Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

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Dealing with users myself has had the somewhat uncomfortable effect of making me often give the benefit of the doubt to faceless corporations over users when there's a scandal of "$service did $thing without my permission!". Frankly the empirical evidence is that it is impossible to get users to acknowledge something, short of sending a messenger to their house in person. People will ignore any forced messages and click literally any button, and the blame will always land on you

It's also why I'm marginally less annoyed now when software prevents me from doing something "for my own good", even when I know what I'm doing. Or proactively prevents "off-label" use cases, because they know that a failure to block a use case will be taken as a commitment to support it

And finally, this is also why true zero-trust encryption situations will always be a niche - almost no users can be trusted to accept the ramifications of being the sole keyholder. And that's not even starting on the users who take server message history for granted yet act outraged when they hear that Facebook does indeed have their message history, and include it in their GDPR exports as requested

My person favorite is when something pops and immediately goes away because I was in the middle of typing, clicking, etc.

Umm okay well I just agreed or disagreed to something, and I have no idea what.

Also after watching my kids, there is nothing they wouldn’t agree to onscreen if gets them to next step in whatever they are doing. Would easily sell soul for a donut.

We have a resource management UI. You could delete resources by clicking ‘delete’ then clicking ‘yes’ on the delete confirmation box.

Users complained that that’s not sufficient, “We fat finger it all the time”. Ok, we added a text box to the delete dialogue where you have to type ‘confirm’. “Guess what, we still fat finger it”. Ok, instead of ‘confirm’ you have to type the resource name, id, or type. “Hey, we still fat finger it”. Fine, you can set a resource to un-deletable in its settings, then you have to go to its settings and uncheck that before you can delete it. We get complaints about both how convoluted our delete experience is and about how people still fat finger that.

It’s hard to make everything soft-delete with undo and needing to handle all integrity and correctness between deleted, restored and newly created resources etc. Not to mention regulatory things that require actual delete. But it’s becoming more and more expected or you’re “amateurish”.

> "$service did $thing without my permission!"

> Frankly the empirical evidence is that it is impossible to get users to acknowledge something

Interesting that you changed from “permission” to “acknowledge”. If the people are not “acknowledging” whatever then that sounds like you don’t have their permission.

What kind of forced message are we talking about here?

Yeah I was really talking about two slightly different things

* Need to notify users about something (not something that requires new consent, just a service announcement like a breaking workflow change). Use emails, uncloseable banners for a month, forced modals, whatever. Users still claim they didn't see it despite proof that they had seen the modal and banner many times

* New feature exists. User explicitly enables it despite a very clear explanation of what it does and simple yes/no buttons. User clicks yes and then complains that it was enabled automatically without their permission. The stuff I work on doesn't deal much in personal data so this wasn't even legal consent, just power features that can cause harm if used flippantly

Not exclusive to development either. I hear the same stories from sysadmins on a weekly basis (of users ignoring any IT communication and clicking buttons randomly without reading, then blaming everyone but themselves). Probably similar stories from any non-tech service job too

I'm pretty sure we've trained users to click "I accept" to basically any permissions popup or notification on any application.

s/we/Microsoft/

I just took some time at actually configuring a MS Windows VM I "care" about, after not really having paid attention to Windows in well over a decade. They're still doing it. Ongoing countless pop up dialogs about "permissions", "are you sure", windows "defender", etc. I would have thought they would have worked on security, cleaned up the UI load by streamlining a lot of the popup questions, made elevated permissions into a better defined thing you enable once per major action rather than just something you routinely need, etc. But no, they really just took the same dumpster fire of an operating system, ported over notification hell from mobile land, rigged ads into various UI elements, and called it a new version. Shame on me for having expected anything more, but oof.

I guess the dynamic is just the equivalent of the US legal regime where individuals are forced into "consenting" to all sorts of vile things through unilateral contracts of adhesion. The only real purpose seems to be so that when someone complains about some poor outcome, they can be told it's their own fault for having accepted.

No I do really mean "we". Every website that asks for cookies. Every phone app that asks for permissions. Every interface with technology with an "I agree" to do anything. Microsoft isn't special, just an egregious example of it. But everyone does it.

And I really intended to specifically condemn Microsoft for how strongly they normalized it. For one, pinning it on "we" is too widely scoped when it was only some developers/managers responsible for horrible UIs. For example the only people responsible for cookie spite-nags are the companies that decided malicious compliance was the way to go.

Phone apps were actually a decent way of asking for permissions - at the start when an app is first installed. That users couldn't say "no" was a problem, but the flow was correct. The newer style of interrupting a user to prompt on the first use is much worse. But the overall idea of setting permissions per app is sound - users needing to make these decisions is unavoidable, especially in the world of proprietary software where the interests of the developers strongly diverge from the interest of the users.

But in my condemnation I really do mean to call out Microsoft specifically. Sure a lot of things have routine dark patterns, but Windows is exceptional in terms of sheer volume and opaqueness. There's a massive difference between some javascript popup that can be ignored or Android asking one pertintent permissions question before accessing contacts/photos/etc, and Windows popping up multiple nondescript "OK" dialogs after a single user intent click.

Most users care more about the service working well, than they do about their data being secure. Its why things like Mastodon (et al) will always have an uphill battle.

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