Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.

Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content".

Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.

Not a main factor but a factor is 'always the latest tech' issue. Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. This is not the fault of react but more of this idea of tech people that everything has to be new which means we don't have 10+ year experience in it and the results just take more work to get right (despite what everyone says here). My local bank did a rewrite from php with js/jquery to react and it's just unusable now. Slow, buggy etc; I have to have my developer console open to see if a transaction actually worked... The site before this was instant loading and perfect; it was over 10 years old and worked fine. The new one doesn't look much better but is garbage. HSBC HK did something similar and the result is awful. I click things and see the console light up red with errors 'undefined' etc. Revolut business has more bugs (which I keep reporting but they don't fix them). And I know how to use developer tools; what do other people do when they click something over and over and nothing happens? Etc etc. Use tools you have experience with ; you don't need to use all this new crap; use it in 10-15 years if it is still around.

Edit; in the same vain: microservices etc are not helping either. When done well they are supposed to help, but in reality I only see systems that can work when all microservices are up and responsive; if one is down, the entire thing is dead. Why didn't you make a monolith? Now you have brittle all over the place and devops with 247 stress.

You hit the nail on the head -- repeatedly. Shit. I just bought my gf a Roku as a stocking stuffer. We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device. My own Roku from a couple years ago works great with no idea who I am, let alone my phone number.

Someone said users tolerate it. I think this has a lot to do with corporations getting out ahead of the law, doing diligence on their own just in case one government or another comes knocking. Yeah, in the case of a streaming device they probably gain a bit of extra intel to sell if they have a phone number to tie to your viewing habits. But it's not just that. Google just asked me on one of my fake accounts to tell them "Charlie's" birthday, just in case so they don't serve me any illegal material. This is to pre-comply with whatever data the government of any country they serve might want.

Now, the problem with Amazon's hostility toward customers of its marketplace is of a whole other order. That's truly a situation where it's cheaper for them to sell rotten garbage to everyone and take returns than it is to make a transparent marketplace, and that's down to the laws of physics. They just make more money being a shipping company than they do a retailer, and the arbitrage between Chinese factory sellers and American consumers is ridiculous. You could design countless better systems, but none of them will ship lead-coated childrens toys as quickly or for as much profit.

This here's the last of the free internet that isn't dumbed down for consumers. This and the retro BBS subculture, and gopher and IRC and other things of that ilk. We're much reduced.

Personally in my own code / administration and training for the company I work for, I really try to make sure that the user experience comes first and there is no daylight between what the customer expected and what they get. This, however, is a minority view.

I agree with most everything you have said but wonder if it is just the internet or everywhere these days.

I recently went through a McDonalds drive thru for the first time in a very long time and felt a longing for the old menu boards that had items and prices clearly listed instead of these TV screens with all the items and prices scattered about like a teenage girls dream collage.

I walked into a new BestBuy store picked up an item and could not find where to pay, apparently checkouts and queues for customers no longer make sense to their business model. I had three people walk past me before one finally asked if I needed help, I said "yes I would like to buy this" they told me they were going on break but directed me over to what looked like a 1980s nightclub coat check counter, where I waited another 10 minutes before leaving the item on the counter and walking out.

The busses no longer accept cash in my city, you need to buy a prepaid card from a transit hub or from one of their partner retailers. So I need to get a ride to the store to get a bus pass?!?

Everyone knows about self checkouts at grocery stores but now with online shopping services, it is like running through a gauntlet with gig workers blasting their way up and down the isles with no patients for us analog shoppers that don't know exactly where our items are located on the shelves.

At the risk of sounding even more like a crotchety old man, people in public these days spend most of their time with their heads down looking at their phones. I took a couple friends out for lunch and was unable to have a meaningful conversation as they felt whatever was on their phones was more interesting than conversing with the sucker buying them lunch.

There was a movie where a guy got out of prison after a lengthy sentence and his words seem to ring more true to me each and every day: "The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me"

*Regarding Your comment about 2FA I recently purchased a hard to find item from a website that only accepted ShopPay, they required 2FA through my phone which was fine but now every time I load a checkout page that does accept other methods, ShopPay hammers out another text message and has managed to become my default method of payment, it now takes me extra effort to change my payment method back to what I want.

I've recently been travelling to some fam in Europe and the entire COVID experience is so convoluted and obscene I feel a moral obligation to defraud the private services profiting off of it.

I think the internet (and its tools) started off with the intention of making the lives of users easier as compared to the alternatives.

However, as the internet became mainstream and competitive, more successful players realized that they can employ dark patterns to increase their revenue by taking advantage of users (lock-in, difficulty unsubscribing, making cloud accounts mandatory, etc).

It's 2022 and I think all the companies everywhere feel like they have no choice but to learn from the best. The pricing tactics used by Apple, are now used by many other companies in different industries and even companies that were non-tech are now using tech with its dark patterns.

Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies. It's just the mindset of growth at all and any cost, that's what I'm seeing all around me on the internet and offline (by using the internet in some cases).

I think it's mainly your last reason. After the founders have cashed out, there's nobody left to care about user experience, because by then, most things are run by MBAs as dictated by shareholders.

And shareholders don't care who suffers. They care purely about profits.

The solution is to introduce laws to reign in "profits at the expense of others". When chemical companies were polluting the ground (superfund sites), we introduced laws to stop them for the good of society. In my opinion, Facebook is the new superfund site, it's just that this time, it is digital and psychological poison, not chemical. So we should just deny them the most user-hostile (e.g. most profitable) behavior through laws.

I think we software developers tend to overstate the impact that the inner world of software developement has on this kind of thing. It wouldn't even occur to me that "release often KPIs" has anything to do with it.

The reason the web looks like it does today is because it mostly works, for the value of works that the people building the web care about. Most things on the web are there because someone wants to make money from them. And apparently they do. Things being "hostile" are a side effect of them being effective at making money. That's mostly the whole story.

20-25 years ago there was at least lip service paid to the idea of "how do we improve software quality", but somewhere along the line that got lost under "move fast and break things", which paved the way for "as a service" madness. I don't want your half baked junk, I don't want constant updates, I don't want monthly fees for perpetually shifting, broken crap. I don't want any ongoing relationship with a team of "devs". I want to buy it once, and if it doesn't work I want my d### money back.

If you ask me it's due to a confluence of:

- People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free;

- The companies who produce this stuff have shareholders who want to see their squiggly lines go up.

Honourable mention: Because cybersecurity is hard and involves saving users from themselves.

That's my oversimplified take, anyways.

Businesses deceive themselves when they think they measure user satisfaction.

There's a thing out there called "net promoter score." That's when somebody asks you "would you recommend our business to a friend?" It's based on a 2006 business book with the megalomaniacal title "The Ultimate Question." https://www.worldcat.org/title/ultimate-question-driving-goo...

In theory it's a great idea. In theory it effectively captures a user's attitude toward the businesss. Its inventor, Enterprise Rent A Car, used it to up their game in a competitive market requiring lots of personal service, and it worked brilliantly for them.

But, now the people deploying it in megacorps must have all gotten C- grades in business school. They use it to measure their SUPPORT REPS, not their BUSINESSES. They pretty much only ask it after a support call. So if you give a NO answer to the question because you're frustrated and needed support, the support rep gets dinged, not the product manager.

By the way, anything below a 9 on the 0 - 10 scale in the question means "NO, I would not recommend."

I once got one of those quizzes from my local ISP monopoly provider (Comcast) after somebody CALLED ME to try to sell me something. My answer: "Would I recommend you to a friend? You're a MONOPOLY! " Anyway, they punished the telesales guy for my NO answer. They should have punished the idiot who thought it was an appropriate way for a monopoly to measure customer satisfaction.

A plea to the people who run businesses: take those NO answers seriously. Use them to look for opportunities to improve, not opportunities to punish.

Its mostly the KPIs. They just follow the A/B test that says people spend more time on the site without asking why the people spend more time on the site, when the answer is that the people are extremely frustrated.

I think it is just part of the commercialization of the web, the same dynamics that happens everywhere where a firm with a good product/brand change it to increase cash flows or some other KPI. Though much more clear in consumer market, but also happen to rich, influential companies (think about the clients of Oracle).

I recently tried to backup my Google Authenticator setup from my smartphone. It's possible to export all secret keys to another smartphone using a QR code, however taking a screenshot is prevented. So how am I supposed to protect myself against device loss or corruption, if I don't have another smartphone to use for the backup (other than taking a picture of the QR code)?

Unregulated winner take all effects. Too many acquisitions - not enough competition. Giant companies providing market leading services at 3+ layers, increasing startup costs, enabling anti competitive behaviour.

However I believe the true reason is geopolitical. The entire digital market is simply the best espionage system. If the US govt had a better way to dominate other countries, they would use it instead, and the internet would improve.

Dark patterns in digital services are not just about greed. They give the US government greater power which translates to increased protection of its citizens.

What could be the solution? Tax loopholes to funnel money into open source code to compete at the govt's expense? Building a better geopolitical power system so they get off tech's lawn?

Realistically, it's probably to invest more in open source services and encryption tools, self hosting tools, proxies. Open source capital ownership governance model.

What is the best way to monetize user-friendliness?

It really feels like internet infrastructure has been growing more unstable. More outages, feels like way more bugs happening on my apple products as well.

I believe this is the result of the same thing that causes all the chaos in all human fields, lack of consciousness. We live in a very distracted time, COVID is still one more stressor on top of all the other things we have to manage in the world we've built to be inhospitable to mental health.

There's a shift happening in certain areas, but I think the old guard of tech is due for a revolution of some kind. My two cents, to start we need to stop building things with such low-level tools.

Humans are bad at understanding that infinite growth goes against the laws of nature. As numbers start to trail off, new ways have to be dreamed up whether it's a degration of offering to save money or new endeavours that have nothing to do with the core business.

I definitely agree some things have gotten quite bad, but at least for me there have been quite a lot of massive improvements.

Banking is a good example, it has significantly improved for me; Instead of having to use one of those 2nd factor dedicated devices that require my card and pin code, I can now use my phone with the app as second factor, it's way more convenient as I don't have to go search for the device and type in random numbers. Also checking my bank statements and saldo doesn't require a second factor so it's much easier now.

My impression is that for elderly people things have improved as well, although based on a small sample size. I have tried to learn elderly people how to use a laptop and the internet some years back, it was almost impossible. But, if you give them an iPad and some very basic instructions they just figure stuff out, do banking, messaging, gaming and what not. I have honestly been surprised.

When talking search and shopping I fully agree; I think the issue here is that not-very-ethical parties have actually succeeded quite well in gaming and flooding the system with the clickbaity low quality crap. It has become hard or impossible to distinguish real & quality vs fake/low quality/scam, manual and automated.

Multi factors do require some work, and captchas really suck (but those are not new!).

My point is that I think overall things have improved, there are exceptions, but the web and digital products in the past were really very bad.

It might not feel like it has improved because expectations rise with the base level, and our expectations are way higher now, so bad apples stand out.

Check out https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-gains-shrinking/ some strong pointers that at least the user experience situation has improved.

Something I've noticed as I've started to more actively try things with crypto wallets(which have made inroads on being identity/login solutions) is that there is a refreshing transparency and friction to the on-chain interactions. There are many things that cost a fee and make the wallet prompt for my password again when interacting with blockchains, but I haven't used Ethereum, so I've never seen a fee above a microscopic amount. And even given that the fees don't impact me, it throws the reality of what it costs to run the system in my face, making the low friction and opacity in big tech UX look shady by comparison, like, "well, why are you rushing me through this?"

Something significant happened to our trust model when we made that little leap from computer systems still "driven" by front office desk clerks and receptionists to fully automated ones - the ability for the intermediary to properly look out for you disappeared under the lens of KPI, as OP notes. So computing tech became more of a weapon for all sides - a thing to exploit or be exploited through at hyper speed. While the crypto way of doing it has a long way to improve still and also suffers frequent headliner exploitations, the core of it reminds me of the past in a good way; both "no questions asked" and "gets your permission". It just needs "smart enough to spot and correct grave errors".

Don’t forget those awful goddamn cookie banners, and the disable ad blocker pop ups. I hate even leaving the major platforms because my entire phone screen is covered up by these annoyances.

I'll suggest over reliance on dependencies on the frontend.

<BOX type="soap">

The thing about a dependency frontend module, is that it often brings in some really cool stuff, like animations and attractive design elements, but also introduces inflexibility. You have to use the supplied design elements, and you can't modify the animations.

This gets compounded, when you aggregate dependencies.

Dependencies aren't bad. They are how we get big stuff done, with small teams. Done right, they can also enforce UI consistency, and improve quality.

Done wrong ... well ... not so much.

It's possible to have UI suites that provide a lot of customization options, but the customization comes at the expense of increased implementation complexity. There's usually a fairly significant learning curve, which isn't popular, when your boss is breathing down your neck, so many developers opt for the defaults (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as that can enforce consistency). It means that they are often using standard tools for specialized tasks (think using an English wrench on a metric bolt).

Also, developers and designers tend to hate (I mean sticking-pins-in-voodoo-doll-hate) usability folks, like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman; which is too bad, because they have some great suggestions.

The backend can be a byzantine nightmare. Maybe it needs to be, but the frontend should be consistent, simple, and user-task-oriented.

That "user-task-oriented" is important. The deal is helping users to get stuff done. It isn't to impress them with eye-candy chrome, pretty design and fancy interaction. Good UI helps the user to get done what needs doing, and gets the hell out of the way.

The best user interface is the one you don't notice. That can be damn difficult to achieve.

This is often accomplished by doing rote, "cliché" UI. I write about that, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

I am a fan of good interpretive SDKs (ones that don't just present the raw substrate to the programmer), and native coding.

</BOX>

I live in Russia and internet services are pretty solid that ever. Online banking is prevalent, secure and feature full. Booking tickets or shopping online is seamless. Web search is of decent quality. Everybody has set on SMS as second factor and that is a good match WRT security/ease of use.

So maybe it's mostly the USA.

Overuse of jargon? WTF is KPI?

Laissez faire capitalism, basically.

The idea that in a free market products work for consumers instead of for the corporations selling them is completely flawed.

A few very successful companies made unimaginable amounts of money early on and established de facto monopolies or close to them. As a result they now continue to make unimaginable amounts of money almost independent of their performance from a user's perspective.

That means they can also now spend unimaginable amounts of money hiring people, which distorts the natural relationships between performance and pay for people working in software development. Many people have come into this industry who are relatively young and inexperienced and don't really know what they're doing at all, yet expect to earn many times the average wage for someone in their demographic on day one and then to increase their income still further as they rapidly job-hop.

Neither those people nor most of their peers or even most of their management teams have ever had to bootstrap a software product where the continued success of their employer depended on making something that users actually wanted to use and customers actually wanted to pay for.

Many of them never work on the same software product for more than a year or two so they aren't evaluated on the long-term benefits of any work they do either. Instead the path to career success often involves high visibility, short-term projects. That brings to mind the old joke that something must always be done and this is something so we're doing it. Or some less flattering comments on modern corporate management and focussing on the next quarterly statement because that's what your astronomically large bonus depends on as CxO.

In short, the reason user satisfaction is often a secondary concern if it's a concern at all in modern software is that a lot of the tech firms seen as highly successful and desirable places to work made stupidly large amounts of money early on and now the incentives for both the tech firms and their employees are heavily distorted because normal financial incentives just don't apply in this crazy little corner of the world.

I was guiding a relative with their 'new' Android tablet, the Youtube app goes either full of adverts or full screen. The latter hides the home button, because it's not a hardware one like the iPad.

So to stop playing a video you have to: 1. tap the screen to show controls 2. tap pause so you don't have to shout over them. 3. tap the icon which looks like a view finder but means exit full screen 4. swipe from the right to show the home button 5. press the home button

All of the above without pressing too softly or moving your fingers while tapping or swiping in a curve.

I understand now why iPads have a hardware home button.

* Metrics-driven product development which focuses on things like "engagement", so more popups and analytics shite.

* HIPPO or designer-driven requirements for "cool" (for various opinions on "cool") requiring large JS payloads, massive banner images and videos etc at the cost of accessibility and lighter page size (as well as larger surface area for UI bugs).

* Developers working with high-end machines and fast internet connections, so lack of empathy for users with neither.

* Scrum/agile hamster-wheel methodology so developers are focused on tiny atomized tasks, preventing holistic improvements.

The asylum is being run by the inmates.

> constant changes to 'systems that are working fine'

This is the one that annoys me the most. Constantly breaking things that work. Windows 11 is a perfect example, can't think of even 1 compelling reason for it to exist.

Every organisation was once running there own email, web and other services on a real internet in new, interesting and innovative ways.

I find it really shocking that in 2022 something as simple as an email server has become too hard for close to 100% of organisations who rely on the crapfest that is gmail or 365.

It would be nice to see some innovation that isn't some cloud BS.

As far as user-hostility on the web and in consumer products and services goes: it's there because there is no good honest economic model.

Everything online has to be free, which means companies have to find some sneaky underhanded way to finance it. They have to find a way to monetize you since you won't pay, and in many cases you can't pay because there is no good mechanism.

People will retort by pointing out that many things you pay for have adopted user-hostile practices too. That's true. The problem is that without a simple honest economic model it is impossible to do business online in any other way. an honest straightforward economic model is necessary but not sufficient to create products and services that are not user-hostile.

The other ingredient that must be there is user preference. People have to vote with their wallets and go toward ecosystems that don't treat them this way. But if there are none to begin with because everything has to be "free," then people don't even have that option.

... and no, open source is not an option for non-technical users. If my time is valued at $80/hour and I have to spend two hours a month maintaining something, that thing costs $160/month. That's pricey.

Edit: The "constant release" pressure is a kind of SEO phenomenon. Searches tend to use liveness as a lazy metric of quality. People do this too. So something that's constantly pushing out trivial releases looks more alive.

I've seen instances where improvements and updates are made to existing systems that works just fine. The reason being optimization of resources like time, manpower and money.

But these improvements create new problems in the system that requires another iteration of improvements and updates.

It either that or the intuitive nature of the system is compromised. This creates a very unpleasant experiences that makes no sense.

Another important reason that comes to mind is unrealistic expectations from the IT industry. I've seen customers asking for features that adds no benefit to their business and they want it just because it's out there and they want in. Customers these days want everything. They want an amazing UI, light speed data transmission, quantum level security, and a sophisticated technology stack. They want all this in 1 month. The IT industry is so dense in countries like India that even though these people know this isn't possible, they still promise a product to the customer for fear of losing a valuable business venture.

This inturn results in a half cooked product that seems to have everything the customer requested but whose stability and usability isn't vouched for. More and more updates are promised to solve the issues with the product since "this is an iterative evolving solution".

I will probably attract a lot of downvotes for this, but are programmers really as innocent as to be not even mentioned among the possible culprits?

I suspect that there is some sort of short-circuit between the clients (those that ask for features) and the programmers (both the "software architects" and those that actually implement the apps/sites).

Speaking of Government issues (in these times of COVID-19) there are certain categories here in Italy (restaurants, hotels, cinemas and similar places) that have by Law the need to check customers' "green pass" (officially EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC)).

This can be done exclusively through an app (Apple or Android) written by what is loosely the IT branch of the government.

What the app does is simply scanning the QR code and check the validity of the pass (by some algorithmn and checking also a sort of blacklist).

There is no technical reason on earth why this could have not been made OS/device independent, or at least the Irish (EIRE) one is a "normal" site[1] that works on any recent browser.

Questions are:

1) was it the government asking for a dual (iOS/Android) app (and no site)?

2) or was the SOGEI (the government connected IT firm that wrote the apps[2]) to decide to NOT make such a site?

[1] https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/

[2] BTW the actual Android app at least - cannot say the iOS one - needs a relatively recent Android version, cannot remember exactly, probably 8, so that using your old phone wouldn't do.

The internet you have in mind is from corporations for corporations.

Humans are the livestock.

And as the corpos are huge, Conway predicts so will be the webpages. (=> 'Website obesity crisis' https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

One thing is IMO that internet became victim of its own success and grew too big. You don't have physical constraints in it and you can grow almost infinitely.

Previously you'd have a bunch of users and mostly somehow tech literate. Now ~everyone is on the net. Most successful companies grew too much and with 1B+ users, each company will have tens of millions of users who are tech illiterate / harmful / scammers. Designing for such a massive user base and dealing with all this requires either enormous fleet of support staff, or "works for 90%" attitude powered by shitty AI which is unfortunately what happens.

And then once you have 100k smart and motivated employees, everyone wants to move the needle a bit, hence everything changes ~weekly in every product. It's super easy to add new things and release in prod, much easier than before (better deploy monitoring tooling and practices etc.)

Firstly - software is too cheap to ship, and has removed the economic incentive for quality.

Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money. Broken software would be publicly embarrassing and long-lived. Some users might never update and just think your software sucked. So we had to try harder to get software right up front, to test in advance and write code that would make it function in difficult situations.

But with no marginal cost to shipping, businesses experiment with the question "how shoddy can our engineering be while still turning a profit?" and "what features can we add for our profit, even if it obstructs or hurts users?". They run those experiments daily now.

I believe this has successfully brought down quality norms in almost all categories of software: UIs respond in 100s or 1000s of ms as standard, not 10s. You lose your train of thought often with bad UIs, and they're all differently bad.

Secondly - a user in 2021 is less likely to be the person directly supporting the author of that software.

So the users' decision to use (or bin) the software for the long run doesn't need to be core of any software business' success. They can be compelled into using bad software by network effects (I know, pioneered by 90s Microsoft but the internet turbo-charged this). That's not just about evil business models; bad government or banking software has forced lots of people to bad software who never wanted a computer in the first place.

Thirdly - the other surprising evil from the network is the end of data ownership. After all the fuss 20 years ago about the politics of the MS Word file format, many users can't reliably separate data from the application that processes it any more. File format interoperability (whether reverse-engineered or open) used to be a smart way in for new competitors - do more things with your old data. Now that's impossible without continued cooperation of the companies producing the data. APIs to online data are treacherous and only kept around while they serve the business, not its users. So many "experience" apps aren't even clear what data they keep for you, and the law is still catching up.

Don't get me wrong, it's (maybe) a good thing that there are more people in 2022 doing things with software than there were in 2002. It's very often enabling. But the ideal of a computer being a tool or a "bicycle for the mind" is something you have to choose & fight for now.

(OS security & power management "innovation" is the other end of this rant, but for another day :) )

Incentive structure. There is no incentive to favor users. Engineers are measured by KPIs that are decoupled from user experience. Managers have similar measures. Investors are concerned with value measured by quantities unrelated to user experience, especially when they want fast returns regardless of how people experience the product. As far as I can tell, there is no incentive on any side that favors users: just incentives that favor developers, managers, and investors. Users grudgingly get dragged along because they need or want the product, and given no alternative, accept it. That acceptance is misconstrued as satisfaction.

Fundamentally it is about GUI toolkits and design, and those get chucked for fashion yearly now.

It used to be five year cycles, but now with the web toolkit du jour and constant web "standards" churn, it happens even faster.

And that's without the hipster "design" fads like material design and flat design and all that jazz.

UIs are a variant of the halting problem: unlike a lot of fixed input/output systems like CLIs and other things that programmers love, any non-trivial UI will rapidly cycle out of control in terms of making a good testability, and that's for code that is fundamentally a lot more difficult to get up and running for even the base use cases.

HTML in the beginning attempted to solve that with its simple forms. Well, those got chucked out for ... whatever it is we have now. I'm not saying that the HTML basic form wasn't flawed, but for the standards bodies after five major revisions to the HTML standard to not do anything and basically just say "here's CSS and javascript if you want validation or multiple buttons or anything that powerbuilder had back in 1990" well, that's an industry failure too.

It seriously flabbergasts me that we had powerbuilder and a lot of the VB stuff cranking out pretty sophisticated interfaces on 486s and pentiums and we are still spinning our wheels 30 years later with 100-1000x the computational firepower.

Open source has been serving big tech for the past 15 years. Millions of man-hours to build better tools for the cloud overlords. Structure everything to fit the needs of amazon and apple, not the little guy who self-hosts a forum. Mozilla was abandoned. There is no open-source mobile phone. The web became a bad fascimile of mobile app platforms. Google doesn't care to integrate touch-interfaces and functionality in the browser. Academia jumped in the cloud as well.

Why do we even need the internet at this point? Google has stored all the content and amazon and cloudflare carry all the traffic. They 'd be far better off with optimized proprietary centralized protocols instead of the distributed mess that is tcp/ip.

Maybe that's what the internet needs, competition from another network

We also need to be able to pay for little stuff. Remember game arcades? All you needed to play a game was a coin, anonymous, impersonal, not-tracked, easily accessible and effortless to use, and it made them sustainable. Try to ask your users for $1, it's entirely impossible considering the fees and dangers involved. We need anonymous mini transactions like this for the internet. Browsers should implement it, and it can be secured with legal limitations (e.g. your wallet cannot spend more than $200/month on websites).

Greed and idiocy. Same as always. I think we were luckily sheltered from it for a long time in technology for many reasons - VC funding with long horizons meant no immediate pressure to monetize, lower revenues, salaries and higher entry bars kept greed and idiocy out. Now the VC funded businesses need to show returns and the $$$ is attracting all the wrong people.

I think it's mainly the last point. They got their marketshare, there's nothing more to gain. Any non-digital alternatives have dwindled. So they shift from attracting more customers to extracting more money from us. Tracking, targeted advertising etc on top of subscription plans. Double/Triple dipping to keep increasing their profits.

The main ones are adversarial space and the destruction of location.

- The Internet makes every location logically adjacent; if you know the domain name or IP, you can access it

- Some users are malicious and will leverage that logical adjacency to harm users

Every user is therefore stuck playing a measure / countermeasure game against a perpetual threat, no matter what they're trying to do.

A sort of “computer interface claustrophobia” felt when using mobile phones is part of the reason, I think.

Lack of space, like lack of time, is stressful.

Also, the web became a more professional and commercialized environment, which brings its own problems.

> Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and [sic] unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.

—Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore in The Medium Is the Massage - An Inventory of Effects

> Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

Because in the process of 'enhancing the experience' everybody forgot to ask the user.

Classical example - A/B testing.

In the ideal world it means what if some change is introduced then it would be tested on a small subset of users.

In our world A/B testing means what there would be two changes and one with less complaints would be chosen.

"But, but I did that the right way!" somebody would say? Well, if you did A/B testing right, that doesn't means you got the right conclusions from it: if you had only 2% (or even 0%) of complaints on some change that doesn't means you are needed to do that change.

It is sometimes so blunt and evident what you are at loss for words. Eg: the logon page of my bank. After a major redesign a couple of years ago (from a ~2008 style) it was a subject for at least 5 "improvements" since that, all accompanied with "for your experience we did blaablabla...". One time they even explicitly stated "we played with fonts". Imagine the audacity.

Do you know what functionally changed in all those minor "improvements"? Absolutely nothing.

Sometimes there was new fonts, sometimes the fonts got back, one time there showed up this stupid "You have 2 new messages!" notification (ON A LOGON SCREEN OF A BANK WEBSITE FFS!) and all other times I don't even know what (if anything) was changed, because my logon experience wasn't changed a bit. Btw, the colorful, giant photo of some mountains serving as the page wallpaper doesn't show up in the Firefox with a strict security settings, means it's get loaded from some unsecure/unapproved (CORS?) location (and what these idiots doesn't test their site in FF).

But both the PR dept and Web design team DOES THE THING for a couple years, both are running successful A/B tests, both are having good KPIs (selected by themselves I suppose) and both... forgot to ask the user if their changes are actually needed.

I would guess as:

1. For a lot of companies that have sites running the site is not their primary business. E.g. bank's business is not their site. Surely, their customers (maybe majority of them even) use the site, but that's not what they came to the bank for, that's something they are forced to endure to get their loan, access to their money, their credit card account, etc. Consequently, no motivation to improve UX.

2. A lot of companies that do run their business via the site, they are big enough so that losing any particular customer is below rounding error for them. If you're mad at Amazon for scammy products, what you're going to do, use... what exactly? Not many sites have as wide catalog as Amazon, and can seriously threaten to take their customers. Consequently, no incentive to improve. Also, automatic problem handling tool cost much less than live support (that would demand benefits, complain about working conditions, and generally cause headache) - and if that costs 1% of customers wrongly banned, the cost is acceptable. In any case, not a lot of people would abandon Amazon because there's 1% chance they'd be banned by mistake - and in fact, nobody even knows how big the chance is anyway.

3. A lot of seemingly independent sites are actually owned by the same company (travel industry is notorious for that). So, if you don't like the UX on the site A, and take your business to the site B, you're didn't take your business anywhere in reality, you're just moved to the next isle at the same store. Same consequences.

4. Scammers are much more motivated to scam than services are motivated to fight them. If a scammer scams Google, they get $$$BIG BUCKS$$$ (or at least make a living). If Google catches a scammer, practically nothing changes in anybody's bottom line. Consequently, you get scammy search results.

5. Not changing anything and just keeping everything worked as it worked before rarely gets people promoted. Reworking the whole site and successfully implementing a buzzword technology and completing a project with 100 people involved in time and under budget - just might. Consequently, unnecessary redesigns all around.

I've thought for a while that this kind of change for the sake of change is fuelled by the number of employees in the companies involved. The ratio of developers you need to build an application vs maintaining one is huge. That creates an incentive for companies to keep building.

Out of the perspective of Agencies (Outsourcing) each working developers generates revenue. Product companies can choose to either keep their employees and keep building, or simply let a huge chunk of them go. Letting a huge number of people go (mass layoffs) is generally seen as a bad thing. So they go the other route. Keep the employees around and have them working - building new stuff.

> Having gained their audience share, Amazon and Google have switched from a 'customer is king' perspective to one which suits their business model most.

At least for Google most of the time the end user is not the customer, the advertiser is.

This has various reasons, one of them being economics, another one being end user psychology.

Also for Amazon this is more and more becoming the case, as sellers and businesses using their services contribute much more to Amazons margin than an end user does.

The rest follows pretty much automatically from the internal incentive structures of those companies, which are dominated by share value increases.

The reason? Too many users.

If you don’t want to tolerate something there’s always another user who will. We think of users as more like cattle that have to be herded through various funnels and protected from wolves (hackers).

That's the way you make money on the internet. Count on slow frog boil syndrome and decreasing expectations of your clientale. For example there was an app I liked a lot (free game) . At first there were no ads, just a donate button in the settings. Then a sliver text ad. Then page ads between screen loads that were enforced at about 15 seconds each (or so). And then ads you had to click off randomly as the game would stop and pop them up seemingly randomly. Obviously I gave up the game.

Users are not prioritized, obscene wealth is (usually for founders, and less so for employees). What do investors want: warm fuzzies or cold, hard cash? Follow the incentives.

I think it's mostly which services you are choosing to use, a choice that may or may not be explicit. You don't have to put up with bullshit on the Internet. It's about drawing a line in terms of what you will allow, and saying no to the services that cross that line.

If someone offers a service that is useful, but does so in a way that is annoying, you can just say "thanks but no thanks" and be on your merry way. Few do, but again, it's a choice.

I think of the Internet as a subculture, like a music scene: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

It started with geeks working in labs doing cool shit with computers on government grants. They figured out the technical aspects. This is circa 1980 and earlier.

Then came the early adopters. They recognized the potential and wanted nothing more than to do cool shit with computers, and so they did. They used the technology invented by the geeks with the same spirit of the geeks, for they themselves were geeks. This was circa 1990.

Next came the mops. They saw early adopters and geeks doing cool shit, and wanted to do cool shit too, but they lacked the wherewithal to do it. But they stuck around because they were happy enough to watch others while they did cool shit. This was circa 2000.

Next came the sociopaths, who said things like "They trust me — dumb fucks". And that was it, that was the beginning of the end. Once the sociopaths came on the scene, everything good about the scene was done. No longer was the scene about doing and watching cool things; it was about sociopaths extracting value from "dumb fucks" who didn't know any better, and there were plenty of them at that point. The geeks were powerless to stop them - the technology was well thought-out and commoditized. Other geeks were then in the employ of sociopaths, executing their will. This was circa 2010.

And really, at this point the sociopaths control so much of the space (as they always end up doing, because that's what they aim to do and no one tries to stop them) that they can just pay geeks to reshape their creation in the sociopath's image (see Web 3.0). This is where we are now.

What usually happens at this point is a long, slow decline of the scene as the sociopaths take over and wage a scorched-earth campaign in search of profits. Everything is monetized to the hilt until there's nothing left. If at any point there is an aspect that remains unexploited, it will soon be exploited by a waiting sociopath. This is the future of the Internet.

That's my theory at least. The Internet is user hostile because the people who own the biggest chunks of the Internet really do view you as a "dumb fuck" that deserves to be exploited.

I feel like one reason might be prioritizing short term profit over long term profit. I read a lot that it's about profit maximization - but I think that's not necessarily true. Facebook for example, is likely hurting itself right now and will become irrelevant in the long term and loose their business. Execs care about quarterly growth more than growth over the next few years.

As a funny (to me at least) piece of anecdata:

I've never worked at a startup that wasn't either in the middle of or planning a UI redesign.

Because the AI is designed to maximise revenue and profit growth and is otherwise completely indifferent to societal consequences.

Software is never finished. There are always new features to be added, tech debt to be serviced, security and functionality updates to be put in place, new technologies to try out, to see if they help.

No UI is perfect. Even if it was, the perfect UI for today may be awful the day after tomorrow. Perfection is a moving target.

The rise of AB testing and releasing often is probably somewhat to blame. It turns out that if you have a good, popular product that you can push your users to their limits. I've seen so many tests that resulted in lower NPS scores but increased usage, revenue, and other metrics.

The primary reason - there is a lot more money in the system than in the 90s. As a consequence, there is a lot more scammers, spammers and hackers. As a consequence, companies built defences, inconvenient for the users. There is a never ending arms race, of which we are the victims.

Another reason is lack of creativity from smaller developers that copy the dark patterns that have become endemic of the larger websites like Amazon, Google, and AirBnb. Many smaller developers mistakenly look up to these “leaders” for guidance on how their software should work.

> * Release Often as KPIs for developers

Not likely. Release often as a KPI usually just means that a few more bugs get shipped and bugfixes get shipped faster. Poorly designed features are usually results of poor design and nothing else.

> Payment Security and Financial Regulations

Not really. Sure, opening a bank account is painful, but setting up the app shouldn't be. I've had three different experiences: Chase (easy), Huntington Bank (security theatre abusurdium), and a Credit Union (easy). It all comes down to 2FA implementation - Huntington has a poorly designed authenticator registration flow.

> Patch-work nature of ID & Verification... Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules and Authentication Apps have been patched onto the original user/pass system

Yes, and it mostly works pretty well. It is telling that no one way has really caught on as the way to do it, but there seems to be broad agreement that a click verified email address is an acceptable identity. I'm not sure there's much better. What does a store know about a buyer in the real world, anyway? Physically present, with cash in hand... good enough.

> KPI switch from customer first to business model first

When has it ever been anything other than business enablement? Ecommerce has always been "customer self service" and many a support site has been built to reduce headcount in customer service. Some companies are good at this stuff, and others are not. Just like in the real world. What is changing at Google and Amazon is the focus is now squarely on making money, so losing money for long periods of time is no longer acceptable. In fact, their focus on mining profit from their users is creating opportunities around the edges... which will give rise to some very capable competitors over time.

The business model is data/network lock-in. Everything is optimized to prevent users from switching, not solving users' problems.

I think it's because users don't pay for anything; it's valuations based on ad exposure, or expectations based on size of user base.

Great question! I was thinking about it lately a lot and what I realised is very simple: Developers can’t code great user experiences without an understanding of UX first. How many companies you know which invest in educating devs UX? I know one company from hundreds.

There are a lot of ways of defining each of these, and the number of hands-in-agreement will probably depend on the minutiae of each definition.

FWIW, I think your last point is the most relevant. It's hard to delve into this sort of thing without stepping into decades/centuries old rhetorical cliches but... let's anyway.

Industries, companies, markets and such go through eras. In the early 1920s, auto manufacturing was on a tear. 20th century factory efficiencies had matured, with prices dropping meaningfully every year. The market had matured. People learned to drive. Mechanics existed. Financing existed. Roads developed. Everyone wanted a car, but not everyone had one yet.

Possibly not without coincidence, the start of the great depression coincided with the end of this era. In this and later eras, everything was different. Margins were lower. Prices stopped dropping. Cars-as-fashion. Planned obsolescence, either mechanical or fashionable existed. International expansions became important. Etc.

Not everything about auto-manufacturing post 1927 was bad. But, a great many wonderful aspects of the youthful era were gone. "Consumer friendliness" is, perhaps, one of them.

TLDR, We probably wouldn't be wondering these things about pfizer, citibank or the Walgreens Boots Alliance.

Modern day internet is all about extracting value ($$$) from user for as long as possible and by all the means necessary.

If the company offering the product/service cannot extract value (again: $$$) from you, you're worthless.

Because dumb people (including me) click on ads and buy stupid shit.

but it’s not? do you actually remember 2005? Online shops, online banking, online food delivery, online payments, they ALL used to suck majorly.

Let's not forget the endless bloat. Multimegabyte sites, spinning loaders and that's before the 3rd party resources are loaded.

Money

For one thing, why is the text of posting light grey on greyish background? It's almost unreadable on a phone.

Because

a) the user is generally no longer also the customer.

b) quality of user experience is generally no longer the main driver for actual use

The web experience is hostile due to its capture by megacorps that are too powerful to be regulated.

The internet is a different issue. I have a great experience with my new fiber connection, SSH and Wireguard VPNs are all good. The persistence of smaller, calmer and noncommercial networks like Signal Messenger, XMPP, Matrix Mastodon and Gemini show that positive interactions on the 'net are possible when commercial imperatives are dampened or removed.

The Web, though, is a corporate capitalist dumpster fire.

1. Maximization of profits.

2. Attempts to regulate and attempts comply with regulations.

The rest are just forms of these phenomena.

I think it's because we were never human here. Meaning we were never embodied.

Walk into a store or a house in the natural world, and people there know you're human, because you're embodied. We aren't online.

Here we are "users," "clients," "visitors," "the audience," "eyeballs" "data subjects" (GDPR) or "consumers" (CCPA). Entities embodied as servers are lords of their castles on the Web. We're just serfs, with no more rights or abilities than each of those grants separately.

The best we become instantiated (though only by implication human) is when we get "accounts" with server operators. Yet, with every account we add, we lose a little more of the agency that arises from autonomy and independence. We have measures of both those graces in the natural world, where we are embodied. But we don't here. And, as others in this thread point out, it is extremely easy to take boundless advantage of our structural vulnerabilities. And to normalize that in the extreme as well.

Of course the wizards among us can spin up personal servers, "own" (actually, rent) personal domains, and stuff like that; but the old client-server model is stacked against the world's muggles and only a bit less so against the wizards, since wizards also need their accounts with the networked world's alpha operators.

The best way to solve this, IMHO, is by developing business and technical solutions that can only come from our side, the human side. I list fourteen of those here https://customercommons.org/solutions/ .

When you’re paying rooms full of developers top 1% salaries, something’s gotta give.

Some of these are strong, unpopular opinions.

My question in return would be, name me a single company other than Apple ( I am no longer a fan of Apple, but credit where credit's due ) that has a user or product mindset in Silicon Valley, or even border terms, in Tech ( or even non tech )? Excluding startups or companies that are still run by founders.

And so most CEOs are either tech oriented, or business oriented, i.e sales and marketing people. Where are the product people?

> "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

>So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product." - Steve Jobs

The first part isn't easy to understand by non-product people. If a company is making record profits. Why are they not successful? What are the inventive to further improve user experience? Or creating a better product? At the expense of additional R&D for zero bottom line benefits.

Here is another Steve Jobs quote.

>"Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.”

>"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Most business have their eyes on their bottom line, they forgot their culture, their product, and only cares about profits and revenue. It is the moment you start designing a product for your bottom line and not because you want to build a better product which may or may not be successful. ( There are plenty of flops at Apple )

The leadership, direction and strategy has to come from the Top. Which is contrary to popular belief that "execution eats strategy for breakfast". The original quote from Peter Drunker was “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but Silicon Valley and VCs in the early 10s only wants their startup to execute.

Finally, something I have suspected for long but recently became my conclusion in the past 5-6 years. Relating to the last part of the first quote

>"Have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

Or Taste. Something Silicon Valley, Tech or VC refuse to admit, and PG made a somewhat rebuttal of his past self in recent blog post.

I call these the Pepla people. Who cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola. Then there are people who can taste the difference but cant tell which one is which, and at the very top end is someone can taste the difference between Coca Cola from different part of the world and bottling technique.

There are plenty of people wearing a product person badge, but Good taste is rarely a common thing among them. It can not be accurately measured, and hence its unpopularity in Tech. You cant do A/B testing. You have to somewhat rely on your intuition.

>"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion". - Steve Jobs

“it almost calls out for returning to the 90s: walled gardens aka Compuserve experience, dedicated devices for home-banking and standalone cameras.”

Were you actually around in the 90s? The internet was not easier to use then.

Shit leadership setting wrong incentives is the reason

Because human nature is hostile and self-destructive.

The only thing anyone who controls websites cares about is profit. Nothing other than money matters in our capitalistic society. No human virtue. No social virtue. Nothing beyond money.

As some have said here, the dark patterns are thought to produce better results. Those results are profits and nothing else. Negative consequences that do not reduce profit are never considered.

Until we change to a social compact based on something more kind than the love of money, we will see nothing but evil.

donotreply@... emails, anyone?

>Captchas, Two-factor SMS, password rules

What would replace those?

Abusive/Maniac users are the problem too

Monopolies.

Greed

$$$

My perspective as someone running a small content website:

* Most users are freeloaders. Some websites are fine with offending those users to get more paying users.

* Blogspam works well enough. Few writers have the patience to do in-depth research on vacuum cleaners, so most content is poorly written or plagiarised from a better source. Most content is written by copywriters to rank a website on Google, not to spread good information.

* Stats are valuable, or at least perceived as such. This calls for tracking, and thus for somewhat compliant cookie banners. The person or department who is responsible for tracking things will necessarily want more tracking to occur.

* There is a financial incentive to recommend specific products with high commissions. It's hard to ignore how much money you're not making because of your honesty.