20130000000000*/http://origin.co...

* https://www.oreilly.com/tim/archives/apple_wwdc2002.pdf

We used to just do things because it was the right thing to do, or out of pride for what we were making, or sometimes just to be better than the other guy.

That everything has to be about profit is a lot of what's wrong these days. And yes, bitching about this on a YC-owned forum is just as silly as bitching about nerds here, I'm aware.

To the end that they exist at all.

One of the biggest organizational anti-patterns of the modern SaaS world is the move away from release notes.

It's a question of whether a company has a competent enough change control process to be able to generate a list of changes for a given release.

If a tech product company can't meet the low bar of documenting its changes, then it probably shouldn't be trusted?

Release notes aren't for end users in the same way that the wiring diagram taped to the back of your appliances isn't for end users.

They're for experts to either directly use... or to communicate in simpler language to end users.

You mean a few customers? Yes, I think that’s perfectly reasonable to expect that changes made to a very expensive product are well-documented for those customers to whom that matters.

Post them by the coffee machine in the dealership waiting room.

Why would they read the updates then?

It is genuinely lost on me why tech nerds specifically have a hard time grasping the idea that they are not the only people that matter. That sometimes, someone will know that something will upset computer nerds, and will still do the thing, because they see it as worth it overall.

Like spoilt children. I genuinely don’t know if it’s the decades of SV pandering or what.

MOST OF THE TIME, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU. And they’re probably right not to.

This is a pretty dumb response, not only because the idea that knowledgeable people matter ≠ knowledgeable people are the "only people that matter," but also because the alternative that you're crowing about is that nobody matters (other than you, the person selling the thing.) You're accusing people of being narcissistic for wanting any information, and bragging about only being guided by your own desires. It's really a moral toilet.

The "tech nerds" is a bullshit term for "people with the background to understand the explanation." If you're not explaining it to them, you're not explaining it to anyone. You're just subjecting everyone to your whims, and really should be regulated into the unemployment line.

You seem to be missing the underlying reason(s) why tech nerds are, well, tech nerds. 0dd to be angry about tech nerds being tech nerdy about things.

In a forum for tech nerds, of all places.

Instead of picturing spoiled children, who are mad about something that doesn't matter, like spilled ice cream, instead consider civil rights movements, for the modern era. The point is to make people care about something that will affect them, sooner or later. Like the right to repair. Nerdy at, until farmers got involved, and there are specific monetary issues involved. Most of the time, people don't care, but people are going to care if farmers don't do their job and there's no food.

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