He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of their ignorance.
You say "people" as though you don't put up with it too...
It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets, through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.
The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.
We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things are", and then go one of several ways:
- Accept and/or support the status quo
- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.
- Try to work with others to change things for the better.
The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called "humanity" one excruciating step at a time.
Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now, and not forever.
I think you only captured half of the picture in this comment. Yes, there's ton of crap created because we screw up implementation. But then there's another ten tons of crap created on purpose.
Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was easier in the pre-smartphone/early smartphone era than it is today.
I blame the same force that gave us our progress - capitalism, the market economy, and the mindset it promotes among management. In established markets, all the easy things have already been solved - you can't win any more customers by creating quality products. You have to squeeze money out of perfectly working things. This is where the engine of capitalism stops being aligned with humanity's needs.
There's a business term for all that crap - "value-added". When you see some "value-added" thing it means that the company is about to shit on you to get more money, either from you or someone else. We didn't have that much crapware on computers until vendors realized they could get paid by third parties by bundling their worthless (for end-user) crap. It's a gamble that worked well for the companies - people will deal with crap because they don't have any other choice, and vendors get more profit.
Then there's completely purposeful degradation. Some of the things we had much better 60 years ago than today: shoes, clothes, kettles, lightbulbs, utensils, kitchenware, various home appliances. Sure, they weren't that shiny and plastic, they didn't have an army of "designers" behind them, but they fucking worked and they still fucking work today. I still have a microwave bought ~20 years ago in Sweden, and it fucking works and never had a single glitch. My grandfathers have equipment bought when they were young, whereas my shoes and clothes degrade within half a year or less.
This is the problem. We know very well how to make good things. But making good things is not profitable compared to shitting on your customers.
If we were buying a product/service, I firmly believe we would see incremental improvements, which things generally getting better each iteration (with the occasional mis-step).
However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything.
People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we have to throw all that out because we are trying to capture mindshare for mousetrapping on mobile.
> If we were buying a product/service, I firmly believe we would see incremental improvements, which things generally getting better each iteration (with the occasional mis-step).
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
If you are philosophically inclined, you realize that art is one of the few exceptions to that. Artists are people that try to achieve perfection in a way that ordinary society doesn't allow.
Because art is done for it's own sake, not to sell it. As a painter you don't get offers from third parties that are willing to pay you for including their logo on your work.
Putting up with annoyances on the web is nothing compared to real life. Ever tried immigration? Unless one has lots of money (most people don't) and hire very experienced, super fancy lawyers (most people can't afford), it is one of the most painful, demoralizing and expensive (even without the lawyers) process one can go through. How about the judicial system? healthcare? And so on.
At least we have options on the web, plus the option to improve/fix things (relatively speaking). He can always send his photos as attachments in an email, or put them up on dropbox and send the link etc. Offline? Different story altogether.
That is why people put up with things online. When you get used to real life crap, these problems online seem small.
It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware, or most of the mobile apps being useless and ugly and broken. I think most of the people just don't expect anything better, blindly accepting whatever is there because they can't imagine that technology could actually be good.
I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
I've seen many times where users have incredibly patience with tedious things --like entering their git password all the time, instead of setting auth keys.
I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
Because they don't have a choice, so they don't expect anything else. Only the technical folks know how and where to buy a clean computer. Hell, the first computer the younger generation bought themselves was most likely already loaded with a ton of such crap, and that sets the baseline of their expectations.
Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).
People like PC World in the UK, as its the closest they have top a normal shopping experience.
I always told friends to go to the small independent shop over the road where they will get a better deal. But then they have to speak to someone who will baffle them with jargon. Its far easier to see the 40% discount offer (from the initially high prices) as some sort of bargain. I have wasted hours uninstalling crap from PC World machines. One came with 3 firewalls and it wouldn't connect to the internet.
It's a result of having no other options. It seems like 80% of websites suck in one way or another to the point where it's refreshing and impressive when a company's website actually meets your needs. "Oh my god! Look at that! I can actually click "remember this next time" and that actually works!" "What??! I can tab through this form in correct order and actually use my keyboard to select my DOB?" "Oh my god, that actually filled in information for me based on the account that I'm logged into? What is this? 2080?!"
Your response is reasonable, but what's frustrating is not that software has bugs. What frustrating is when something that worked well enough before gets a whole slew of bugs that could have been avoided by simply not adding unwanted features.
Here's an update to the piece of software that you had enjoyed using and had incorporated into your daily workflow. It has a whole bunch of features you didn't want and the new interface is so complicated and intrusive and buggy that it renders the whole thing nearly worthless. Something that worked well for you before has been taken away for no discernible reason. Becoming enraged at this may not be rational, but it is human nature.
I don't think is ignorance, but I think is mostly a lack in a better solution to compare with. I mean, if you have something that works great (in any field, not just tech), you take it as yardstick. If you don't have a real super-nice-outstanding solution to compare with, you will be always ok with what's coming, even if it's the worst implementation ever made.
I agree with 90% of the points in the article, but I also know that others have implemented similar solutions and only fews have, instead, tackled the same problems with a different, better implemented, solutions.
Anyway, the most annoying example is Skype, I really hate the "oh it looks like is a Live Account, redirecting..." flow, it's annoying.
