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Comment by d357r0y3r | Hacker News Reader

> It is so, so easy, to be living and working in big cities like Toronto (me), SF (a bunch of you), NY, Chicago, et cetera, and truly forget the context of the absolutely awful experience a lot of people have online outside of these urban epicentres.

To be fair, many urban companies are designing for urban and suburban users. Your advanced analytics dashboard product is not for Cletus in rural Alabama.

If 30% of your target users don't have broadband, then you should design with that in mind. If 0.01% of your users don't have broadband, then you should ignore them.

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If you make your site completely unusable for 30% of people, no matter how many try to use it, they'll end up making up a miniscule portion of your user base, which you'll then use as justification for ignoring them.

Which can be ok. There's no ethical duty to make websites for literally everyone.

Accessibility is a different issue of course, but to illustrate my point: I have never translated my websites to Chinese, making them unusable for 1/7th of the world population. I don't think it's necessarily a failure on my part.

Well, yes, you didn’t communicate it in Chinese. But did you make the text easily machine identifiable? Was the source language indicated? That would allow their browser to offer the ability to translate.

You didn’t intend it for a blind audience, but they’re certainly capable of reading the text. Did you avoid making the text actively toxic to screen readers?

Many of the whiz bang features on new sites, ostensibly because “users want features!”, hinder even this functionality. It’s fair to criticize this as a regression.

I use a browser extension that lets me click links and buttons from the keyboard. The more bleeding edge they make the sites, the less I can use this feature. That’s not an improvement.

It's not worth it to gain 30% more customers by spending 10x the original development time micro-optimizing everything.

But it would be better to gain that 30% of customers by not doing a shit job in the first place. This was the point of the presentation. Not doing a shit job doesn't take that much more effort.

A really important addition to this would be: it has to have been from the start.

The issue is that so many projects have not been designed with these ideas from the outset, that it indeed usually does take a mammoth amount of re-engineering and dev time to make these kinds of changes and optimizations after the fact.

Which is exactly why I cringe - often visibly - at any suggestion that a duct-tape-and-bubble-gum "MVP" is in any way/shape/form acceptable. That "prototype" will end up being the final product because dev teams have a tendency to accumulate technical debt like gangbusters.

To continue with the mediocre carpentry analogies floating around: a (competent) carpenter doesn't build a sturdy table by first building a shitty table and reinforcing it later.

I’m going to take a bigger view of this and you can say it’s “rather convenient”, but I’m not concerned about the experiences of a group of our society that is the biggest resource drag. I’ve had it with rural inhabitants. We already subsidize the shit out of their lifestyle, and now we’re expected to accommodate their Luddite-centric tech access? We need fewer people on the outskirts and more people in cities. The fucking planet is dying.

We should be incentiving people to live closer, not spending 90% of our time on them.

The "fucking planet is dying" because big corporations in their big-city HQs are strangling it to death in the name of short-term profits. Rural areas don't (typically) have the sheer abundance of smokestacks and cars and refrigerators and spray cans Swiss-cheesing the ozone layer. They're certainly not helping by any means (agriculture-driven deforestation is certainly a problem, but not really one in the US, at least not anymore), but that pales in comparison to urban pollution.

But sure, go ahead and blame the dirty country folk for not being able to reliably access your shittily-designed-and-implemented website. God forbid there are people who don't feel like breathing smog all day and existing in perpetual abject misery.

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