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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> The developer of StopTheMadness is Jeff Johnson, famous for solving the Mac OCSP appocalypse. Jeff's other software includes Link Unshortener, a Mac app that expands shortened web links, Tweaks for Twitter, a web browser extension for Mac and iOS that makes Twitter better, and StopTheScript, a Safari extension for iOS that stops all JavaScript on your selected websites.

If HCI/UX was a real thing, none of these remedial apps would be necessary, because users would have choice about how to operate the things they bought and paid for. Yet, all of these are solutions to fixing someone else's idea that they've imposed upon users. "Take back X" is slogan we're going to hear more and more of until we finally admit that consumer computing has become a battle between developers and users.

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UX is not a real thing for companies. GX is. Growth experience. Growth in revenue that is. GX and UX might overlap (for example when Chrome first came out it was just a lot faster which is a better UX) but similarly everything considered “asshole design” is also GX.

In a way you seem to be saying that companies are incapable of producing good software. Is that true? I don't think it needs to be. Or do we have different ideas of what a "company" is? Sounds like what you are calling GX is a funny way of saying greed.

I think they were just exaggerating. Of course, companies can focus on UX rather than GX if they wanted to, but many prefer to optimize for growth than user experience.

They can produce good enough software. If great software is their differentiator then it will be great. If user hostility is their strategy you get that instead. Most are somewhere in between.

Given that most of this stuff is to deal with advertising, I’d argue that users haven’t bought or paid for the content in question and that’s the issue. We love “free” stuff.

>We love “free” stuff.

Not all of us. It's just that most of the time there's no other choice.

It might be a slogan that gets advertised more, but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock.

The amount of 'taking things back' might only apply to those who 'had' things to begin with, and only a subset of those that still want to 'have' things. I fear most people neither know nor want to know about any of this.

and that's exactly why we need to "take things back". for them. for those that don't know how it was and how it should be.

Technically yes, but if you give people a choice between "no instant gratification, click 10 buttons" and "click here to trade yourself for instant gratification" the latter will still be the selected choice and everything is still the same.

most of them yes. but as captain obvious would point out, not everyone's the same. I'm not one of those users. and you're not one of those users. and I understand "taking back" as "making it possible to be ok for users like me". and I appreciate anyone that does that for whatever thing tgat can be "taken back"

> but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock.

I really don't mean to direct this at you personally, I suspect you're just repeating things you've heard, or what you think other's think, but I sincerely believe this kind of latent contempt for users needs to stop. Are we all experts on what "users don't give a crap about" here? In another thread today [1] I made a similar remark about our willingness to suppose we know how "users" feel about privacy.

This feels wrong, like the equivalent of something like racism or sexism that should have died out in the 1980s.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618884

The word “User” itself is derogatory.

I'm basing it on metrics from networks I manage (and where a signed policy is in effect that law-mandated decryption proxies are in use). The crap people will still do on such networks is baffling, and we're not talking just white collar tech workers or something like that, it's all across the board. (granted, it's only about 150k users in western EU, 10k in Africa and 25k in canada, so may not be representative of the world at large) That experience combined with the number of visitors/users for those platforms I mentioned results in what I wrote.

For you and me, we already have plenty of options, there is no 'taking it back' because we already have it. If you use Iceweasel on Debian fore example, you're pretty much there already.

This does sound like useful empirical data. I'd love to hear more but suspect you're constrained by good manners/duty (if not actual confidentiality law) to say no more. Ping me if you feel like saying more about it please.

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