Asklemmy

44129 readers

362 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

188

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

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CookieOfFortune 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’m not sure Windows is a good example here since they’re historically well known for backwards compatibility and fixing obscure bugs for specific hardware.

Whereas Linux famously always had driver support issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Backwards compatibility - yes I agree, it's quite good at it.

Hardware specific issues for any OSes - disagree. For windows that's 80-90% done by the hardware manufacturer's drivers. It's not through an effort from Microsoft whether issues are fixed or not. For Linux it's usually an effort of maintainers and if anything, Linux is famous for supporting old hardware that windows no longer works with.

But the point I was making is not to say Linux or osx is better than windows or vice versa, it's that windows holds by far the largest market share in desktops and neither of the alternatives are really drop-in replacements. So in the end they have no pressure on them to improve UX since it's infeasible to change OS for the majority of their users at the moment.

[–] CookieOfFortune 1 points 2 months ago

In terms of driver development it’s more collaborating than just Windows releasing an API and the manufacturers creating the drivers. Bug reports from large manufacturers are absolutely taken seriously. Customers usually never see this interaction.

I would say maybe 1990-2010 was really a dominant time for Windows and that was also when they were actively improving, but now they have plenty of competition. It’s just that people have moved away from desktops. Mobile platforms are now an existential threat. Fewer and fewer people are buying desktops to begin with. Maybe Microsoft has given up on desktops and that’s why they’re making Windows worse.