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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Also stop treating your users like idiots. The "Something went wrong" of Microsoft products is just offensive when it doesn't even show you the error code - it's basically saying that you're too stupid to understand, so we're not going to show you exactly what happened. I'd maybe understand if it was just MS Word doing this, but when an Xbox Devkit does that, which you know - by definition - only professionals can have and use, then it's worse then useless, it's actively condescending.

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Nah, it's just that Microsoft doesn't understand it either. That's why it's just logged as a damn guid in the event log, that exactly one other person on the planet has encountered and no one on the Microsoft forums have responded.

> Microsoft forums

"Just run dism and sfc /scannow. It will surely fix your problem. Kindly mark my response as the answer."

You forgot the introduction.

"Hi, I'm Greg and I've been a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. I'm happy to help you out."

To be fair, googling windows error codes is borderline impossible with all the shitty tech support websites.

I think it shouldn't be done for dev tools of course, because devs are the ones that need to see the errors.

“The error code 0xwhatever usually means you have a bad driver. We suggest you run dism and sfc, and if that doesn’t work, buy our software!”

You have no idea how much this speaks to me.

I have a broken installer. I get some random error. Googling suggests I need to reinstall the software... whose installer I am trying to debug. Gee whiz never could have thought of that!

Wait, those “articles“ still exist?

The ones where you search how to resize an image, and the very helpful guide on coolmagictech.com tells you somewhere around the 2nd step to download and run the CoolMagic® MagicResizer™ tool?

I haven’t seen one of those in like 5 years… But then again, I also haven’t used nor troubleshot Windows in those 5 years. Might be a correlation there?

They absolutely still exist and clog up search results.

You know, a while back a friend of mine was involved in a criminal case and needed to hand in messaging data to the police as evidence. Problem was, they did not want to hand in the whole phone but the app didn't provide any mechanism to get message history to your PC. The app was not globally popular enough to have publicly disseminated solutions.

Time was at a premium and the one option seemed to be one of those sketchy Windows app at an equally sketchy website where you could buy the software via cc. I explained the risks to my friend who decided to give it a shot (on a clean Windows install which was later wiped, of course).

It worked, just as advertised. We got all the data in a usable enough format. Surprisingly enough.

I always feel bad for companies like that because you're sitting there going "omg this is totally a scam, I'm absolutely going to get my card stolen", and some wee guy in Chechnya is sitting there going "oh hey, my fourth sale of the year, think I'll buy a sandwich and coffee with my massive winnings!"

I always do a double-take at the "something went wrong" messages from MS and the dinosaur browser errors in Chrome, because they trip the same part of my brain that's been trained to notice phishing emails.

Microsoft products always treat you as stupid. That's a hallmark of their UI design.

The average Windows user is far from being tech-savvy (I’m not going to call them stupid).

That's not the point - if my mum gets an error trying to do something, showing her "something went wrong" is not helpful in any way shape or form. Without even a hint of an error code, I can't help her either even if she calls me and asks for help.

Recently I have this issue with my energy supplier, every time I try to change tariff in the app(like they tell you to) I just get "uh oh something went wrong". Like......that's condescending to the maximum.

Yep. And sometimes it's my fault too! Like, if I was fucking with the router settings to do something but then forgot about it, I'd appreciate “your internet doesn't work, idiot” over “uh oh, something went wrong :(”

Same goes for redditors who need to end their sarcastic messages with /s tag. Okay, so you passively assumed I am too much of an idiot to miss your sarcasm. I will always downvote these posts.

Strange take in the context of Poe's Law

And yet there are 10x the responses of people who clearly didn't get the sarcasm, which comes across textual interfaces way worse than face to face.

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