Why Do So Many Everyday Systems Feel Harder to Use Now?

https://therealitydrift.substack.com/p/reality-drift-in-everyday-life

by realitydrift • 1 month ago

16 22 1 month ago

therealitydrift.substack.com

An illustrated collection of ordinary systems that have gradually become harder to navigate over time. Not catastrophic failures, but layers of process, abstraction, and complexity that steadily accumulate

Bender2• 1 month ago

Parking by App Only

Is this a big city thing or maybe a European thing? I have never seen this but maybe I escaped California just in time. People on HN have mentioned it a few times. I'm in a rural area and I often leave my cell phone at home. My goal is to eventually get rid of my phone all together and I think that is doable.

bediger4000• 1 month ago

A bunch of lots in downtown Denver have this "feature". I suppose it's good for the lot owners, they don't have to buy and maintain receipt vending machines.

kylehotchkiss• 1 month ago

These have been far superior to “if you lose your ticket we will charge you max daily price”

gwern• 1 month ago

As so often, a thinkpiece exemplifies the problem.

You include a bunch of random AI-generated images to go with your AI-generated prose. The images are cluttered and filled with pointless, fictional detail which convey nothing beyond the prose and which anyone could vaguely predict, and yet take up something like 2/3rds of the vertical space of the article body. And that is generous, because your items are padded by LLM writing, that is to say, verbosely filled with needlessly superfluously repetitive redundant redundancy. And that's where it's not filled with crowdpleasing but dubious rhetoric and assertions (all present, of course, without any sources or backing).

Consider with a critical mind a random assertion like

For many people, the first experience of healthcare is no longer treatment but paperwork. Intake forms, insurance verification, privacy acknowledgments, and consent agreements often precede any human interaction related to care. The administrative system introduces itself before the clinical one. This changes the shape of the experience. What should begin with care often begins with bureaucracy, shifting attention away from the person and toward the process.

Really? Recently, peoples' first experience of healthcare was treatment? What wondrous era was this? How could 'intake forms' not, by definition, 'precede any human interaction related to care'? Why should it begin with care? 'Ready, fire, aim!' etc. When did all this happen, exactly?

And it's all like this. Engagement farming - that OP is worthless won't stop people from falling for it and chiming in with whatever pet peeve they have, no matter how many other people have commented about it or how tiresomely predictable some complaint about, say, smartphones will be.

almarcher• 1 month ago

Restaurants that don't have physical menus, and only QR codes. The solution when you don't bring a phone is they bring you their tablet. Why?

CodesInChaos• 1 month ago

So they can raise prices without reprinting the menu?

saltcured• 1 month ago

Finally! The real explanation for why we need 5G mmwave and 120+ Hz phone displays..

DonsDiscountGas• 1 month ago

Or change the products on offer

jibbers• 1 month ago

How many paper menus could one buy vs. the cost of a tablet and the backend for the digital menu?

techteach00• 1 month ago

Buying a new phone and transferring the apps over is a complete nightmare with login issues, unrecognized device, two factor authentication etc

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

just bought a $170 phone (android) to transfer from another bargain basement <$99 phone. All it required was being on the same wifi and scanning a QR code.

/anecdote

JohnFen2• 1 month ago

A couldn't agree with the article more. Technology is increasingly being leveraged against us and is making daily life a greater pain in the butt than is necessary, and a greater pain than before the technology came around.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 month ago

Every day I feel a little more disgusted that this is the field I dedicated my career to. I ignored warnings for 25 years because things seemed fine and then suddenly everything started to turn so fast.

These days you can't even warn people about things that are already happening.

JohnFen2• 1 month ago

Every day I feel a little more disgusted that this is the field I dedicated my career to.

Oh, man, am I sympathetic to that. But I try to remind myself that the problem isn't the field itself, it's the industry. Those are two different things. I am on my way out of the industry (it has been getting increasingly problematic over decades, and the water has become a bit too warm for this frog), but will probably never quit the field.

because things seemed fine and then suddenly everything started to turn so fast.

This is how things often go, historically speaking. Punctuated equilibrium. You have a period that looks like a steady state that is followed by sudden change.

m30472• 1 month ago

Some of this isn't new, like the printer example. However I recently bought a Canon inkjet printer because it purportedly had good linux support (spoiler: it's actually ok!).

Even though MacOS drivers and software were available, all of the online instructions were strictly for Windows. So I set the printer up with the Mac software. Knowing what I know now, I could have done all of the printer setup with the printer control panel.

As far as I can tell, all the printer really required on a reasonably modern copy of SuSE Linux was a PPD. I haven't done pcaps, but taking it at "interface value" it looks like it ingests ghostscript-generated PDFs just fine. I haven't tried to get the scanner working on Linux.

m30472• 1 month ago

Reading a little further on this person's site:

    "Reality drifts when systems stop learning from feedback."

A little drier on the dopamine rush.

realitydrift2• 1 month ago

Yeah, no dopamine rush. Mostly just trying to map recurring structural patterns.

mindslight• 1 month ago

10. Articles with headlines promising to answer "Why", but instead just bombard you with a bunch of examples and never do any analysis or synthesis.

My own answers for "why" here things like the incentives of middle managers to always be adding bullet point features (eg 2FA most places), the more of your effort something takes up the less time you can spend on competing options (eg bloated shopping websites that take 10 seconds to load each page), the ever-present desire to siphon more surveillance data from your personal devices, etc.

My own response is to withdraw from these types of businesses where I can, avoid high-touch "services" that want to own the experience (ie be able to arbitrarily change them) in favor of libre software and my own digital software/systems/infrastructure, and generally accept being a "weirdo" for customer service people when I don't accept answers like "just install our app!". It helps to understand how these systems work too, like for shipping item returns rather than ever logging into the website from my phone (lol) I just save off the QR code image and send it into a Matrix chat, which is available on my phone. While the dynamic is unavoidable, solutions are there for many of these problems but it takes deliberate effort to push back against manufactured complexity.

moezd• 1 month ago

Everything is designed around collecting your data somehow so that they know what to sell you next. You've no longer the customer, you are an agent that gets to use that interface.

musicale• 1 month ago

The Hidden Fees Receipt

I wish the FTC hadn't exempted restaurants from junk free transparency requirements.

https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/ftc-exempts-restaurants-...

Restaurant industry celebrates "win" on exemption from junk fee disclosure:

https://www.lra.org/2024/12/17/advocacy-win-restaurants-ftc-...

But delivery fee transparency may be coming:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/16/2026-07...

The following should really apply (of course those "shipping charges" can be another scam, see eBay etc.):

Businesses may only exclude three categories of charges from the total price: government charges, shipping charges, and fees or charges for optional ancillary goods or services that people choose to add to the transaction.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/rule-unfair-...

Why Do So Many Everyday Systems Feel Harder to Use Now?

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