Hacker News Reader

Comment by phiresky | Hacker News Reader

There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.

Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.

View on HN

I've sometimes noticed friends navigating (on foot) in a residential area staring at their phone until the blue dot is on the turn they need to make.

I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.

> They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

In big cities, there is construction happening everywhere, POIs have closed down or changed location after the pandemic.

Street names are the only thing that stays the same.

Perhaps not a large use case, but I use street names regularly when discussing bicycle routes. "How to get from Town A to Town B by bicycle" often relies on street names - take Rt 123 for 2 miles, turn left on Fancy Farm Lane, etc. The route-finding often keeps you on Rt 123 for the whole route, but it's a busy dual carriageway and really not suitable for bikes.

I think a big problem is that Maps' bicycle routing would prefer to send you down a 55mph 4-lane street with a "sharrow" in the right lane, because that's a "bike friendly street", instead of the 25mph quiet residential street that parallels it.

There were always people who were like that it's just that it was harder with paper maps, at least that's my view.

For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.

> The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore?

I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.

If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.

It's process lock-in applied to the real world. Sad.

Unlike a physical map, we can't go back and access old google maps, so those changing preferences in style leave a memory hole.

If you haven't read 1984, this is really confusing, but a "memory hole" is a hole into which you place something you don't want to have any memory of, destroying it forever. The ironic name is an example of "doublethink."

I believe you mean "Doublespeak" rather than "Doublethink".

No, “doublethink” is the term introduced in Orwell’s 1984.

And those who've actually read it also know that Newspeak is also a term he coined and that since we don't actually have newspeak, the natural extrapolation of the term Doublethink into a spoken application is the term Doublespeak.... Right?

On the flipside digital maps can progressively show layers on user demand. You can pull up the OSM map with all the street names. If you've got a bit of patience to learn tools like QGIS (or ArcGIS) you have more power than ever to build personal maps that work best for how you personally navigate spaces beyond the lowest-common denominator that used to be print maps.

It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)

I don't think the issue is digital maps, just that the data is not accessible or preserved.

I think you mean this blog? https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , it's been shared a number of times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=justinobeirne.com here with this one being the most popular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 , though that's six years old. Still well worth reading

You need street names as I see the name on a map on iPhone plan in my head a route and see the street name so as to know where I turn - or how far you are along a road. GPS is not that accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com