In 2017, developers competed for who could create worst volume control interface | Hacker News Reader

In 2017, developers competed for who could create worst volume control interface

twitter.com

150 pointsrmason38 comments

Open articleView on HN

I actually liked the one that said: "Make a noise as loud as you want the volume to be". Seems pretty intuitive.

Sounds like hell for people using headphones at night.

I’ve often thought this is a good idea for Alexa/Google-home devices.

It’s annoying when speak to mine quietly in the morning and it responds in a loud voice that wakes the whole house.

Try "Alexa, turn on Whisper mode"

Nothing changes when you speak to her normally. But when she hears you whisper she'll answer back quietly.

As someone who comes here expecting a source of fresh high-quality content, it saddens me to see reddit style reposts on the top of the page.

I think 6 years is fair game for a repost. Not everyone has seen it.

I hadn’t seen it, but I also as a rule don’t use Reddit. I rely on HN to surface the good stuff to me. Like this!

I always loved the useless utilities competitions. Me and a Buddy made one for measuring your foot size by entering yours monitors size and dpi, putting your foot on the monitor and then adjusting a bottom and top line and then would tell you your shoe number.

8/ actually has a germ of an idea; the only way to really get accurate volume when there are multiple volume knobs (tv, soundbar, tv remote,...) is to measure with a microphone.

Even better: a volume application that measures system sound and auto-mixes output audio to fall within set tolerances around the average decibel reading of that sound.

not just systemsound but also background noise. if i am listening to an audiobook while out in the street, i frequently have to adjust the volume when the street noise gets to much.

unlike listening to music where missing some lyrics might not bother you, for a book every word counts, and if i miss something because a noisy truck just passed by then i have to skip back and repeat.

Why not just link to the original reddit thread in the tweet?

Gotta get those engagement metrics. Also it actually is nice having them all in a row in a tweet thread.

It is, until you get to all the Musk and Tate posts under the thread.

They do at the end, but using reddit is more annoying than any of those volume controls. Did you try navigating that thread? Over 400 replies and no way to conveniently filter, sort, or search. Not worth it.

> Over 400 replies and no way to conveniently filter, sort, or search. Not worth it.

HN has similar issues, although here it's minimalism by design.

I actually think they're working on it (at least the paging.) Although I also think there's no hurry, because if a thread on HN (or Reddit for that matter) is too big, it's probably also terrible.

link to old.reddit.com

That's all I use, pared down further still with RES.

Go to the Reddit link at the end of the post and tell me that that is better. I can't even find anyone's submission.

Ah I forgot most people don't have "old reddit" turned on by default. The new UI is absolutely atrocious.

I still don't see the argument for how Reddit, even its old UI, is better than someone curating the only content that you care about in one place.

If I submitted a candidate, it would be this:

Tiny bright green triangles on blue background buttons immediately next to each other without spacing.

The first button is initially volume up and the other button is volume down, except the direction of the arrows and functionality change randomly with every press or tap.

EDIT: The wheel of volume is creative.

I thought Apple already did it with QuickTime 4.0 and the thumb wheel volume dial it had:

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

That's the post-Tog era.

It's sad to say that some basic control UI I have seen are actually worse than these in totally unimaginable ways.

For example, how about some huge input latency introduced by unnecessary dizzying animations?

How about a volume bar too thin and has no hover transition it becomes irritating trying to grab?

How about rather than an easy-to-see handle, we simply use a bar with two colors, where the edge where the colors meet represent the volume level, and make the colors' contrast as low as possible?

I like #14. It teaches you the resistor color codes!

At least they are funny. The volume controls in Android and Windows are atrocious. Apparently someone decided that 10 levels shall be enough for everybody and logarithmic volume sucks.

Some of these are absolutely priceless. I like the resistor bands one.

Is it just me or is the suggested tweets at the end (that come after the thread) turned to absolute right wing madness?

I don't have a log in, and saw, Elon tweet, about 5 Andrew Tate tweets, anti trans, some sort of return to classism thing?

Funny thread but holy hell I knew twitter was making sure there was always an Elon tweet or something but.... Like it's almost like a troll what is there now!

Didn't I say Twitter would turn into Parler 2.0? It's well on its way.

It’s kind of weird that you saw those. I got to the end and saw “More Tweets” and left. I had to go back and scroll further down to even see what you were talking about.

Well, I will also in future, lesson learned here.

I guess I though the "more tweets" would have something related to the thread I was just looking at, they really didn't!

Soon after Musk took over, the tweets I received by email (which is how I primarily interacted with Twitter) started being stuffed with extreme right-wing stuff from people I definitely didn't subscribe to, like Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro. It completely changed the kind of content I was receiving from memes and interesting observations about technology from people I followed to pretty vile takes about the culture war topic of that particular day.

I unsubscribed soon after. It ruined the product for me overnight.

(I'll grant I was never really a Twitter user and didn't have friends or much a community there, I was a lurker. So it was an easier decision for me then for others.)

Solution: use nitter. No suggested tweets, no bullshit, just the thread.

https://nitter.net/0xDesigner/status/1642554817590566915

Same exact experience here

Doesn't look like right wing madness to me, though I don't tend to view the world through a political lens.

"Suggested" tweets seem to be those with unusually high like counts (compared to the poster's usual numbers) in the last 24 hours. Here are the dozen or so it displayed while my coffee was brewing:

* memorial for musician Ryuichi Sakamoto

* memorial for a dog that protected children from attack

* announcement that a football club has sacked one of its staff

* photo of a huge rhododendron in bloom and the elderly lady who planted it

* Tate saying he will resume communication via email

* video of a large moose walking along a highway

* photo French F1 drivers on strike (can't tell if real or AI)

* photo of an F1 driver stretching

* colorized photo of Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s

* physician's opinion of another physician's opinion on transgenderism

* user expressing support for Italy's ban of lab grown meat, insects on pizza, and ChatGPT

* list of keywords that caused old twitter algorithm to shadowban

* colorized video of San Francisco a few days before the Great Earthquake

Pretty benign stuff.

I got andrew tate, jordan peterson, and 'stopwoke'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com