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Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Hammocks4All@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

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[–] kotauskas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's a young field and we're still entrenched in the consequences of the sort of mistakes that, in a few hundred years, will become "those silly things people used to do because they didn't know better".

Daily reminder that the web is a mess of corpo bullshit piled on top of 90s tech and most OSes currently in use are culturally from the early 80s.

[–] AdNecrias@lemmy.pt 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is that a thing that goes away? I think a lot of fields still have that silly things being done even closing in a half millennia on the industrial revolution. You still have tons of screw head sizes and types! Why such diversity!

[–] kotauskas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The screw heads are mainly to prevent people from tampering with stuff they aren't supposed to unscrew. Hard drives, for example, all use the same star-shaped heads that most people don't have screwdrivers for.

I do think that people passionate about information technology – those who love it for the intrinsic awesomeness and not the money it brings – could break away with some of the legacy bullshit that holds back the quality of the software we use, if they were given the opportunity to defy software "tradition" and the profit motive. As of now, there is no systemic path forward, only occasional improvements incited by acute inadequacy of existing conventions for the growth of interested businesses.

[–] AdNecrias@lemmy.pt 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Whole that's true, you have Philips and flat heads and ikea hex which could all be those sort of flat and star that are for common people that could be more universal.

About software were a lot freeer, because if it doesn't have hardware and specially infrastructure requirements, such as the whole Internet layers or new visualisation devices you're open to change things up a lot.

[–] smallpatatas@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will 'cam out' (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out

Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they're great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they've been painted over.

Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun