> 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.
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.
The key is in what the word "it" means. The answers are positive if by "it" you mean "this category of product". They may very well be negative if by "it" you mean "our particular product".
The customers want a jar of salsa. They don't want, and never asked for, your particular variation of a jar of salsa, essentially identical to 10 other variations except for a differently designed label.
Another tricky bit is in the "asked for" part. For most products on the planet, customers don't really ask for anything. The market isn't structured this way. Products are just dumped on the market, and those that sell survive. This is wasteful, but has some benefits. It would just be better if marketing wasn't there to meddle with things, artificially sustaining more variations of a product than needed.
I'm gonna use one of those examples that irks me personally. Do we really need 19 different formulations of fabric softener available in another 15 different scents from 12 different manufacturers?
I'd say it's a solved problem. Make - dunno - 3 different formulations (normal, sensitive, extra soft?), and provide the scents as small and separate ampules, and let the user mix and match the apple and cinnamon, and make the place smell of a bloody apple pie after a load of laundry for all you care. People are usually already familiar with those, and have their preferences, plus it would even be fun to experiment, and make one's own blends.
Anyway.... What I wanted to say is that I hate having too much choice (especially artifical one), and I specifically hate choice paralysis.
And I'm writing this as an European. Finding myself in search of a cereal, and ending up in a typical USican giant isle consisting just of a cereals is my idea of an nightmare. I thank the FSM for Lidl existence.
The underlying cause here is unbound and often unregulated profit motive with the farse that competition self regulates. At some scales competition self regulates but at scale we see now, it simply doesn't. There are too many barriers and too strong of foothold in markets.
As a result it trickles down, how can we improve our revenue stream. More data, more ads, more nickel and diming consumers, how can we lockdown control of this product/service, charge more for the same and even more for less.
Developers are, in my opinion, just along for the ride and not making these decisions so much as allowing and enabling them to happen. In the world of professions software engineering pays quite well and it pays well for a variety of reasons. People take lucrative positions and decide, reasonably, that what they're being told or pressured to do isn't that bad. It's not like the holocaust where they're turning a blind eye to genocide, they're turning a blind eye to corporate, monopolistic, and oligopic market abuses because at the end of they day they get to live comfortably.
I develop garbage I don't agree with often. I reduced my comp level to have more leverage to haggle against questionable practices but even then I still have to do some questionable things. For developers it's a choice of following along and being paid well or taking a hit and working somewhere that comps a hit less but doesn't product hostile products. I have nothing against those who choose to enable these business practices because they're building financial security in a world we've created that says these practices are OK. Businesses are sort of doing the same but they're more proactive in shaping the policy that allows these practices, so they have real responsibility here. Consumers have a responsibility as well by continuing to buy garbage they don't need that uses these practices. Voters have some responsibility for pushing politicians in who bend to the will of businesses to allow deregulation or prevent regulation for these practices. Politicians have blame for the ethical flexibility to let lobbyists and businesses incentivize them to represent businesses more than their voter base.
We have a mess on our hands with everyone having a little bit of blame here but the biggest responsibility I believe falls on large businesses and the capital holders behind them setting most of this in motion.
If you build your culture on an ethic of competitive individualism, this is what you get.
Hardly anyone is really happy. Not even those with huge piles of money.
They're comfortable and (largely) immune to everyday threats. But the system as a whole continues to be made of traps and sharp edges. And a lot of people fall through them, never to be seen again.
Not a few were convinced it couldn't possibly happen to them, until it did.
As a career front-end developer, I take affront at this. I have never argued in favour of any of the shit people face on the web on a daily basis. I’m close to wanting to get out of the industry because the product is so toxic these days. The people are largely great, I love my current team.. but every month we’re told to add more tracking, or advertising (from Google of all people). I could leave out of political differences but where am I gonna go that’s different (in London)?
Biz: we need to track our users, stick GA on it
Me: we could do a privacy-friendly alternative which brings the data in-house. It would lower our lower our GDPR burden so our cookie notices would be simpler, and at the same time make it easier to link our user data with other metrics (I work in streaming video at the moment)
Biz: GA is free
Me: Longer term, out overall cost of development will be lower because the complexity will be lower, and you wont be leaking data about your customers
Biz: but GA is free and works out of the box with more analysis than we’d use
Me: Do you see how that actually makes it more complex, over-engineered and unfit for OUR purposes? It’s also a dog to use by the data people and they will ask for a different tool because they can’t change GA
Biz: it’s free. The deadline is three weeks.
BIZ: we want to make more money so we’ll sell advertising
Me: Ok, but content-based advertising would guve us more control over what we get linked with, doesn’t track users, lets us set our own pricing, lets us sync better with our own content (because presumably we’d be able to control the manifests better
Biz: but GA gives us an admin panel and we don’t have to think about it
Me: but the integration will take months and half of it’s out of our hands be ause Third Party
Biz: here’s the admin key they gave us…
(Ok, so I didn’t actually have these conversations and TBH I only learned the detail of sharing manifests with a third party after I joined the team.. but you get the idea).
Dont take a critique of the job title as a slight against you personally. We, frankly, don't know you.
And as a whole industry, front-end devs have implemented atrocious dark patterns and all manners of disgusting anti-user choices. Have you? Only you can answer that - but I sincerely don't care about your personal choices. This discussion was never aimed at "the_other".
I understand that you may feel affronted (and apologise for making you feel like that), but I'm actually criticising the web development as an industry and as a set of broad trends, rather than individual developers. Sometimes developers may have leverage, but from my experience in backend dev, that's rarely an option.
"In computing, native software or data-formats are those that were designed to run on a particular operating system. In a more technical sense, native code is code written specifically for a certain processor.[1] In contrast, cross-platform software can be run on multiple operating systems and/or computer architectures."
If it runs in a DOM, it's not native. Native (to me) means it uses a layout engine that's significantly different from a web browser, uses native controls relentlessly, and integrates well with the OS. Electron cannot do that. QT, C#, Lua and Python can.
I've never worked with a Javascript developer who was responsible in any way for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy. In my experience, those decisions are always made by PMs and approved by the board.
Your comment seems like an opportunistic attack on a type of developer you don't personally like rather than something that is rooted in reality.
> for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy
well, generally a JavaScript developer is just a frontend developer so I'm assuming at least some have experienced a PM saying: too many people are doing X which we don't want them to do, how do we keep them from doing X? And the developer then makes helpful suggestions.
> 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.
Ignoring the fact that Android puts its buttons in basically arbitrary places, the fact is that it's just not a very useful platform for more complex tasks. It can do less, so there's not much to master. Windows and Linux can do more, so there is more to master because they allow more complicated interactions between things inside the computer. In other words, listing an OS on your resume means that you are sort-of competent enough to pull off such tasks at all.
The reason you don't list android user on your resume is that it's very difficult to use android (or iOS) for anything beyond passive consumption of content which is not something employers want.
Also I think Windows/Office is kinda left-over from 20-30 years back when it wasn't fully standard knowledge... So it's entirely meaningless buzzword used to fill up CVs...
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.
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.
Yes, that's what I had in mind, and I suspect it's already going on to some extend with votes and follow ups, which is easier than content generation, until the later becomes so good you can let it roll free.
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.
Was (is) there any normal person who was in favor of the DMCA? Geeks knew about it and hated it; non-geeks were unaware or, if informed, hated it. It was a product of lawyers and moneyed "entertainment" industry interests.
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.
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.
Up until web 2.0 and the smart phone revolution it was mostly hardware, and mostly business. What changed was once the majority of the consumer market and attention span was tapped via ubiquitous web and mobile penetration which opened up the possibility for software companies to extract maximum value from every single consumer.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With FLOSS, the culture often looks down upon telemetry so there's an incentive not to include those because of user outcry (Audacity, ahem). Forking or patching out the offending pieces of code is also possible (see Audacity again).
Caddy v1 also came with telemetry, but it was trivial to rebuild it with the telemetry switched off. The best you can do with closed software like Windows is to apply a hack and hope it's not undone after an update.
That's true, but still, the trend of embedding spyware in FLOSS is becoming normalized. On top of that, FLOSS spyware vs. proprietary spyware is a distinction that is useful only for software developers - a subset of "tech-savvy people". Until recently, tech-savvy people could just assume that FLOSS software is free from bullshit, and both use it and recommend it to non-tech-savvy people without checking.
FLOSS or not, most software is still products, with a name and an owner. The openness could, in principle, enable a "network of slightly different forks" model of software evolution, but it didn't. There's universally a single canonical repo, with the "real" owners, and occasionally some niche forks. A fork takes over only when it can win the marketing game against the repo it forked from. So, each time an owner of the canonical repo decides to include telemetry in their project, their users who aren't software developers are screwed.
> By default, Mozilla collects limited data from Firefox to help us understand how people are using the browser, such as information about the number of open tabs and windows or number of webpages visited. This does not include data that can reveal sensitive information about users’ activity online, such as search queries or the websites users visit.
I think you are defining the term spyware too broadly.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If adware makes money, then even hardware is impacted since you can now undercut competitors. Two mice, essentially the same but $40 price tag. Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on them in the store?
> Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on them in the store?
This is why I prefer to shop online or at least do a quick search on the internet to show potential issues.
On the other hand, I would really prefer a requirement for products that are sold in a physical store to be reviewed by a government-run, independent organization on build quality and sustainability, and that this review be presented or easily accessible in a store next to the product.
We already have such a requirement in the EU for electricity usage of appliances, it could be extended to small electronic devices.
If enough people signal interest, products that do not ship with bloatware/adware could put a "no special software required" on the box/description. I would pick those in a heartbeat since vendor software is usually complete shit (even without adware).
> maintaining any support for Linux is just as a massive effort.
Is it? ALSA still works, even if routed through PulseAudio or PipeWire. X11 still works even if what you are talking to is XWayland. OpenGL still works even if there is also Vulkan now.
Even if you want to stay up to date with the audio/windowing API of the day there are libraries like SDL that will help you stay up to date.
> 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.
This is the thing that makes me most upset. I'd very happily pay more of they'd stop selling my data, but since it's always there as an option I basically have to either selfhost, be robbed, or get politically active on the topic.
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.
At least horse armor in Oblivion was DLC - basically a tiny expansion - even if cut down and sold at price / value that was outrageous compared to previous expansions. Microtractions have grown to be way more egregious since then:
- Generally locked to an account, so either not resellable or only within the Developer's market where additional profit can be extracted for each sale.
- There seem to be more and more consumable microtransactions, so you have to keep buying to get the same experience.
- Lootboxes and other gambling mechanics that mean you are not even guaranteed to get what you want when you pay.
And then we got to add gambling mechanics into "microtransactions" which weren't so micro anymore. At least with horse-armor and DLC you see what you get. With gacha and lootboxes you can't be even sure about that.
And the money is gone forever. At least with Valve who kinda made it big you can recoup some of investment if you get lucky and use it to buy other games on their platform...
> 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.
The ability to directly sell software is necessary but not sufficient to enable a software ecosystem that is not about exploiting the user.
That's why I mentioned forcing functions. Once "free" became the norm, it became impossible to even think about doing anything else. The door to conventional honest business models was closed for most software authors and vendors.
The notion of all software actually being free is a fantasy, unless you are talking only about software that can only be used by nerds. The amount of effort required to make software usable by the general public is absolutely massive. Then throw in constant UI changes, ecosystem changes, and supporting a lot of targets.
In general once the app basically works you are 10% done. The other 90% of the effort is UI/UX.
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.
Precisely. Payment processors gatekeeping the collection of small donations is soon to be a solved problem thanks to cryptocurrency. I mistrust anything that purports to enable something like this via centralised banking, primarily because it will let regulators of unrelated jurisdictions and large corporations/banks control and surveil the transactions. It's either crypto, or this.
I'm skeptical if the problem is technical about micropayments.
Let's assume we have some hypothetical zero fee universal payment platform. You CAN send a developer 3 cents because you like his work.
But now you've got the psychological barrier-- people don't want to think about spending 3 cents, even if they aren't bothered by the cost in the abstract. Then you need to make it a cultural norm-- that sending 3 cents is a legitimate gesture of gratitude and not unintentionally offensive or sarcastic.
IMO, the lack of micro (and I mean micro on order of 3 cents, like you mentioned) payment platforms is what kept such tiny donations from being normalised. My theory is that it will become normalised in certain circles, now that it's technically possible.
Even if it's a very, very thin trickle of donations, I would still take it as evidence that someone appreciates my work enough to think "hey, I should really send some money this guy's way, he's helped me out with this software/blog post". Allowing transactions on the order of single cents mitigates the psychological barrier of making some donation at all to the highest extent possible.
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.
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.
Right, that's partially my point. My unwitting grandparents are precisely in the set of "universally", and they didn't know nor care by whom these apps were distributed.
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.
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.