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Comment by Hasz | Hacker News Reader

Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

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"Commercial" implies to extract the most out of every potential customer. That's a direct logical contradiction to "serving the customer's wishes in every way".

In other words, there can't be any commercial incentives that "align" with providing a perfect user experience.

The weird thing in my opinion: why is open source software such a pain to use? They don't have commercial interests?

>"Commercial" implies to extract the most out of every potential customer

Disagree, this is an unreasonable framing. We just need to exchange goods/services for money, not optimize every transaction on a curve by some measure of "extract everything"

There are many incentives apart from $ -- general fame, specific, niche credibility, love of the thing, internal projects (eg a phd/masters/capstone project), etc. Looking at everything from a $-incentive only will lead you to actions and incentives that don't make any sense. Look at the linux kernel or something like sqlite -- more deployed than almost any piece of "commercial" closed-source software, huge community, signifigant resources, but tiny, tiny slice of revenue by any metric of popularity.

It really does seem that every business is out to squeeze the living daylights out of you.

No one(execs, middle management, shareholders) is happy to earn a decent(10-20%) profit anymore and call it a day.

Every last drop needs to be wrung out of the customer or the employee or the citizen in the case of government.

That's not an unreasonable "framing", it's an unreasonable expectation to believe a "market" to optimize for the interests of those exploited for profit.

In other words, you want the market to restrain itself, which of course never works.

You then observe people to have other motivations beyond greed. Yes! I emphatically agree. Only, those aren't subject to market logic other than being potential subjects of exploitation.

I think it's evident that the biggest flaw of capitalism is the focus on profit. Many corporations have started to see why social responsibility is a moral duty of companies, even Google did that at the beginning, with the "Don't be evil" motto, but it is still largely optional.

It's also evident that, as companies grow older and/or founders retire, they become abstracted from their investors/shareholders into money-making machines, and those will not accept a lesser return in exchange for societal good. Social responsibility should be baked into law, so companies don't have duty to their shareholders (AKA profit) as their maximum legal priority.

I don't think It'll happen in our lifetimes, but if humanity has any hope to last more centuries, it needs to seek what's beyond capitalism, hopefully before global warming forces our hand.

> The weird thing in my opinion: why is open source software such a pain to use? They don't have commercial interests?

My guess is its a combination of 1) lack of resources and 2) being developed for the developers themselves (who are weird users).

Most of the best open source software (e.g. Linux) is that way because commercial interests have incentive to pour some of their vast resources into it (and if copyright was ever abolished, expect it to start sucking, because the main reason we get to seee the commercially-funded improvements is the genius of the GPL).

All of that, and more broadly because FOSS developers are horrible about accepting advice or feedback from non-engineers, like designers or "normie" users. (Naturally speaking in broad terms, here; I'm sure some are great.) I can think of three or four (otherwise excellent projects) I've used where a "please put that CLI-only utility everyone uses all the time into the GUI" PR or Issue gets repeatedly closed. Or where making the rudimentary GUI look just a bit nicer would attract an order of magnitude more users. I think some developers really don't want to make things for non-developers. I get that, to a certain extent - support gets way, way harder, for instance - but then there really isn't much ground for complaining about FOSS's limited reach.

You're certainly right about 1), but why 2) needs to be the end of things, I don't know.

Clearly, open source software with a good interface becomes more popular. I suspect, being popular isn't really a good experience for the developer, who then gets inundated with unreasonable requests etc.

Why bother abolishing something that is obsolete?

Even the GPL isn't needed anymore when you can trivially reverse engineer nearly anything.

2 often translates practically to "designed by a committee", which surprise: isn't always very good or usable.

Probably true, but why do they have to organize themselves in such amateurish ways? There is nothing stopping open source developers on a project from organizing themselves in a professional, effective manner?

When they put their individual egos above the actual outcome of their efforts, well, that's a programmed disaster of course.

I mean, I don't think they have to or anything. I imagine what is stopping them is more inertia, how they've traditionally organized themselves, and so on. It's the same thing IMO that prevents big companies from building products that find clients down market. Claiming you want to do it, and having an organization which _can_ do it are different things.

I love Home Assistant for all of the reasons you list but I wouldn't say it "just works". It's the kind of thing that requires a lot of research and tinkering to get right. AI does actually help a lot here though, if you tell your agent "setup the new smart lightbulbs I just bought in Home Assistant and add them to my Living Room area", it just does it.

I hate homeassistant. Used it for years, on and off. Currently I have it running on a rpi somewhere, I dont know how to access it, I don't want to get dependent on it and have it break when the card dies or a bad update happens. I hate home automation.

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