The masses however can not read out a word to its fullest letter like "cryptocurrency" they stop at "crypt" oh, and say "crypto". These are the people in the "crypto market" now to buy "coins" and "tokens" to get rich because "they believe in it" (but because theyve been told and seen someone made x1000 buying a token and selling it later to someone else) They are like flat earthers and evolution-deniers and "covid is ebola black bubonic plague vaxx everyone 110%" people.
These people can not pick between 1000 coins which one is real innovation in consensus algorithms or whatever, and which one is a scam, like BitConnect or IOTA.
These people know this, so they do the next best thing which is hunt for coins based on logos and overall marketing looks of the coin. This was not enough because the cryptoh projects used fancy words, its easier to just pick on logos, and even easier than logos with a project and website is to trade logos marked as NFTs.
Havent you noticed that people who see dark future post and tell it more often the past 30 years, than people who think "it will all be just fine"?
I remember the late 90s doom and "oh no millenium 2000" gloom predictions, and 2012 nostradamus end of the world maya calendar the end is near. I read about the 80s cold war "will go hot nuclear any time" and can be seen in movies like Terminator.
US will not collapse, no nuclear war will happen, climate change is not even the biggest fuckup we are doing (cutting down the amazon is, biodiversity loss overall), but we post-pone the imminent danger from a scheduled Ice Age.
I was pretty optimistic in 1990, but since then there is new data. Donald Trump was elected president and led a violent insurrection against the government based on a transparent lie with, so far, no negative consequences. If he runs in 2024 he will win the Republican nomination. Unless the Democrats suspend the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, he will almost certainly be elected president again (because measures are being put in place at the state level to insure that the election is not "stolen" from him again). And I've seen the effects of climate change with my own eyes. The changes are happening with breathtaking speed. The climate where I live is already dramatically different today than it was when I moved here a mere 11 years ago. All of the data from the last 30 years is dramatically worse than the worst-case projections of 1990. Absent some really dramatic technological or political breakthrough, it is a question of when, not if, climate change destroys civilization. It might be longer than 30 years out (I certainly hope so), but it's not 100 years out, not any more.
To me this may imply a sort of built-in "failsafe" against political and economic hegemonies that is a part of human nature. This may be useful to ensure that political systems do not last forever so at least some part of humanity is able to explore alternate ways to construct and operate societies.
Well, that's a cheerful way of looking at it I guess. Personally, I'm a fan of civilization, but maybe that's just a reflection of my rich-white-male privilege.
Oh no, the end of the world is upon us, how could the people chose _that_ kind of guy as president. The people where meant to chouse _our_ woman it was _her_ turn.
Ironic really, you are scared of democracy ending yet as main reason why, because democracy worked.
You left out the important part: Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government based on a transparent lie with, so far, no negative consequences.
Trump's election was not a failure of democracy, merely a failure of common sense among the electorate. The failure of democracy began when Trump tried to get the secretary of state of Georgia to "find 11,000 votes". It continues now that he is successfully promulgating the Big Lie. It will be complete when he is "re-elected" in 2024.
Why was Trump your indicator that US democracy was failing, and not Bush Jr? IMHO, the latter did far more to destroy American democratic society than Trump - but the wealth and riches he provided through his war crimes seems to occlude this fact from most American's point of view.
Trump is just the latest in a long line of failures one could point at as examples of the destruction of American democracy, and he wasn't even the most effective at altering America's sociopolitical landscape, as Bush and Obama were ..
Yes, the decay certainly goes back further than Trump. Before Trump there was Bush and before Bush there was Nixon. You could probably trace it back as far as the JFK and RFK assassinations, maybe further. Some see what is happening now as an extension of the Civil War.
But Trump is unique in that he:
1. Has never accepted his 2020 election defeat
2. Wields enough control over the rank and file of his party to have the power to terminate the career of any Republican who crosses him in any way, and has demonstrated the willingness to use that power without reservation
3. Demanded that election officials to commit election fraud (and was impeached for it, but not removed from office)
4. Incited a violent insurrection against the government and has suffered no negative consequences for it
It is his ability and willingness to use his power to promulgate the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen that makes him a much bigger threat to democracy than anything the U.S. has seen since the Civil War.
If only Al Gore had been a bit more ballsy about having the election stolen from him by Bush .. we probably wouldn't be dealing with the failure of democracy that is manifest in America's wanton destruction of so many other sovereign states and the murder of literally millions of people around the world .. the point is, Americans aren't the only ones who suffer when their democracy is corrupted for military purposes.
I think I've mentioned this before on HN, but I remember a teacher in my highschool class in 1984, asking if we thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in our lifetime. I was the only kid out of 30 that didn't think there would be.
Doomsayers are sometimes correct, but usually not, and they are ever-present. And, for some reason, very appealing to many.
Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.
Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.
Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content".
Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.
This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get"
In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person"
How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps.
She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.
Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns.
Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.
> Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns.
Dumbed down and user-hostile are independent things. Dark patterns are being introduced for nefarious purposes. No one is explaining away things like "click to subscribe, wait 3 hours in a phone queue to unsubscribe" as required for "grandmothers"
The software isn't stupid, it's intentionally and cleverly manipulative and user hostile.
It really is the grandmother excuse "you the user dont know what the unsubscribe button is doing, so we ask you to wait 3h and confirm 4 times because maybe you are clicking by mistake since you dont know where and what you are clicking".
This particular pattern is so dark that the FTC is cracking down on it[0]:
Under the enforcement policy statement issued today, businesses must follow three key requirements or be subject to law enforcement action, including potential civil penalties:
Disclose clearly and conspicuously all material terms of the product or service, including how much it costs, deadlines by which the consumer must act to stop further charges, the amount and frequency of such charges, how to cancel, and information about the product or service itself that is needed to stop consumers from being deceived about the characteristics of the product or service. The statement provides detail on what clear and conspicuous means, particularly noting that the information must be provided upfront when the consumer first sees the offer and generally as prominent as the deal offer itself.
Obtain the consumer’s express informed consent before charging them for a product or services. This includes obtaining the consumer’s acceptance of the negative option feature separately from other portions of the entire transaction, not including information that interferes with, detracts from, contradicts, or otherwise undermines the consumer’s ability to provide their express informed consent.
Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place.
Most of the dark patterns are not due to dumbing down UI. They're either because nothing better is available (security), income would be reduced (ads, cookie warnings, software is deliberately crippled for non-professional versions), development is done by lowest bidder.
Yeah. It would actually be pretty cool if web sites and apps were dumbed down for a few things: denying cookies, deleting accounts, contacting support, unsubscribing from spam.
With dark patterns those things actually become more complicated.
If your user base is large enough, some significant faction of your users are in fact “retarded un-learnable,” though I might have put it more delicately.
And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user.
I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.
Normal users, as they represent by definition the largest numbers, are necessary to enable the network effects on which the Internet companies rely, and as a result they also put other, reluctant users in a position of minority, the position of the 'unreasonable', the position of the grumpy old fart, the position of the burden to support.
The mass, thus the normal user, is indeed the enabler.
But this isn't the fault of users, "normal" or otherwise; enablers don't make people abuse alcohol or whatever. Alcoholics who blame their enablers are deceiving themselves, and if designers try to blame users for their design errors, they are making the same mistake.
A lot of the crapness, AFAICS, is down to mobile. Mobile browsers and desktop/laptop browsers are different, and are used differently. And mobile browsers aren't all alike. Since most website hits are now from mobiles, designers are optimising for mobile, and then their employers stop the project before the desktop/laptop work is done. This really annoys me, because I'm too blind and fat-fingered to use a mobile as much more than a phone.
I think the crapness of the modern web[1] is going to eventually result in a rebellion. Like, the crapness seems to be snowballing. I mean, popups? What? I thought we got rid of them 15 years ago, because they were crap. How come people think they're now OK?
[1] The OP spoke of "todays's internet experience", but all he spoke of was the web. The rest of the internet seems to be working as well, or better, than it was working yesterday.
It’s pointing out that it’s a side effect of user market forces. The point is that users keep using these sites despite all of these annoying patterns.
It's blaming users for market forces though. It's kind of a lazy invocation of the just world fallacy: the users must be ok with it because otherwise they would have revolted if they werent.
I've accepted many a dark pattern because of sunk costs and a lack of energy, time or options. I dont always have the energy to fight and punish.
Ultimately market forces are about collective power, not a collective representation of "what people want". A lot of people would like us to blur the two but they are distinct.
The challenge is, when no notable end user group is coordinate enough to havd significant market force/power to push back, what else do you call it but ‘users accept it’.
Everyone I know hates Comcast and the defacto monopolies in many areas with internet service. (Among many examples). But except in a few small areas, no one seems to even be effectively pushing back.
‘We’ve reached a hopefully temporary equilibrium point where corporate interests and ability to extract value vs user interests (and their lack of ability or interest in fighting for them) result in users hating life consistently’ isn’t any more explanatory I think, but says pretty much the same thing.
Users are relatively helpless/uneducated/captured and uncoordinated here at the moment, and the business interests are getting less pleasant as they fight each other in the absence of any other guidance/regulation as they try to grow and extract the maximum value they can.
At some point something with change and we’ll start shifting to another equilibrium point. Based on past experience I doubt it will be much friendlier to end users, but I have been surprised once or twice before.
And this isn’t (near as I can tell), ‘corporations bad’. Everyone always tries to get the maximum value they can get out of a system barring energy expended/concern about social judgement/blowback concerns.
From kids downloading warez to someone looking for maximum stimulation/emotional load from browsing instagram for free to a company getting the extra couple dollars from improving a signup flow.
Or because they have no other choice. It's mind-boggling that the very people responsible for creating this landscape have the audacity to throw up their hands and try to absolve themselves of responsibility for the things they built by saying "idk the users just love being screwed". We must do better.
Meaning what? Name-and-shame clearly won't do the job. The only solution I can see is for there to be laws against dark patterns. The profit incentive for user-hostile design isn't going to go away.
I said "directly" blaming, very important distinction.
The people making the garbage is still the ones to blame for the garbage itself. The reason people make such garbage is because a subset of people accept it. But nobody is saying the people accepting it are doing it out of an evilness (maybe they're saying it's out of "dumbness", but I would disagree with that too).
someone can say that people are allowing themselves to be victimized, without saying that the people doing the victimizing are in the right.
The comment however is wrong in that it is perhaps not possible for the users to keep themselves from being victimized, without some recourse to the law.
The root of the issue is they never complain, even when cornered into a shitty bank or govt app. Everything else just grows from this fact. They are used to commercials, spam, telemarketers, scammers, pre-checked boxes when the law allows to uncheck it and demand the same service. There is no revolt.
If you don’t take responsibility for change, it doesn’t happen.
Complain how? In older times we could just mail the company now the support page has stupid chat bots that do nothing, and you have to fight with it or the damn page for 5 mins before you can send a mail. Most of the times I just give up. And if we complain for every site takes too much time. And it will boil down to "sure sir, but thata how it is"
> Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.
We use WhatsApp groups for this now. It’s perfect, no ads, only the content from people I want content from. No slimy Facebook algorithm. Between tiktok Instagram and whatsapp how is Facebook.com even still a thing?
Yet, Whatsapp belongs to Facebook... And I won't hinge my bets on it staying better for the long run given the shittiness of the original product in so many ways.
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests.
While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice?
Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
> Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.
Rather, I see the problem being that any time a viable competitor appears, it just gets acquired so there's no longer any need for the incumbent to compete. Case in point, Instagram actually became the next hot social network after Facebook, but Facebook the company retained relevance and market share by simply buying them rather than competing. Google has also acquired a bunch of more niche search engines over its lifetime (that's a little more subtle in that none of those alone were going to beat Google like Instagram did to Facebook, but by nipping niche search providers in the bud, Google consolidated the market share around its product).
> I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.
I think the second sentence contradicts the first. There's little capital being spent on building a Facebook or Google competitor. VCs are chasing "the next big thing" instead. The other reality is that VCs are going to want Google-like revenue and continuous growth from a Google replacement they fund - this means that eventually dark patterns will come into play to squeeze more money from existing customers.
The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause.
I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000.
It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall.
Let's consider a basic example: How can you justify not using Microsoft Office? Yes LibreOffice is there and works 95% of the time, but the remaining 5% are not completely useless parts of the software.
It's same for most of the user-hostile software. Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find. Also, free software is not guaranteed to be sustained or be in front of the pack.
I use Linux, and free software to the most extent I can use, but there are some closed source stuff which is expensive but is soundly ahead when compared to open source alternatives. I can break the sweat and write a similar code, but how can I make sure that it's sustained when it has a A/GPLv3 license?
I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office, they expected me to deliver a thesis or other document. When there was the "5% expectation", kindly decline, uninstall.
The road I picked, was not always success or easy, I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice. I refused to learn Office because I had already learned to produce documents and presentations (websites) with a computer using free open source software.
> Alternatives are not as intuitive, easy to use, or easy to find.
Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX. I literlaly cant even scroll or type on a collegues macbook or find my way around anything. Very hard to use, not intuitive.
The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent. If you accept the software will think for you, well it will. Now you dont have to think, youre not in control, just enjoy the UX dark patterns and ads.
> I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office...
You had it easy it seems. When someone sends you a document which contains convoluted structures and only renders in a very recent version of Microsoft Word, and you have to fill it for work purposes, you have no other choice (We're a Linux shop, but not everyone we interact uses Libre Office, so yeah).
> Whats ease is what you have learned. Had you began with Linux since 1999 you would not even know how to do anything on Windows or MacOSX.
I started with a C64 in 1989, jumped to a 486 some years later and installed Linux in 1998, when there was no documentation, and dial-up was kinda hard without any. So I double booted Linux and Windows for a lot of years, and despised Windows since Windows 95. However, I can use all three without problems, making all other ecosystems work with my Linux systems (I adapt them to talk with Linux, not vice versa).
> The "easy to use intuitive" eventually becomes the dark UX hell it is today, a slow descent.
No, it's not. Automatically adding another bullet point is not. Marking the center of a shape and snapping to it is not. Having sensible defaults and intuitive key bindings are not dark patterns. Also fixing bugs in two days, getting direct replies from developers, your feedback taken seriously are not dark patterns. The bitter part is they can be all done in FOSS, very easily (I've developed such software for some projects, and it's well loved), but developers are not motivated or bothered by it.
You always, always have a choice. Throw away the victim and obey mentality. Freedom is taken, not served to you.
When someone send you a trojan horse.virus.exe you do not have to open it. Neither do you have to open a convoluted proprietary binary format requiring you to buy a license to read said binary. Politely decline, reject. You have that power.
You are both right and wrong at the same time. You demonstrate it yourself.
You say how you've failed informatics classes for failing to pass MS Office test. If that's not "forced", I don't know what is.
There are many battles worth fighting when it comes to freedom, and choosing to fail a test to demonstrate freedom is quite admirable. And quite silly. I've done things like that too, and I am fully aware that they can be both. They make for good stories too.
Similarly, I could choose not to use Windows to file my taxes when the country has switched to obligatory online-filing and only provides Windows software: I am not "forced", but I could be liable for heavy tax fines if I don't do it. Or I could reverse engineer the code and develop tooling that works on free software. I could possibly even get that marked unconstitutional if I am willing to put a long fight in court (and spend a lot of money on legal representation too). Nowhere does it say in our constitution that I've got to use Windows to be a citizen.
Where we draw the line and what's the effort we are willing to expel to fight against the tide is each individual's prerogative.
We do need people to fight against the tide. But it's not wrong for anyone not to, because there are other things worth fighting for too! And some simply need to survive.
Many workplaces, especially those that deal heavily in Word and other Office software, heavily restrict work machines so that no un-approved software can be installed. Your experience, though very real, may not reflect that of a majority of others.
If you dont consider most Linux software user hostile in it's own ways then their really isn't much to discuss here. You've just accepted its series of failures, rather than the failures associated with commercial software.
By being named after "global regular expression print" a hilarious in-joke that normies won't get. Everything a normal person deals with uses * for a wildcard search, especially shell globbing does. That means in
grep .* .*
those are two different behaviours of .* that's pretty hostile, don't you think? Certainly doesn't go with the law of least surprise. Regex itself isn't particularly user friendly but if you know it exists and want to use it, you're not going to guess the tool to use it is "grep". On whatever this Linux is[1] (Debian stretch/sid) I "apropos regex" to work out what tool to use, oh "regex: nothing appropriate", how friendly. [edit: "apropos search" has nothing, "apropos count" has nothing. I'm beginning to suspect it's not working but hasn't noticed that it's not working. Typical user-unfriendly computer behaviour.]
By having a "--help" which tells you about the four different kinds of regular expression it can accept, and nothing about what regular expressions are. By saying "basic regular expression (BRE)." as if someone read somewhere in a textbook that they should explain an acronym before using it. Then never uses the acronym again except where to repeat "basic regular expression (BRE)", sounding like an alien trying to imitate good documentation.
By refusing (unless forced) to list files which exist and do important-to-the-user things like control settings I care about, because said filenames begin with a dot. Arguing that this is helpful to the user to hide information, but at the same time defaulting to showing file sizes in bytes and only showing human readable filenames when poked. By defaulting to showing files in columns which is better for a human to read and only showing file-per-line when asked. These are a mess of defaults - for a human, show files in columns, hide files, show sizes in human readable. For a machine, show file-per-line, size in bytes, all files. And if hiding files for user friendliness, don't hide my config files, hide OS files I never use.
By having so many options for controlling output formatting because the system refuses to do anything helpful (like have/enforce/encourage some platform standard structured format) such that every tool has to have this, and every tool does it differently. That's incredibly user-hostile. The idea that you have to learn something, isn't. The idea that no tool respects what you've learned and makes you learn a different way to do the same things over and over and over, is.
By refusing to match text case insensitively unless specifically told to; that default is the wrong way round for user friendliness, it's the one geeks want to be technically correct, not the one normal English-using people want to get tasks done conveniently.
Like the rejection of video and whining "Ugh is there a transcript anywhere, only normies watch video, I'm a superior text reader so I need a transcript" and willfully "not understanding" that looking at human faces and hearing voices has meaning to people, to demonstrate membership of the "I don't have a TV" superior group. And the related rejection of GUIs, the way GUIs seem to have come out of Xerox Parc, to macOS and Windows, then Linux gets GUIs which are cargo-cult copies of Windows and macOS designs. There's probably a reason why pinch-to-zoom started and got popular at Apple before being aped into Windows, when you'd naively assume that Linux with more ways to connect weird hardware to it, more access to source code, more culture of customisation, would have come up with all kinds of things like that earlier. I'm going to suggest that reason is the embarassment of using something a normie would use, with the forgivable exception of a tiling window manager for laying out terminal windows.
You're presumably going to argue that being hyperliteral is user friendly because that's what geeks want, but being a precision tool for someone in-the-know to use for advanced use cases and scripting is exactly what user friendliness isn't. You might then quip "it's just selective about who its friends are ;)" and guffaw to yourself about how superior you are to be a Friend Of Linux(tm); it's related to the way the "community" believes that easy to use software is for inferior people only, and that using harder to use software is a badge of honor. See also the other reply to your comment sneering "knowledge is user hostile, I guess?!" because the only reason you aren't using Linux is because you can't because you're a baby who doesn't know how, hurrr. It's cult heresy to suggest that the reason you aren't using it is because it's bad, you have to assume it's user friendly as a prior and then contort yourself around it[2].
Nobody feels superior for driving an automatic gearbox car. Gearboxes are a kludge necessary because engines don't have the same torque and efficiency at all speeds. Some people have uses where manual gearboxes are better for choice, cost, reliability, maintenance, other people drive a stop-start commute and making them use a manual gearbox is no overall benefit to them. Yet people do feel superior for driving a stick shift, then go around saying people who don't drive one can't drive, can't count to 6, are worse drivers. Offloading gearboxing to the machine is what you would do if you weren't attached to the identity of being a superior stick-shift driver. As soon as the machine was good-enough at it. The more you have to learn about it to use it, the more user-hostile it is. The more safety guard restrictions on behaviour that could exist but don't, the more user-hostile it is. Manual gearbox without clutch needs more skill, so is more user-hostile.
Also, love how it tells you
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
but if you type the suggested "grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]..." that just errors out. Presumably that's usage for people who already know how to use it. For everyone else, try 'grep --help' for more information. Information we could have shown you right here, but we don't really understand humans. Maybe you remember what grep is, and all the options, and regex language, and need information, but that single hint is enough. It could happen.
(Also, enjoy how "grep xyz" complains that there is no such file or directory as xyz, but "grep /etc" complains that "/etc: is a directory"). (Rust people spent a good deal of time on compiler error messages. Perhaps this is an underappreciated reason why Rust is dramatically more hyped than many other languages?)
[1] on windows I can run systeminfo or get-computerinfo to find out what OS I'm using, both reasonably named . Good thing I happen to know to poke at /etc/REDHAT_RELEASE or in this case /etc/debian_version. On Windows I can use type or get-content or notepad to read the file, two tools with names that hint at being relevant, one which isn't so far away. On Linux I can use cat for catenating files, less the in-joke named pager (because less is more! snerk snerk). "type" and "edit" both do something totally unrelated.
[2] You have to contort yourself around the computer on Windows and macOS and iOS as well; but at least they strived to have consistent platform UX guidelines which were pro-user at the cost of more work for the developers, for many years. I'm not arguing there are computers one never has to learn, although Brett Victor and Dynamicland might surpass everyone on that front, I'm more arguing that poorly named, inconsistent tools with text only, no GUI, no graphics, full of in-jokes, and beloved for their hyper-literal do-what-I-say scripting precision are absolutely not "user friendly".
For my case, if we're getting a Office document, it's almost guaranteed to break when opened with latest LibreOffice.
We don't handle these files everyday, but it's a necessity. If the data inside a file can be transported with something FOSS, it's already carried with that software.
So, in my case, at least; I'd rather do my research and create more GPL software rather than trying to convince established companies to switch to LibreOffice.
>For my case, if we're getting a Office document, it's almost guaranteed to break when opened with latest LibreOffice.
That even could happen in MS Office. MS needed several major versions until they fully followed their own Office Open XML standard.
I'm not using it either for personal purposes for more than a decade, but sometimes life gives you lemons at the office (the literal one), so you need to work with something you don't like for a bit.
The point I'm trying to make is, if you're exchanging files and doing collaborative work, you don't have all the freedom to do whatever you want to do.
Congratulations on making a decision long before it became a serious problem for users and developing the habit.
The vast majority of people are not like you. Most people succumbed to these practices over a gradual period of a decade and as such are locked-in habit-wise to this with an attention span that is hard-pressed not to focus on the matter.
You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys.
The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government.
Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.
We can look at earlier consumer-hostile experiences which were generally solved by consumer rights regulations.
You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc.
This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.
Yes, this is primarily a regulatory problem not a technical or design one. Most user hostile actions do work to bring in more users or make you more money. If they didn't then companies wouldn't be doing it would they? But just because something makes sense for a business does not mean it is ethical, moral or legal. Snake oil and counterfeit goods are solid examples. Things like auto charging, difficult to cancel subscriptions and the trade in user information should also be handled in a similar way.
100% - even annoying "promotional" email blasts. I've worked for companies where, when we did surveys, customers overwhelmingly said that we sent them too many emails or that the emails were not relevant. Yet time and time again we would do a bulk email send and watch in-store sales climb up proportionally. So naturally then we had to make email address a required field when making an account online. One more step for users, and specifically something that most users don't want to give...but the money says otherwise.
This reminds me of JC Penney's attempts to switch from bullshit discounts to "everyday low pricing"[1]. Sales dropped 20%.
I think the sad reality is that, despite how people like to think of themselves as rational actors who consider the pros and cons of each purchase, these tactics work. The only way to curtail stuff like this is by interfering in the free market - i.e. regulation.
This is why I rarely use the same email address longer than 1 year now or try to manage different accounts for different spam. I just change the password to random crap and forget about that email account, while setting up a new one.
I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).
You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA).
While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”.
Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.
1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
“ Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.”
I think this just illustrates how much easier smart phones make things. If we didn’t have smart phones for example, all your interactions with the government would be as cumbersome and inconvenient as this fall back option.
For so many things. Need to scan a QR code to enter a building, or need to display Vaccine status. My bank now requires I run their mobile App to be able to log in, even if I'm on a PC. Most OTP authorisation requires you to receive an SMS code. Government departments are now only contactable via the Net, so a smart phone is the minimum unless you have a PC.
For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too.
This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.
There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS.
Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics.
Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile.
Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.
Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.
Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.
What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days.
Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia.
So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all…
With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another
I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
> I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
Really? I wonder where you are.
I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table
Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
It's getting harder and harder to manage without a smart phone. I was stuck overseas at the start of the Pandemic because I couldn't buy a plane ticket as I couldn't receive an SMS for OTP authorisation. Had a shouting match with my bank when I finally did return as they now want me to use an App, which I couldn't get while I was overseas.
but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).
The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all.
Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy.
In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture.
Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above.
Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone.
How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone?
(Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app.
You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code.
This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company.
Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem.
Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else.
Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences.
Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010!
The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too.
Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).
We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago.
But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
> Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).
Society has always been fast to embrace new technologies, particularly if profits were to be made or economies of scale made prior luxuries affordable for everyone. Industrialization, the advent of the rail age or air travel as mass transit, and now the Internet.
We're using CPUs with more processing power than multiple million dollar 70s-era mainframes in disposable pregnancy or covid tests, and a modern single (!) GPU can blast a 90s-era supercomputer to pieces with GFLOP/s performance.
"When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."
There is also ever-increasing ubiquitous digitalization of many aspects of our life. In a lot of countries, you either spend minutes to hours online to do government-required paperwork or days "the old way", and the old way is mostly dwindling, catering mostly to elderly internet-inept citizens. There are services you're only going to get online.
And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding.
So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?"
So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.
I try to respond to dark patterns with a 1 star review on trustpilot and google maps making clear that it signaled a lack of trustworthiness.
The last time I ran into one (call to cancel for insurance) I also filed an official complaint and made it clear it was the sole reason I was dumping them in favor of a competitor.
It's not much of a punch back but it probably had an effect.
I am not a cricket.
I told you what to do, dont use that software, dont accept the license or terms, uninstall, deactivate, deny. Read a book, go hiking. You arent forced to use shit software.
Oh boy, tell me how you do tax reports with the amazing experience of pen, paper and standing in a window. I bet you're outsourcing misery rather than avoiding it.
Of course not “intentionally” but if you manage to have an even slightly complex tax situation and not get tricked and report something wrong, props to you!
Sure, but then they just send you a letter correcting your mistake, you OK it if it looks right, and either they send you a check or you send them a check. You don't have to pay a fine and you don't get audited.
(I am not a tax lawyer nor an accountant, but I have done this 4 out of the last 6 years.)
Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.
Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.
I think you have it backwards. Wealthy already have all the power they need. Everyone else has zero power, unless they organise, pool their resources or at least choose to move in same direction independently.
It’s a matter of phrasing. We all have power available to us if only we organize. If we choose not to organize we are letting the wealthy have the power.
But anyway I agree with you that we need to organize. Voting with our dollars as atomic individuals works in limited ways but won’t change things on a large scale.
Is modem firmware really the piece of software in you're more concerned about or at all? But still, if you want to see something changed on this front - give money to Purism or Pine64. Make sure to tell them that you'll continue your support if they continue moving in same direction.
Withing 15 years, there will be microchips in your seat, table, and the packaging of your bread. And your iToaster will not toast unauthorised bread.
I am concerned about firmware because it is being used to take ownership of our devices away from us.
Oh, you could fix your device by replacing the chip, but we own the firmware and it's a crime to copy it. Also we can uodate the device at any time and add or remove fubctionality without you even knowing.
I agree that most of the time with entrenched players it looks like there are no outs. But let's try to look at your example of ticketmaster. Your options depend on how much you are invested in concert-going as entertainment. If not much - stopping altogether might be preferable to further feeding the beast. If a lot - you can explore your local musical scene of amateur bands. The ones that play in bars and other venues that probably don't even sell tickets, or at least do it without relying on ticketmaster. Sure, you'll lose access to stadium-kind of experience, but there will be no change without at least some sacrifices.
I've never been to a stadium gig. I've been to concert-hall shows, with letter/number seating, and no grooving in the aisles; the ticketing experience was horrible. The shows were good, in a way; but I've always much preferred pub gigs and student-union gigs, where you just pay cash at the door.
I live in a major city and even the small and mid-sized venues use ticketmaster… I go to very small shows (basement shows, very small bars) which does sometimes avoid it, but if the band you like is even remotely successful you’re back in ticketmaster’s realm
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.
It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show.
The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls.
20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple.
It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain.
It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web.
It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.
Is Apple's case really a dark pattern? I can start a software subscription trial and immediately cancel. Do that with a random third party and suddenly the cancellation page is "down for maintenance" and you have to call in for support where they try to sell you a discounted package (cough Adobe.)
Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software
Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money.
Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?
> even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests
Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.
People only expect things to be free because they're not being told / educated on the actual cost of their "free" service.
I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world.
But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>.
This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".
> and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them
I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it.
But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”)
It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.
Yes, blame the one law that attempts to give people a modicum of privacy, and not the developers really wanting you to click through and press accept all for income.
The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...
The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker.
I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls.
And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.
> Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams
How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s.
Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.
Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure.
The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)
Not sure why you brought Apple into this, while yes, their walled garden is very pretty, the experience of them extracting money out of your accounts is as friction free as it gets.
Unluckily providers clone each other, designers trying to prove their reason of existence pushing for new or modern approaches just for the sake of it, and technical writers in the fallacy of quantity write about anything different comes their way quickly, judging by first look not by sustainable usability consequently generating the appearance of trend without having any trend (not like a trend is a good measure, not at all! nevertheless, it is used as guideline by too many).
I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty.
I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all.
It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something.
Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies.
Same with music.
I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses.
Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there.
HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.
You did not pay for any page to load fast or to serve you what you are looking for. Every web-request, every click you make with your browser, can deliver you a response which is unknown to you or your browser before-hand. There is no way for you to see what you are buying before buying it if it was possible to buy page-loads.
Say thanks because you are not in the EU and get the cookie and GDPR spam thrown at you as well. Worse than the 1999 popups.
Look at the data per age group and per sex, when looking at 0-99 all 3 sexes does not tell the full story since 65+ have totally different risks from covid-19 than 20-29.
This study isn’t based on VAERS data, it’s from the UK.
The design tracks their medical record system, under reporting shouldn’t be a big concern
Edit:
> We assessed the temporal association between COVID-19 vaccination and cardiac adverse events using hospital admissions with diagnoses of myocarditis or pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias.
Maybe there is differential reporting based on who shows up at the hospital with Covid vs just vaccine induced side effects, but it’s sort of hard to design a large scale study to pin this down. The methodology seems sound enough to fairly track at least those ill enough to go to the hospital
No, do not do it. Not worth the risk, while your natural immunity is way more effective than even 3 shots of vaccine. If you are above 60 years old, get the vaccine.
