The rise of user-hostile software

https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/

by dend • 5 years ago

456 254 5 years ago

nicbou• 5 years ago

With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses.

I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services), but surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience?

This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to last long.

southerntofu• 5 years ago

I can understand that monetisation and user well-being can be at odds sometimes (e.g. with free apps and services)

This is also the case in paid services, who are not known to be more user/privacy-friendly.

This is why I tend to buy things that use generic, open standards. I don't trust something that needs an app to work to last long.

Same here. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly harder! Fortunately the second-hand market is inundated with hardware that has proved its reliability thus far... I feel definitely more at risk when i have to buy new hardware.

TeMPOraL9• 5 years ago

surely a generic hardware manufacturer wants to ensure a generic experience?

What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer.

Quite a lot of those user-hostile choices - custom apps, SaaS-ification, focus on collaboration features - are attempts to prevent the product from being a commodity.

For example, I can replace my current washing machine with any other model of any other brand. Independently, I can use any brand of detergent with my machine. Both the machine and the detergent are commodity products. They mostly compete on price and marketing bullshit, which offers very limited margins. Modern tech companies desperately want to avoid being in this situation.

The most common - but by far not the only - approach of ensuring you can't be easily commoditized is through network effects. Not just "I can't switch from Facebook to Diaspora because all my friends are on Facebook", but also the weaker forms: "I can't stop using Teams because everyone at work uses Teams, and we can't switch because of SharePoint integration - which also incidentally means we have to use MS Office and Windows". Or, "I can't stop using Google Docs because a bunch of non-techies I have to deal with don't know how to (or don't want to) use anything else".

This is why companies fight interoperability[0] tooth and nail - breaking lock-in for users threatens breaking the weak network effects they need.

[0] - Except "API interoperability", which isn't really proper interoperability for users, as it's governed by business contracts between API providers and API consumers.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

What they want, first and foremost, is to not be a generic hardware manufacturer.

Every once in a while I day dream about starting a company[0] called something like "Generic Products" where all we do is make the most basic bog-standard things with no extra garbage or marketing bullshit, striving to have as few different models as possible. Amazon basics and https://xkcd.com/993/ are similar ideas.

[0] Never let me start a company, I am not suited for this job.

gumby2• 5 years ago

Or, "I can't stop using Google Docs because a bunch of non-techies I have to deal with don't know how to (or don't want to) use anything else".

Interesting example. I’ve worked with two organizations this year (one large, one small), both of whom happily use gmail, google docs etc. In both cases people expressed surprise that my address wasn’t gmail.com, that on a screen share my search was different etc.

Some of these people expressed concerns about privacy but clearly had no understanding of how pervasive the spy infrastructure is. And why should they? Their expertise lay in other domains.

The private sector has a lot to answer for and an government-driven response (driven by a combination of experts, ignorami, and grandstanders) will be their own fault.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Which is better, to be a commodity, or to be a not-commodity but the thing that makes you not a commodity is a thing that nobody actually wants?

mosselman2• 5 years ago

I hate my brother printer. Now I have to do some weird black magic that involves pulling out the power cable and paper tray and inserting the cable while holding some buttons in order for it to even turn on.

A year earlier it suddenly stopped being able to print wirelessly and, as with all cartridge printers, the ink is crazy expensive.

A month ago I bought an HP printer with an ink reservoir for my mother and it is great. You don't need apps to print and printing costs nothing compared to traditional printing. It comes with ink for about 10k pages and new ink costs around 10 euros.

The best in class for ink-tank printers are supposedly Epson and instead of buying new ink for my own printer, I'll probably just buy one of those.

Aeolun• 5 years ago

Or just buy a laser printer and never have the issue again?

plemer• 5 years ago

I am sorry you’ve had that experience.

My Brother has been running perfectly for years. Use cheap generic toner. It just works.

wolrah2• 5 years ago

When people talk about good reliable Brother printers they're always talking about their cheap laser line.

Inkjet printers exist in two forms: Quality photo printers and complete garbage.

They are not for documents or other normal printing, that's what laser printers are for. Your primary printer should not be an inkjet unless you only ever print color photos.

FranksTV• 5 years ago

Printer companies make money band over fist. It's a razors-and-blades recurring revenue model.

tonyedgecombe2• 5 years ago

I suspect one printer company is making money hand over fist. The rest look pretty sickly to me. They are all desperately trying to shift to services in an attempt to shore up their profits.

II2II2• 5 years ago

With all the praise Brother laser printers get for being just a damn printer, I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses.

Why does a company need an end game? That implies there are winners and losers, with the winner taking all. Shouldn't we be striving for a more diverse business environment, where there is credible competition to help keep the actions of businesses in check? Wouldn't this be a healthier environment for businesses as well, since they could focus upon long term sustainability?

burnished• 5 years ago

Well, two thoughts. 1) long term sustainability matters more to stakeholders than it does to shareholders 2) you need an endgame because its compete or get out-competed, so a company that had better, more consumer focused practices holistically might close after a rough patch, leaving more competitively fit companies behind.

Tragedy of the commons. Its why we need government that isn't business controlled, to care for the common good and help steer against problems where local incentives drive everyone to a stable but sort of terrible state.

lasereyes136• 5 years ago

I wonder what the end game is for some of those businesses.

The end game is often an annual bonus for a decision maker at the business that doesn't think they will be there in 2 years when there might be fallout. The incentive is short term gain for me, I wouldn't be here in the long run so whey should I care about the long run.

mikro2nd• 5 years ago

I do think the flowchart needs one more diamond (if-statement): Between "Would any user benefit from this?" and "Build it" there's another state. "Would other users be harmed/disadvantaged by this?" (and draw the obvious lines out of that...)

foxfluff• 5 years ago

"Would some users benefit from it?"

-> build it and allow them to opt in if they like it.

AshamedCaptain3• 5 years ago

Aaand if you follow the steps on the flow chart, your product will immediately be dead, forgotten; replaced by some competitor's product who, while being likely technically inferior to your product, did not hesitate to do all these types of shady things in order to gain that bit of extra market share.

"Natural selection" at work. Sad, of course.

JimDabell• 5 years ago

Almost all of the examples listed are in relation to hardware. As far as I can see, hardware vendors see software as a cost centre and at best don’t care about quality and more often than not try to make up for the cost by bundling crapware with the drivers.

General purpose application software is leagues beyond the crap that hardware vendors pull off.

can16358p• 5 years ago

Well, I'd want to see it only be hardware but sadly it's also common in software-only too: Adobe applications being extremely slow/inefficient/buggy (not even mentioning the creative cloud app which insists on working in BG even if no Adobe apps are open), want a monthly fee, or Microsoft bloating its own OSes UI with ad of its own services are just a few examples.

TeMPOraL9• 5 years ago

Agreed on all points.

Interesting to see this:

You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar.

What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole software category was called by various pejorative names - "adware", "spyware", "malware". There was a whole ecosystem of tools and tricks to get rid of them, as well as preventing them from being installed in the first place.

Something weird happened over the past decade. We find ourselves in times where most mainstream software from renowned companies should be, by the standards of the toolbar era, classified as malware.

zksmk• 5 years ago

Something weird happened over the past decade.

I blame it on social media monopolies, or at least effective monopolies, oligopolies, and the network effect. Once everyone was sucked into these silos and unable to leave they could do whatever they wanted with the user experience without repercussions. And once everyone was used to it and took it as a given it was only a matter of time before it leaked even into desktop apps or even Windows, and people just accepted it. What I think could reverse the user hostility trend would be competition which would require breaking the oligopolies/network effect which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible. And of course there are limits to how far they can degrade the user experience without starting to lose users so I don't think it can be a lot worse than now, but still we're stuck with the status quo.

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

I blame it on web development, pure and simple. The relentless drive for analytics and advertising is what brought the acceptance of spying.

zelon88• 5 years ago

which means the rise of Linux desktop or Fediverse platforms, and that's gonna be a while, but not impossible.

I like to hope you're right, but I don't believe you are.

Most people don't want to learn more about tech. They just want tech to be intuitive enough to pick up and use.

The mobile market appeared because Windows is too big and cumbersome. That's why people advertised it as a skill on their resume. It isn't fun. Windows is a chore to most people.

Nobody puts "experienced Android user" on their resume because it is expected that just by being alive you should be capable of using every function of an Android device. Very little functionality is abstracted away into 20 year old UI's or shell commands. There is a button for everything, and the button makes sense.

So if Windows didn't stand a chance, there is absolutely zero chance Linux will catch on at the scale it needs to for your post to come true.

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

Precisely. The fact that most software these days can be called "spyware" and "adware" is very unsettling from the perspective of someone who got into computing at around the time of Windows 98.

api3• 5 years ago

Something weird happened over the past decade.

I blame free (as in beer).

If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible.

It’s hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I have a rule that “every step required to adopt something halves the adoption rate.”

Greed for both lightning growth and profitability tends to put conventional economic models off the table.

mschuster914• 5 years ago

If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

For a piece of hardware I buy at a store I'd expect that the price I paid for it is sufficient to not require further monetization - mandatory cloud services (e.g. a web-available surveillance camera) excepted.

Anyway, there is another cause: continuous backward-compatibility breaks from OSes. Windows is ... relatively decent in that the only things that really broke drivers over the last decades were the shift in GPU driver architecture that came with Vista (IIRC) and the shift to 64-bit that began with Windows 7. The only change that busted old games was with Windows 8 and the DirectDraw removal, but other than that you don't need to do any maintenance for Windows drivers and software if you don't have new features.

Keeping software working on macOS or on Linux is a real pain in the butt, in contrast - Apple changes stuff around every minor release, and maintaining any support for Linux is just as a massive effort.

Kernel drivers pretty much have no choice but upstreaming (which is a hassle in itself when you have proprietary blobs/IP), and userspace stuff suffers from fragmentation (x11 vs wayland, flatpak vs deb vs rpm vs self-build/gentoo, systemd vs sysv, kde vs gnome vs ...).

And the worst of all to maintain anything for is Android, where an insane level of fragmentation collides with even more binary blobs, devices that are widespread in usage but haven't seen an upgrade for years if ever, shoddy (or none...) QA and preloaded crap from manufacturers and carriers.

abecedarius• 5 years ago

Worth noting that 'crypto' creates an opening for new ways to fund open-source development. Let's try not strangling that in its crib? We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto, and if the older funding models were going to take free software beyond the niches it's found, we'd see that by now.

commandlinefan3• 5 years ago

If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

Somebody had to say it out loud...

rixed• 5 years ago

If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

If you can't sell software and have to monetize it somehow, sure you can steal user data. But you can also steal user data even if you sell the software, as has been demonstrated many times.

Only authors who have no intend to monetize the software could really be trusted.

nottorp• 5 years ago

If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

What do you mean, can't sell software? Lately you can't BUY software. Everything is either free or subscription based. And they sell your data even if you pay for a subscription.

hnick• 5 years ago

A similar thing happened in games. I'm old enough to remember horse armour in Oblivion. Ridiculous idea but look where we are now. Not only do most microtransactions cost more, they aren't only in free to play games. They're in full price games and those with monthly subscriptions. And they have enough people arguing that it's a good thing because more money = better game.

I can buy a mount in a game for USD$40... or I could buy another game.

BiteCode_dev2• 5 years ago

Something weird happened over the past decade.

PR happened. The big players have figured out that if they want to keep misbehaving to make money, they needed people to not fight them. To do so, one amazing tool is to make sure the entire way to speak about the topic is controlled by them.

Internet gave us the ability to share more, and we though it would allow us to defend our self better, to make people more aware. But we didn't predict that an entire industry would specialize into creating submarine communication that pretend to be an organic one of such quality that the average human can't tell the difference.

With old school com and ads, you at least knew somebody was trying to sell you crap. Now, you are nicely having a chat in what you think is a community of peers, while being exposed to commercial and political influence that have been crafted to reach you here without raising your BS radar.

And with AI, it's going to get worse.

kortex• 5 years ago

And with AI, it's going to get worse.

Cynical prediction: AI influencers, possibly with a hybrid components. Accounts powered by some GPT-esque generator, acting like a real human, shilling various widgets in a naturalistic way. Use humans-in-the-loop to add randomness and natural-ness. Or just AI extending how much marketers can generate.

And/or microinfluencers. Platforms benefitting (otherwise regular) users in some way to adopt some stance. Oh, you said good things about Brawndo, and our fingerprinting was able to trace your social media to your amazon wishlist, which happens to have Brawndo in it? Free pack of brawndo shipped to you from a "mystery admirer". Post a selfie with a logo prominently, CV bots pic it up, get swag. Gossip quickly spreads that if you say nice things about X, or take pics of Y, you get free swag. Suddenly your feed is full of your friends giving a lot of organic-seeming attention to corporate products. It'll put the Sunoco bumper sticker campaign to shame.

quetzthecoatl• 5 years ago

Politics too. People are far too eager to cede power to these big tech companies just because it will hurt those on the other side of the political spectrum now - without realizing that that power is gone forever. DMCA takedown, demonetization and ad revenue scene, privacy - it's all the same story.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

most mainstream software from renowned companies should be [...] classified as malware.

Most FLOSS has not fallen in this category.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

Exactly. To keep being user-hostile and keep the user base, software needs to satisfy some requisites: being closed or depending on not reproducible proprietary services, or having no better competitors. A user-hostile software that happens to be useful and is open would be forked and cleaned in no time, or users would flee to the competition if there is any. The fact that the most user-hostile applications today live in closed proprietary PC or mobile operating systems, or proprietary services where there is no such thing as either openness or competition, gives an hint on where the problem is.

sneak3• 5 years ago

But even a significant portion of FLOSS can be legitimately called spyware. Firefox, Chromium, Docker (although Docker Desktop is no longer open source), Homebrew, Mattermost, Netdata, Bitwarden - all of these are common, popular FLOSS that embed spyware, oftentimes operating silently (other than a little notice at install time that the authors think constitutes informed consent).

The spyware epidemic is real, and FLOSS is not immune.

michaelcampbell2• 5 years ago

back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes.

Clearly not the case or they wouldn't have been as ubiquitous as they were.

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

Flash came with McAfee. Everyone knew that McAfee is being distributed by assholes, but they needed the assholes' product anyway, so they put up with it. Eventually projects like Ninite were created precisely to install software without all that included junk.

dkarl• 5 years ago

Yeah, I think they fall into the same category as fad diets, MLM schemes, and those cold calls to buy real estate for less than market rate: incredibly popular despite "everybody" knowing better.

slingnow• 5 years ago

They were ubiquitous because your unwitting grandparents wanted into install some simple application and weren't savvy enough to read and uncheck all of the boxes that installed the new Ask Jeeves toolbar.

userbinator• 5 years ago

We find ourselves in times where most mainstream software from renowned companies should be, by the standards of the toolbar era, classified as malware.

It's called Microsoft. Microsoft Windows 10, to be precise.

dasil0032• 5 years ago

The problem is too much money came into tech. Even 10 years ago software companies had only a fraction of today's representation among blue chip companies. Once the industry is recognized as a top place to make money then the wrong sort of people start worming their way in slowly but surely undermining whatever integrity came out of the early engineering culture and values that built the foundation.

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean. Blue chips like IBM and Microsoft were making bank even in the late 90s. Lots of money in tech isn't new.

only_as_i_fall• 5 years ago

I think that it's a shift in trust. 10 years ago people worried about sketchy/annoying software and would avoid software that asked them to refill their printer ink 10 times a month.

These days everyone lives in a walled garden of some kind so there's less chance of sketchy software being outright malicious.

Also I think people are just inured to it. Apps on my android phone that I pay money for still send ads to my notification bar every day. If my desktop starts doing the same that's hardly a large shift.

rout39574• 5 years ago

I don't think there is a sense of "safety" because of walled gardens. I think it is a sense of "learned helplessness". If you keep shocking the rat no matter what they do, eventually they lie down and just hurt.

MrStonedOne• 5 years ago

The smartphone era gave the internet as a whole its Eternal September.

User growth outpaced culture absorption so the tech leaders got to direct the new culture, at least wrt to expectations on companies in the internet.

amelius• 5 years ago

Just watch the movie Idiocracy, and you'll understand where it all comes from.

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

The problem is that since the past decade or so you started being able to get tons of investment money from simply "engaging" users (whatever the fuck that means). This works recursively too - you can create a company that provides services to other companies who "engage" users. Best of all, you don't even have to be profitable or have a long-term business plan (being against your users is not a successful strategy unless you're a monopoly), you can just enjoy the VC money and get you and your mates a nice salary for a few years and then rinse & repeat.

This turns the entire thing upside down. It used to be that you made money by making good tools that users paid money for because they solved their problem - thus the incentives are clear and aligned. But now it's the opposite, you simply waste the user's time and annoy them as much as possible and money just magically appears and the users don't even have a choice because they're not the ones paying for it.

TeMPOraL9• 5 years ago

Agreed.

This works recursively too - you can create a company that provides services to other companies who "engage" users. Best of all, you don't even have to be profitable or have a long-term business plan (...)

A neat flavor of this is what I believe a good chunk of adtech industry is built on. Since these companies are all paragons of virtue, some apply the same honesty to their in-industry customers as they would to end-users. That is, you don't even have to supply your adtech customers with a product or service that works. You only need to supply the perception that it's working. With data-driven cargo cult, it's easy - neither you nor the other side is likely to know what the data means anyway, but as long as the numbers are printed in green, and the line on the chart goes up, everyone is happy and the money keeps flowing.

"engaging" users (whatever the fuck that means)

English is my second language, and I've learned most of it from videogames and TV shows. For many years, I thought "engaging" is the thing that a starship does to another starship with phasers and photon torpedoes. Only later on I learned the ordinary meaning of the word.

xnx• 5 years ago

Like other malware, they learned that it's best to not draw attention to yourself. Viruses don't put a big animation on your screen anymore, they silently enlist your machine in a botnet and steal your account number and credentials. Toolbars (now extensions) don't change your search engine, they silently add affiliate parameters and cookies.

Tagbert• 5 years ago

It’s funny to find a product that you worked on mentioned in HN and being called an asshole by implication. :)

Around 2003(?) I worked for a search company that published that Dogpile toolbar. This was before browsers were doing web search from the url bar and when pop-ups were a big problem. The Dogpile toolbar was intended to bring web search to the browser and to also help cut pop-ups. It also include a news ticker fed by various RSS feeds from news sites. Strangely, the pop-up blocker would bark when it blocked a pop-up. Fortunately you could turn that off and I’m sure most users did right away.

It was not bundled with other software, did not install other software or change browser settings, and was not installed secretly. There was a menu option in the toolbar to uninstall it which removed everything. It didn’t spy on user activity or report anything back to the mothership. I can’t speak to the intent of the publishers of some of those other toolbars, but the Dogpile one was an honest attempt to produce a useful app and to promote our search site.

After the toolbar market became tainted by underhanded techniques we pulled the product, not wanting to be associated with that kind of behavior.

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

Ultimately, a developer's or a company's objective is not to provide good software, but to succeed financially (or in some other metric). This is somewhat aligned with the user's needs - if a user wants a calculator app, it should do arithmetics. But beyond that, The Dev is not a benevolent entity, and users are a means to an end.

It doesn't have to be cynical and exploitative, but when push comes to shove, The Dev will act in their own interest and not that of the users.

Maybe sad, but really that's how everything works. Are energy companies interested in a world with plentiful green energy? No, they want to make money and pay dividends.

kevincox• 5 years ago

Of course there are other motives. For most Free Software the motive is "Make something that is good for me." Still not optimal for other users but closer aligned.

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

Sort of. As much as I like Linux, I don’t use it on my own kit. Linux is made for tinkerers, or people who know it’s internals well. For me Linux is always slightly broken.

I guess that’s because the devs building it don’t care that much about 100% seamless work on all hardware; 95% is good enough. But that remaining 5% means I just can’t use it. By contrast, Mac is a non-free, limited walled garden (prison?), but doesn’t need the trackpad be debugged or kernel recompiled.

So here, libre devs’ work is less aligned with my needs than the commercial operation, whose key selling point is seamless UX. (Not complaining, just saying)

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

This flowchart is true for many things... even webpages:

How many users actually wanted to subrscribe to your newsletter the first time they visited your page, before they even read the first article there?

How many first-time visitors actually want to donate money?

...

quickthrower23• 5 years ago

How many users want to have to have the inconvenience of paying for the software too!

denton-scratch2• 5 years ago

If you want users to pay for your software, put a price on it, and stop pretending it's free. Nagging pop-ups -> Close tab.

thewebcount4• 5 years ago

I do. I would much rather pay than see ads or be required to give up personal information. I can understand that not everyone wants that, but I do. I also have been very disappointed with usability of FOSS to the point that I rarely consider using it anymore. So yeah, I'm happy to pay (once per version I actually use).

city412• 5 years ago

I don't understand this. I visit a site I've never been to before and immediately a popup takes over along these lines. Do those really convert? I can't imagine they do, but they are also everywhere so they must be effective to some degree?

I feel like The Guardian's approach is better, after a while they bring up a banner down at the bottom that says (paraphrased) "hey you've read x articles, we want to stay independent, can you help us?"

thewebcount4• 5 years ago

they are also everywhere so they must be effective to some degree?

I wouldn't assume that. I would bet most people enter a fake email address just to make the thing go away because they don't know you can just close most of them, or don't realize the passive aggressive "No I don't want great deals sent to my inbox every day because I hate great deals" text link is a button they can press to dismiss the dialog because they don't read it and it intentionally doesn't look like a button to discourage users from pressing (or reading) it.

Ekaros4• 5 years ago

Or ask me for feedback. Like I haven't even used your site yet, only feedback I can give is don't ask me for feedback...

quickthrower23• 5 years ago

At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with Google Analytics. Don’t want to send it? Have your browser send a Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work.

How is this consistent with the message to not be hostile?

dend6• 5 years ago

OP here. You have an explicit option to opt out, no gimmicks.

quickthrower23• 5 years ago

Is this default ON designed for the users needs? Or the developers?

pseudalopex• 5 years ago

Few sites respect Do Not Track. Some even use it for tracking. So you force people to opt in to other tracking to opt out of yours.

flyinghamster2• 5 years ago

Hear, hear! My disillusionment with tech is at full boil at this point. It's gotten to the point where I trust tech products about as much as I'd trust a wild chimpanzee.

Unfortunately, one person boycotting hostile tech is like one person trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.

denton-scratch2• 5 years ago

one person boycotting hostile tech

So I don't try to boycott; I assume I'm an outlier, and my choices won't make much difference to the supplier.

I just stay away from stuff I don't like or disapprove of. Of course, I hope that others -ercing the supplier is a path to unhappiness.will share my views, and that the supplier will notice and change; but it doesn't usually seem to happen.

But I'm not upset. I'm just exercising my preferences. Trying to use your preferences as a way of proving a point or coerce the supplier is a path to unhappiness. Exercise your preferences, and be happy that your preferences are satisfied. If your supplier receives a signal, so much the better - but that's the cherry on the cake.

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

I don't boycott, I try to check out whenever I can. I've been running a libre stack on my desktop computer for over a decade.

anovikov2• 5 years ago

Natural selection will quickly weed out everyone who tries to follow the suggested path. Simply due to cost of traffic becoming lower than revenue.

dvdkon• 5 years ago

Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect example of why some things shouldn't be services, just plain old downloadable software.

AshamedCaptain3• 5 years ago

Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally working and probably much more featureful calculator app.

People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in this www query would be able to do hundreds of these simple multiplications _per nanosecond_. But no, people query google.

anovikov2• 5 years ago

By cost of traffic i mean: cost of acquiring users/clients. Nowadays it makes everything which is not a clickbaity, addiction-based scam, pretty much futile. Slowly but surely, Internet becomes a land of sociopaths, no one else gets to make much money.

greatgib• 5 years ago

This article is globally so true, but there is a major error:

It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole".

Like for telemetry, most of the time the business side "can", so they do.

And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain and not like release such user-hostile software but they are forced by business to do it.

Like this stupid project manager that thinks that his product/software is the most important in the world and there is no reason why a random user would not want to install it and also that the user computer belongs to him and to the company because he is using the product, without shame.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole".

Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks.

And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

"Developer" here isn't being used to mean only the people who directly write code. It means the entire organization responsible for developing the product, which includes the managers, marketing, and executives. As in Microsoft the company is the developer of Windows, and Windows is made in such a way as to prioritize the needs of Microsoft over the needs of Windows users. They're not prioritizing the needs of any specific employee or category of employees. All stakeholder groups on the producer side may or may not be fighting for their own specific interests, but collectively producer-side stakeholder groups are given way more of a say than consumer-side, because the consumer-side only has the purchase as their tool to influence product decisions, and thanks to various forms of lock-in and information asymmetry, they can't or won't make informed purchasing choices that force Microsoft to care about them.

lutorm• 5 years ago

Isn't it sort of obvious that practically every product developed for profit is done for the benefit of the organization doing it?

"The needs of the user" is just one factor for satisfying the primary incentive, which is making money. The needs of the user needs to be met to the point that they are willing to pay money for it, anything more you're not maximizing your profit. I mean, why would you expect anything to be different.

I primarily blame the users. They're the ones who accept this shit and still give their money. If they don't want user-hostile software, they shouldn't use it. If people refused to pay for it, things would change. And yeah, that might come with some sacrifices.

tlarkworthy• 5 years ago

OMG the pointless telemetry. I got asked to install some on a project I took over. I checked, and said "there is already telemetry integrated for account XYZ". Nobody knew who had access to XYZ. Like, they install it, and lose it. Its not even fulfilling a useful purpose.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

And again, for specific app and co, most developer would complain and not like release such user-hostile software but they are forced by business to do it

For every dark pattern, invasive analytics package, adware, malware, spyware that gets added to a product, there is an actual software developer sitting in a chair, voluntarily adding it. Maybe someone here on HN, reading this very thread! Nobody is putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to do it. I've quit jobs in the past where I was asked to work on something I considered unethical. Developers have options. The job market is evidently still going gangbusters now, so who can really say they are "forced" to develop anything?

It's so strange: On one hand, people keep saying developers have tremendous leverage, and high market value, and are being sought after, and then one thread later, developers are powerless victims, having to do the will of their evil "project managers". Which one is it?

jclardy• 5 years ago

Both, because different organizations prioritize different things. In some places, developers can run the show, in others, it is the marketing team calling the shots.

I think the early startup area is driven by developers, but once a product gets some traction they transition into the product manager/marketer driven mode where dark patterns start to show up.

read_if_gay_• 5 years ago

At the end of the day even if all devs collectively decide they won’t implement these features (which already is utopian), there will be someone in a more desparate position who would just be too glad to take the job. You may have to go looking in other countries. Or raise wages. But it will get done.

liketochill• 5 years ago

Professional Engineers have to take ethics courses and have values which include protecting the public welfare.

I would like to see something similar for people writing software.

What keeps Professional Engineers honest is that they are accountable to the discipline committee and liable for negligence. This is in stark contrast to consumer software which comes with no guarantees other than a click through EULA.

drstewart• 5 years ago

Surely the genius software developers can just do away with the stupid and pointless project managers with their self inflated egos and release the great software ourselves? Why don't we do that? Surely there must be some reason if these useless business people only provide negative value!

selfhoster1112• 5 years ago

The problem is that it's not possible to unbundle the business acumen and the "profit above everything" mentality. Developers need the former, literally nobody needs the latter.

jerome-jh• 5 years ago

I wish the article would be a little more documented, however matching its definition of hostile SW those two examples come to my mind:

- Origin, the game distribution system of EA, forgets the user's credential if she declines to upgrade

- at work, a piece of software contracted from a well known three-letter German multinational always warns the user she may lose unsaved work when quitting, no matter she just clicked "save" a second ago.

tonyedgecombe2• 5 years ago

I suspect this is mostly driven by the economics of the software business. The cost of software is driven by fixed upfront costs. The marginal cost is now pretty close to zero. This means that unless you have some kind of lock in like Photoshop or Office then competitive pressures are going to drive your prices down towards zero.

If you can't make any money selling your product then you will start looking elsewhere. That will include transactions that are against your customers interest like selling their profile to advertisers.

mschuster914• 5 years ago

Want to get data from inside a device onto your computer? Nope, it’s not a mass storage device.

MTP exists, Windows and Linux can use it... but OS X still doesn't have a native MTP client.

flyinghamster2• 5 years ago

Vendor lock-in absolutely figures into a hell of a lot of user-hostile tech. Even before Apple went full spyware, I refused to buy iThings on principle, just due to Apple's abuse of its customers and developers (ever-changing connectors, unrepairability, needing to get Apple's blessing, revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for them, etc.).

Android is very far from perfect, but for now it's at least still usable, except that manufacturers have decided to follow Apple's lead on unrepairability. But at this point I'm preparing myself to do without, as I'm not optimistic about the future of smartphones. I was a holdout for a long time anyway, and the whole "Install our app! <small>which, by the way, also sucks down your contact list and mines cryptocoins</small>" thing has gotten out of hand.

mschuster914• 5 years ago

ever-changing connectors

iDevices have had only two connectors over their life time - the bulky 30-pin lasted thirteen years (2001-2014), and the Lighting connector from 2014 to this day. The iPad Pro has USB-C, so I won't complain there.

Macs also have only used standard connectors since the Intel era.

revocable at the drop of a hat, to even write software for them

You don't need a paid certificate to write software for your own Mac/iDevices, you don't even need Xcode to create software for Macs (as evidenced by Homebrew/Macports).

Fully agree with you on the rest, though.

holri3• 5 years ago

Just use free software. Stallman was right.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

Unfortunately:

- A lot of free software either sucks or is entirely non-existent for many use cases

- Free software is not entirely immune to this behavior either

thefr0g3• 5 years ago

The point is that with FLOSS you can fix both of these problems yourself.

holri3• 5 years ago

I prefer to not use a feature instead of using a hostile one.

In my more than 20 years of journey in the free software world, I never came across a user hostile free software. This is in stark contrast to proprietary software I tried.

thesuperbigfrog• 5 years ago

"Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the users":

https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57

akho• 5 years ago

To be fair, most of the examples in the post are about shitty hardware, or shitty mobile experiences. The option of using baseline commodity hardware with no RGB lights is somehow not considered.

Free software is indeed a breath of fresh air.

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

If you have the users design a car you end up with a Homer bubble car.

A better strategy is don't be an asshole.

You know telemetry on by default is wrong.

Putting sane defaults that the users must opt in instead of opt out is right.

No one wants to make an account for your product, other login choices are usually available, but don't force it if you don't need it.

thewebcount4• 5 years ago

The author didn't say, "Let the user design the software." They said, "Would the user benefit from this feature?" That's a big difference.

kstenerud• 5 years ago

You'll notice that all of his examples of user-hostile software lack a universally accepted standard. This is not new.

Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No - everyone follows the standard, so your OS just knows how to hook up your headset. With USB it's different, because the standards are insufficient for the gadgets that we use, resulting in specialized software for your extra buttons, light shows, sensitivity, etc.

Two prime older examples are graphics cards and printers. There has never been a driver standard for either that was universally accepted (after VGA and VESA local bus), and so the only alternative is bespoke software. Remember when game controllers needed specialized drivers (Sound Blaster)? I do.

And it's not like this is limited to software either. There are plenty of standards and lack-of-standards in construction, automotive, even electrical in some cases. One of the most expensive explosions in history was the result of a mismatch between metric and imperial measures.

Want to get away from this nightmare of custom-implementations-for-everything? Push for sane and comprehensive standards.

danuker2• 5 years ago

everyone follows the standard

Try sharing a file via Bluetooth between an Apple and an Android device.

thefr0g3• 5 years ago

So everyone except Apple?

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No

Logitech and Samsung would like a word...

l0b0• 5 years ago

Oh? The Logitech G613 Bluetooth keyboard and M510 Bluetooth mouse were plug and play on Windows, Arch Linux and NixOS. Back in the day, sure, but I don't think custom drivers are much needed for anything but GPUs by now.

jmrm2• 5 years ago

I think is impossible to standardise everything. You can do it only with products with limited use cases, like Bluetooth devices, USB HID devices, some "standard" USB devices like cheap mouses, sound cards, disk drives, or WiFi NICs.

I won't ever happen a GPU standard in a short or medium time, because deciding how it would work were giving their R&D to the competition, and AFAIK, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have totally different types of architecture.

Printers maybe could have some kind of USB standard, but I don't think the different printer making companies are willing to do that, the same happens with some kind of "gaming" devices. That would mean not showing ads of cartridge or other products and letting the users be more outside of their "ecosystem". QMK keyboards are a honourable exception to this btw.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

Would any user benefit from this?

Corporate types will just self-delude themselves to always answer "yes" to this.

Recently, a telemarketer called me to sell me solar panels. Initially I thought he was calling me about my existing solar panels, so I asked, "Are you trying to sell me something, or do I already have a relationship with you."

His answer, "I'm not calling to sell you something. I'm calling to tell you about the blah blah blah."

echopom• 5 years ago

Nothing new here !

The vast majority of Today's software is built by "Corporate Developers" and "Corporate Business Owner".

Generally these people don't have any background in UX or UI or simply commonsense about software ergonomics.

An example would be Stripe , as an Architect in Banking I've spend years explaining to Executives and Business Owner to invest in "Partner Experience" and good "Developer Ecosystem" , something they've always refused because the current model "Answer the Need"

This is the same problem , the people who are building are generally not using the product, the people in charge simply don't understand the "Added Value" of making a change to the current software so it's doesn't weight "150 MB" but rather "1MB" and has "auto installer" with it , "we have always done it this way , why change ?".

Add to that software legacy you end up with mess like those which are obscenely hostile piece of software.

avnigo• 5 years ago

However, the problem is becoming much more endemic lately, with everyone on the hunt for more data, more accounts, and a level of access to a computer that would make it seem like they’re using it as a giant bullseye for everyone on the Internet.

And I would argue that the main driving force for that is for selling your data to advertisers on software that is free (and sometimes paid), and maybe to increase sales on software that is paid. All this, quite possibly, at a privacy detriment to the user.

I don't think the fault lies directly and singly on developers, as mentioned in the article, but many are reacting to the way the software market currently works, and attempt to gain that edge. A lot of the big-name software may also likely be designed by committee, one of which may include the marketing department, growth analytics etc.

jasonhansel• 5 years ago

The issue is that there's a reason software is so user-hostile: it increases profits for the software's developers. If we want to get better software, we need an economic system that changes the incentives.

One way to get there could be to encourage widespread adoption of copyleft licenses like the GPL, which would encourage more corporations to release their software as FOSS, thus exposing them to competition from more user-friendly forks.

kekeblom• 5 years ago

One thing that could help, but obviously would not completely solve everything is some sort of "organic" label/certification for software. Basically have someone audit the software and check that it doesn't screw the user in any way. For many categories of software, if you could sell the software as not doing any of this or other bad stuff, it would make sense to stay within the bounds of the certification.

Of course some business models are fundamentally toxic and they could never not break some of the rules.

I wrote about the idea here https://keke.dev/blog/2020/11/29/organic-software.html

bo1024• 5 years ago

This strikes me as extremely generous.

I agree that on an individual level, developers may be just following an industry-trend path of least resistance. The trend is putting the developer first.

But as a general phenomenon, it's exploitative. The goal is to capture as much of the user's time, attention, and data as possible.

Sometimes I feel silly for prioritizing FOSS highly, but sometimes not. At least I don't ever put up with this kind of stuff.

city412• 5 years ago

I am using Ubuntu 20 and as far as I know I don't encounter any of these issues. If anyone is aware of user hostile things in Ubuntu, I'd love to hear it.

TheCapn• 5 years ago

I think the entire argument falls apart at the Flowchart presented:

"Would any user benefit from this?"

Why? Because its trivially easy to say those shitty additions help a user, satisfying the check and throwing you into "Build It" territory.

Do users know how to navigate their local network to upload data to a folder? Not all of them, hook it into a cloud service. Do all users know how to download the right BIOS for their mobo and execute the update? No, make an app. Do users even know what version of OS they're on? Nope, better make something platform agnostic so electron it is!

I'm not all in on FOSS, but I do try to support them when appropriate. I think that ecosystem does a decent job of giving the user control over what's happening, but that comes with the obvious drawbacks of having a higher barrier to entry. I can figure these things out, but my wife can't... my mom can't.

At the same time some of the examples given live in two different realms. A calculator accessing your contacts & location is a different case than your dashcam wanting to ease the backup process. A mobo bios update is different than ads in your video driver installer.

I don't pretend to offer realistic solutions. I think I'm a bit pessimistic that our hacker culture will collectively decide we need to focus on user-first features and oust malicious developers looking to exploit the tech-illiterate. I've seen it too many times on hackernews that people will justify any action because it simplifies things now. I've never favored "move fast and break things" culture and butted heads with hackers who think regulation à la engineering code of ethics is detrimental to our profession.

thefr0g3• 5 years ago

but that comes with the obvious drawbacks of having a higher barrier to entry.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many governments even raise the barrier of entry artificially for dangerous activitys by requiring licenses or training to operate heavy machinery, handle dangerous chemicals, install electricity etc. Using technology sometimes requires knowledge about the inner workings so users will not accidentally hurt others or themselves. Imo developers shouldn't infantilize users but give them tools to work with. Of course this naturally works better with FLOSS since there (more often than not) is no monetary incentive to get absolutely everyone on to use it.

thinkharderdev• 5 years ago

Yeah, I had a broadly similar reaction. Some of the things the author points out seem like genuine attempts to make software less user hostile by adopting solutions that "just work" across all platforms even if the users have no technical knowledge. I think a lot of engineers think of user friendly as "I can configure it any way I want" whereas for the vast majority of people user-friendly means "just do what I think it should do and don't ask me any questions I don't understand".

wilde4• 5 years ago

But who will pay for this software? Not the author, they’ve made that very clear.

The things they’re railing against fall into two categories:

1. The OS vendor hasn’t built it into the OS.

2. Cost saving measures.

One the developer has little influence over. The other is business physics.

dend6• 5 years ago

OP here. Au contraire - I am happy to pay a bit extra for software that does its job and gets out of the way. With hardware, one could argue that can be made a part of the price for the device - if I buy a "premium" component, I prefer to have a clean user experience that does not create a hole in my network to manage RGB lights.

wilde4• 5 years ago

Thanks for responding! I guess I was mainly reacting to your claim about the move to subscriptions. It costs $10/mo to make software these days. $0.33/mo (your stated price) isn’t tenable.

I expect the added costs apply similarly for other portions of the supply chain. Apple hardware provides similar quality to what you’re asking for. It is 2-4x more expensive and that’s with the advantage of scale.

abraxas• 5 years ago

they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers.

Oh this kind of software takes care of the needs of customers alright. Except their true customers are advertisers not users.

This adification of every single item we use every day is tiresome and will hopefully lead to a wide pendulum swing in the opposite direction once consumers truly have had enough. We're not there yet but I think it's coming.

danuker2• 5 years ago

I think it's coming

Unless you make it come to yourself by boycotting adware, the fact that adware is everywhere is proof to the contrary.

rchaud2• 5 years ago

Increasingly I am looking at purchasing my software, instead of using freemium or subscription services that lock you in forever. Here's what I've bought since 2019. All of the below were one-time purchases:

- Affinity Designer + Publisher (Photoshop + InDesign replacement, $35 each)

- Tumult Hype (Adobe Animate replacement, $100)

- SimpleMind (mindmapping tool, MacOS, around $40)

- Bootstrap Studio (WYSIWIG site builder, $59)

- YouCut (Android video editor, $11.99 full version)

- Sketch ($99 for 1 year of updates; more than enough for storyboarding and basic prototyping)

commandlinefan3• 5 years ago

When I was a kid, TV came for free over the air, and the TV stations made their money selling advertisements. Then came cable TV, which you had to pay extra money for, but which included lots of ad-free stations. But after a while, cable caught on and almost everybody was paying for it, and the cable stations realized they could double-dip and not only charge you to get cable TV, but start putting ads into their previously ad-free stations. After a while, the "included" cable stations had as many ads as the old broadcast stations.

I suspect that the pay software products will follow a similar route and monetize every way they can.

rchaud2• 5 years ago

It already has. Which is why it's important to highlight the remaining few iconoclasts that stick to the tried and true method of "I provide a product, you buy that product". Not rent the product as you would with Spotify, but be able to buy it permanently.

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

I notice someone else mentioned that software is a zero marginal cost product. This is an element that drives the cost down to zero when there is competition. But software is more than just zero marginal cost. An additional passenger on an airplane is zero marginal cost as well, but they can still charge for a ticket because it is trivial to keep someone off of an airplane.

The bigger problem with software is its a public good. I don't mean that as some kind of normative statement saying it should be or deserves to be provided free of cost to all users of a particular state. I'm saying it is non-rivalrous (some sequence of bytes copied onto person A's disk does not prevent person B from copying the same sequence of bytes onto their disk) and non-excludable (due to the nature of disks and bytes, you can't prevent a person from doing it.

Not all goods that are public goods by the economic definition need to be publicly provided. Media has this same characteristic, and they solve it by:

1) Making money off of live performances or theatrical experiences rather than the content

2) Selling ads

There is an analogy to selling live performances in the software world. At the company I work for, every product we make is 100% free-to-use, open source, self-hostable, doesn't require an enterprise edition to unlock features, and doesn't include any kind of user-tracking to sell ads. Instead, we sell support, and also embed developers as consultants into client organizations. This is why I currently work for the Air Force. We're monetizing the developers rather than the software, the same way rock bands monetize live performance.

The only other options are to either figure out some unnatural gating mechanism to prevent people from using your software without going through a payment gate (i.e. don't open-source it and only host it on your own servers, or distribute some of the software in encrypted form only and require a paid key to unlock it, or you sell ads.

In traditional media, ads were fine. They were annoying, manipulative, I don't think anyone really liked them, but some were entertaining (arguably a draw of the Super Bowl), it was always easy to avoid them, and they were entirely targeted based on context.

The problem with ads in the software world isn't the ads themselves. It's that companies relying on ads to monetize are never happy with the returns you can get purely from contextual ads. You can learn so much more about a consumer's purchasing behavior and preferences by installing spyware on every device they own and logging every action they ever take, all the better when most of them don't even know you're doing it.

But this is the classic Jurassic Park dilemma. All of your machine learning researchers were so preoccupied with figuring out what human behaviors they could predict given enough data that they never stopped to consider whether they should collect all that data. Market research used to be conducted on paid volunteer focus groups and paid volunteer Nielsen families. They consented to it. They knew what data you were collecting and how you would use it.

But not happy with the limits of profit margin imposed on what data can be voluntarily collected from consenting research subjects, we have instead built a panopticon to turn every single person in the world into an unknowing research subject.

stadium3• 5 years ago

I saw my get kid prompted to pay $59.99 usd to buy in-game achievements for the hill climb racing game on Android. That's a f-ton of money to be soliciting from anyone, yet alone a kid. He's not quite at reading age and just clicks things. The game design and characters is clearly targeting kids. In my opinion, these aren't games any more, they are gambling.

benatkin• 5 years ago

I've played Hill Climb Racing, and it's a pretty awesome game, even for an adult. The varying gravity, and inaccurate but fun physics, and the variety, are what made it fun for me. I haven't played it in years, and after that moved on to Geometry Dash, which I see myself wanting to play in the future more than Hill Climb Racing. I've scoffed at Candy Crush, but wondered if people who play that might feel the same way I did about Hill Climb Racing.

I think the price is high, but not absurd. I don't know how you'd determine the maximum price in a way that was fair to everyone.

stadium3• 5 years ago

As a parent the volume of in-game purchase advertising and scarcity tactics are anxiety inducing for both myself and my kids.

Every game on every platform should have a global opt-out for in-game purchases, just like do-not-track on iOS 14.

yawboakye• 5 years ago

It is a universal and fractal problem: toolmakers make tools they don't use. They include a manual in the box because your intuition alone won't be enough to understand and use the tool (see React, especially React hooks where several blog posts later no one is finding them easy to use). The unhappy users make even more bad tools they don't use (and, mind you, the badness is exponential from one layer to the next).

The first toolmaker in the chain will be a user of the final product. They'll see all the badness in the product and rage about it. But they won't see their contribution. They don't make bad tools; it's their users who refuse to MTFM (master the [scrubbed] manual), they think.

The reward of doing the job is the money. Ergo, focus on what brings more of it, as patio11 advised. This is the natural destination of the "Profit Center" advise. Bad experience for the user, yes, but Excel is having a great time.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

As someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality. The developers will try to “fix” or improve their work by bolting on things like ActiveMQ, Kafka, ElasticSearch, NoSQL and everything but the kitchen sink. They rarely give production deployment much though, and if they do it’s just a bunch of people yelling Kubernetes.

The sad part is that many of these problems aren’t THAT hard.

I’m really facinated by the lack of quality and that no one seems to care.

trutannus• 5 years ago

someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality.

Not just you. Developer tools are slowly decaying into disasters also. Pretty much every enterprise development tool I've used is just... lacking basic QOL features. Or the workflows are strange to the point of being counter-productive. Atlassian and Microsoft are the biggest offenders.

I actually spend more time fixing things that Visual Studio messed up (ie: removing dependencies but destroying a config file in the process, deletions creating phantom files, ect) than I do actually resolving bugs I created by being asleep at the keyboard.

Ekaros4• 5 years ago

Working in security and seeing these systems just bolting boxes after boxes of various things sometimes I wonder what are we doing? Is all of this really needed? And how many messages etc. did we actually need to handle? How many resources we are allocating for all this?

zonabey• 5 years ago

I couldn't stop laughing whilst reading the entire article.

The one that really got me was the Electron-based “launcher”. I had to take a break for ten minutes.

dend6• 5 years ago

OP here. Sadly a true story with a "shall not be named" software for optical media management. I just want a Win32 binary that does it's job. Instead, I had to wait 45 seconds every launch until the server "spins up" from working in the background.

fleddr• 5 years ago

This article needs a part two. It does a good job of pointing out the misalignment between user needs and organization needs, but fails to address why this misalignment exists.

The flow diagram assumes the naïve situation that this is a just a matter of awareness, education, or people becoming somehow a "better" person.

Whilst I don't have all answers, it's a complex problem set, allow me to speculate.

When you look at the type of products discussed, say a mouse, they are low margin products. Ultra quick time to market, yearly iterations, and hardly ever built to have a long time span.

That's not us though. We're "Good Corp". We do it properly. The mouse comes with a basic driver, no app needed. We do build an optional app for the lights. It's a native app, built from scratch. Smooth and fast. We build this app for 2 or 3 operating systems, natively. And we respect standards, the app can also control lights of devices from other manufacturers. Our enormous test lab tests every possible combination across operating systems and competing mouses, and will keep doing this as these underlying systems are constantly updated. Finally, we build our mouse to last, from better materials, and also design for repairability.

Our good corp mouse costs 120$. The evil corp mouse costs 50$. It has the exact same features, just a lot of cutting corners, but functionality is comparable.

Which mouse will customers buy? Will they recognize quality? More importantly, will they pay for it? Or will they just go for the cheapest and tolerate the annoyances, and buy another one 3 years from now?

I think you know the answer. When the market does not reward quality, quality will not be delivered. There will be no magical moment where developers turn "good", they cant do good, because good is expensive, and nobody buys it.

lp0_on_fire• 5 years ago

Not sure this author actually drinks their own medicine based on this comment. One would have thought that someone who just wrote what I read would not have tracking enabled _by default_ and everything would be _opt in_.

Respect user choices. If someone doesn’t want to send telemetry (or any data for that matter), give them the option to not do it. At the time of writing, this blog collects anonymized data with Google Analytics. Don’t want to send it? Have your browser send a Do Not Track request and no data will leave this page. It takes an if statement to do this, not a month of engineering work.

"Respect user choices (unless it's my blog and I want to collect metrics)"

commandlinefan3• 5 years ago

they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers

I'm not sure what he means by "developers" - the people who actually wrote the code? This didn't come from them. Or the marketing people who create the JIRA tickets that the developers are supposed to "close" 10 of every "sprint"?

dend6• 5 years ago

OP here. I should've clarified in the article. "Developers" is not meant to single out engineers. It's the collective "people who build, promote, and maintain the software"

loxs• 5 years ago

Is there a list of ethical software somewhere? It does not need to be free in any sense, just not implement the described asshole practices.

Applejinx• 5 years ago

One word that keeps coming up in all these objectionable scenarios is 'market'.

One word you never see is 'standard'.

All this isn't an exception, it's the rule. If you want stuff to not be wrecked by externalities, back away from free market concepts and look towards more centralized control from whatever source. No exceptions.

We could probably shift towards a sort of managed capitalism model and be just fine. It's the free market absolutism that causes this. This is what you get out of that. It's not increasing the evilness in the world, it's just that without accounting for externalities competitive pressure will always push this direction no matter what. There are no rules in 'competitive' unless you put them there.

Non-free-market systems don't naturally scale, while by definition free-market systems that ignore externalities can scale to unlimited extent, for 'free'. Again, this is what you get.

Figuring out how to make capitalism be managed and still scale nearly as well as free-market capitalism is just a problem, nothing more. It is only an area of possible disruption, work to be done. It's not some tautology.

lukifer• 5 years ago

I'd take it one step further: every market is a managed market, and we're only haggling over details. While you could find exceptions (local babysitting clubs using hours as currency), the vast majority of Actually Existing Markets use state currency, and state contracts, and property rights defined and enforced by the state. Markets are merely one tool in a political toolbox, and the details matter.

An excellent book on the history of property rights and policy (for good and ill), and which explores the tradeoffs between different forms of "ownership design": https://www.minethebook.com/

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

Isn't this a VC/investor problem? If you make a new device, say some GPS locator for hikers, isn't their very first question going to be, "Okay, this is cool hardware, but how are you going to generate MRR from each purchase?"

MatthiasWandel• 5 years ago

This isn't new. I was annoyed enough to write a rant about it on my website back in 2004, 17 years ago. http://www.stentex.net/~mwandel/rants/hp_scanjet_4600.html

GuB-42• 5 years ago

I think it is correlated to the rise of free (as in $0) software.

People don't like to pay and developers want to make money. So the strategy is to make the initial cost low, preferably zero, and then make the user pay, directly or indirectly. It is not new, we had things like shareware in the past, but now, developers have more options, and they use them, because the most "user-hostile" thing is to ask for money, especially a large up-front payment.

I know some people prefer to pay, but they are a minority, and therefore, it is not the most profitable way to monetize.

no_time• 5 years ago

This argument falls apart if you look at windows. You are (supposed to) pay for it AND you get datamined until you are dry.

mixmastamyk4• 5 years ago

This piece is a great idea, but I was disappointed at the execution.

New, but doesn’t mention Apple’s photo scanning. Forced Windows upgrades and telemetry mentioned but buried. Focuses on keyboard lights, which is fine but not exactly near the top of my list of concerns. Doesn’t mention ads in the OS.

Finally it blames “developers.” This phrase could include management from certain perspective. Honestly, I’m sure approximately zero engineers are pushing for this stuff.

Ensorceled• 5 years ago

New, but doesn’t mention Apple’s photo scanning. Forced Windows upgrades and telemetry buried.

Those two things are different issues, the article is about software that makes it difficult to perform the actual task you are using the product for.

Apple's photo scanning doesn't make my camera difficult to use. Windows telemetry doesn't make Windows difficult to use. Yes, they are user hostile, just not in the way you wish the article was written.

frickinLasers• 5 years ago

Disable telemetry? Not a chance - you better be ready to have seven layers of defense in /etc/hosts, Pi-Hole, and a custom-built DNS + firewall + URL filter + deep packet inspector inside a server rack in the basement. I am exaggerating, of course. You only need six layers of defense to make this all work.

That's in the post (and, incidentally, it appears OP works for Microsoft)

mixmastamyk4• 5 years ago

Yes, I think it could be better, and these hostile practices do overlap. Author does mention telemetry, although the lede is buried.

thewebcount4• 5 years ago

Oh man, I just ran into this. I work on a product that has a 3rd party API so other people can write plug-ins to extend the functionality of the app. It's great for users and developers. We received a bug report related to a particular plug-in, so I went to download their demo to see if the problem was on our end or theirs before contacting them. Here's how the process went:

1) Go to their website and click "Download" 2) Prompted to enter email address with no way to opt out. Shit. Go to mailinator.com and create a fake email address to enter. Enter it. 3) Wait for them to send the real download link to my fake email. 4) It came in almost instantly. Great! Click on the link. 5) Click to download the installer package. Wait a few minutes. 6) Run the installer package. 7) It needs the same email address and password so it knows I'm a "legitimate user" just to install the thing. 8) After entering it, it kicks me back to the web page for some reason. No idea what it's looking for or what I'm supposed to do on the web site, so I go back to the installer. Oh it's not an installer. It's an installer installer. It's going to download the installer I want from a list of dozens of possible installers. Download the real installer. 9) Run the real installer - It lists dozens of products. Find the one I want. Install it. 10) Prompted for email and password again.

And keep in mind this is all before I'm actually a customer. I haven't paid anything and am trying to evaluate the software to determine if it fits my needs. (Or I would be if I were an end user.) Honestly, if this weren't for my job, I would have given up on step 2. Fuck these people. I'm trying to save them time by seeing whether the bug is ours or theirs, but they're actively wasting mine and everyone else's who downloads this crap.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Do you work on the Lumberyard engine? lol

dancemethis• 5 years ago

Discord comes to mind.

ZoomZoomZoom• 5 years ago

This is a really serious problem and a nice set of principles to go by. There's a big "but", however: Most of us here are hired employees and aren't really making the products for the end users. What really could be helpful are not some "oaths" but the strategies for dealing with our managers and employers and ways to uphold the ethics (and in some cases, aesthetics) of our work.

The mere market clearly don't work here, as the demand for these values is overshadowed by user's convenience, network effect and marketing brainwash.

xanaxagoras3• 5 years ago

I recently left iOS over the surveillance stuff and I was looking at a Nokia device to replace my Apple Watch. I read in the Amazon review that you had to create an account and their privacy policy explains that your location data will be synced with Nokia and you can't opt out, the device can't be configured without accepting that.

Nope.

I'm at my wit's end with ALL of this stuff. Most software, apps, digital life, everything related to technology or a computer or a phone - a good majority of it is frivolous. I will no longer exchange my privacy for these idle conveniences.

Browsing a site through the browser and not the app? Half of the functionality is not available, just to force the user into the app for no good reason. I just want to read a comment.

reddit you absolute POS.

kibblesalad• 5 years ago

That seems to be the end result of companies seeking untapped income from harvesting and selling customer data, besides offering everything as a subscription service without any kind of end-user ownership or guaranteed ongoing functionality. Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?

Most people don't think twice to hit that "Accept" button prompting for permissions, allowing the envelope to be pushed further and further. The increasing ease of processing huge data sets allows all of this information to be aggregated, sold and used for whatever purpose whoever is willing to pay for it sees fit.

xanaxagoras3• 5 years ago

Yeah, this whole thing has been a big eye opener for me and you've the nail on the head. Moving from iOS to Calyx involved reading up and a few things and that's a community that's much more disposed to discussing privacy related concerns that I simply haven't been aware of. It's a bitter pill to swallow and infuriating, the degree to which we're surveilled and manipulated. Went back and paid attention to the Prism disclosures. It's all just fucking mental.

Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?

This is the key issue, it absolutely makes sense for them to do it. I'm one of those people who just hit "accept" but no more. My new answer to any company that continues to ask that question is simply... because if you do that, you lose the sale. It's frustrating that basically amounts to spitting in the ocean but I simply can't participate any longer.

Paianni• 5 years ago

I don't think their S30+ (dumb) phones have that sort of ToS imposed...but then I can't imagine you want to revert to that sort of thing.

xanaxagoras3• 5 years ago

Ah, sorry, maybe a bit unclear - I was referring to a smart watch that Nokia makes. From iPhone 12 with iOS 14 I moved to a pixel 4 with CalyxOS.

zmix• 5 years ago

So, who of you earns their money that way?

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

The medium to broadcast ads has simply shifted over time. It used to be expensive tv ads, billboards, and print. All very expensive and you could not target population segments precisely, it was limited to what time or during what tv show the ads were shown, or in print political leanings. Retargeting was almost impossible and expensive.

Then people started watching less tv and reading less newspapers(or did so online). Then JS got mature enough to track users and then the marketing departments started instructing the devs for maximum efficiency. At the cost of user ui/ux. Almost every web page loads ads via ajax , consents popups, email list ctas with a lot of bloat. Nobody knows how to fix it, or the financial incentives are just not there.

inshadows• 5 years ago

All of the examples above have one thing in common - they focus on the needs of developers instead of needs of the customers.

Exactly. https://web.dev is prime example of that. Shiny new features for _developers_ all the time, as if any of that will make incompetent web developers write slick and fast applications.

srdev2• 5 years ago

I've gotten a lot of flack for saying that advertising and marketing are terrible industries and need to be chopped down by 95% or more, but I think this only supports my point. They can't stop themselves from trying to hook into everything so that they can track and "engage" the user.

I've gotten a lot of stink eye by strongly pointing out that the users don't want to be "engaged" with your brands and that people are creepy for having that expectation. They just want a product or service that works well. Somehow along the way we convinced ourselves that all of this is normal.

nsm• 5 years ago

Another example: Cue Health makes a rapid COVID19 test. They ship you a little box, and a set of wands to insert into the box. The box should literally be able to tell you whether the test passed or failed, like thermometers, and pregnancy tests.

But no, the stupid thing requires you to install an app on your phone, create a cloud account (because we all know we can totally trust the cloud with personal data) and it will refuse to work without any of this.

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

Closed source software has always been built on an extortion business model. As long as we permit math to be patented and copyrighted this will continue to be the case. The issue now is that each of us as individuals uses much more software than we did, 5, 10, or 20 years ago.

_carbyau_• 5 years ago

Network effect. That is what I blame it on. Once people all have to go to the same place, they are trapped and the owner of that place can do what they like.

And what is the network effect really? The fact that people can't find each other easily on the network.

If we had an easy way to find each others devices directly I could send a "FB Post" directly to my friendship circle rather than via FB.

Maybe instead of a DNS we need a PublicKey <-> IP address system.

jmrm2• 5 years ago

I think the article is pretty kind and benevolent about what the companies do this kind of things. This isn't done simply because they don't care about users or care more about developers, they do it because they want to get more money after buying the product.

Some spy their users to sell their information, others ask a lot of personal information to do that. Usually they give you some "poisoned apples" in the shape of software you don't need, and even they are some cheeky who try to sell you other things, in a more polite way[0] or using the "erosion method"[1]. More infuriating are those who doesn't want you to control them and the only thing you can do about this is uninstalling[2].

The worse thing about all of this is the difficulty about avoiding this kind of software, like some printer drivers[3].

[0] Sometimes, after opening or using the software, they show you some ads of the same company

[1] The erosion method is what Avast do in their free software. Lots of pop-ups (yeah, in 2021) from the software asking you to buy some of their product until the users buy it to "shut it up". I don't think this works too much btw.

[2] Have you used any PC with a paid McAffee antivirus installed? They don't let you ad some exceptions to analysis because they want it that way. So, if you have some old hardware, with unsigned drivers, you might won't be able to install it because the antivirus says that is malware.

[3] When you buy an HP printer you have to install all of their software to have some kind of details, like reporting to you it doesn't have ink and that's why doesn't work, but to have that, you have to install a 500 MB package with a lot of things you don't need, a lot of ads about how HP original ink is the best, an HP Assistant icon in your task bar, and a lot of process, services, and programmed tasks who only make your PC slow. Meanwhile, Canon ones only need a 20 MB~50 MB installer who works fine without all the bloat.

The rise of user-hostile software

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