I find much of the HN community insightful and interesting, but in terms of consumer feedback (especially in a B2C environment) I wouldn't touch feedback here with a 10-foot pole.
I don't mean that to be an insult, quite the opposite. Most people here are power users. But that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet.
"Why do I need to download a 100+ MB app, give it permission to track my location, and let it run background processes just to browse through a restaurant menu, buy a ticket, or scroll through a list of posts?"
-------------------
Hardware/software companies have, historically, targeted power users because regular users listen to them. The companies producing these apps do so because they can benefit from exploiting the data of regular users, but risk little blowback from power users if they keep their web versions up to date and in good shape.
That doesn't mean power users should ignore the presence of these apps however. We should be telling regular users to avoid them for their own safety. We should also be worried that, if we stay quiet and let regular users flock to apps, the motivation to maintain web access will be eroded. When all power users vanish into a single percentage point and a platform achieves total dominance over the alternatives, companies might well choose to focus on only apps.
> that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet
Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
Yes, we are in a bubble here - as with every niche/special interest topic: It would be same for me if I would join a "car tuning event" or similar - Im just a car user, and I do not know of all these details and nuts & bolts
> Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
I don't think so. A majority don't want to. But they are forced by geeks/nerds. Geeks/nerds often show off especially in family/friends parties with older/common folk - telling - I can do this/that. Then average CEO or parent is forced to get a smartphone.
Next the geek/nerd - has no time to maintain the computer/laptop of the parent. Or loses patience explaining updates/double-click/avoid scammer installing software. Then - boom - geek son/daughter - if smart gets a decent pixel/iphone - otherwise gets a shitty Android device - installs everything there. Moves on.
And finally remember it is the young same geek/nerd that will eventually do programming for FAANG/palantir etc. which forces people to install apps, degrade privacy, worsen webapp/websites - all for money.
I think this is missing that older people are not stupid, and they could learn how to use software if they spent the time. Many older folks used even more complicated software in the past, and then they lost the skill or didn't keep it up to date.
A lot of older people rely on yougins for tech support not because they have to, but because it's easy learned helplessness.
A large part of this is ALSO software's fault, though. Software changes too quick and for no reason. Software these days lies to users, erroding confidence.
> A lot of older people rely on yougins for tech support not because they have to, but because it's easy learned helplessness.
Already as young guy in 20's I've found this also works with female government bureaucrats (tax bureau, etc.), who are usually older women at least in their 50s and exploiting their natural maternal instinct. They will be much more laidback about your paperwork and will help you to fill it, if you just pretend to be helpless/stupid little kid they need to help.
OTOH I've found if you need to bend the rules, you are much more likely to succeed with (older) man bureaucrat who wanna show off he doesn't need to follow the rules to the T, but he can use some leeway and help you, while women will strictly follow the rules.
Obviously the young female bureaucrat in her 20-30s is best to be avoided and rather take new number and wait in queue for older female/male worker if possible.
So there are two approaches suitable depending on situation you are dealing with.
Maybe you are focusing on small statistic of older people from white-collar jobs. Most people in > 70s were primarily in jobs that never needed IT. Yes, they have seen computers , faxes, scanners but not sit in front of computers 9-5. Remember HN needs to remember plumbers, bricklayers, nurses, etc
Very fair point, as an experienced B2B guy myself whenever someone ask me advice about B2C in like “I have no idea”. Been doing this for 25 years but B2C especially today geared towards younger audience is impossible to related for me. I assume majority of the demographics of HN similar
Honest question do you really use all of those tabs? As a small handful of tabs user I use the bookmark feature to hold things I want to keep for later. ctrl-d and it is in the list. Even then 99% of the time I open it again and go 'why did I keep this'. I get it that it is your workflow. Just sort of curious why you would consider that a 'power user' thing? Would not saving them to the bookmark list be more of 'power user' sort of thing to do?
I don't know why, but equating how many tabs a person has open to how much of a power user they are sounds like something right out of a south park episode.
The whole bookmark/tab system really needs to be completely revised. I have a new system I'm thinking about for my Chromium fork which will be radically different. More like a full-page "new tab" screen where everything can be visualized and sorted into different projects etc.
Just look at how most people do a search, for instance. These days for me it often involves 20-30 tabs, or even more, due to the horrific state of internet search. Many results have to be explored, many links from those results also explored, more searches done to narrow in on the precise keyword needed to bring up some hopefully good results, etc. And I can't close all that until the answer is found, as I may need to backtrack, so they just pile up. It's really quite ridiculous how much work it takes to find a good answer these days.
Compare with the typical person who just does one search with some suboptimal keywords then clicks on the first link, or starts dutifully absorbing the AI-generated garbage. Orders of magnitude difference.
I have dozens of projects I'm actively working on just for my Linux distro. Dozens of tabs open for things like X11 window management, for instance, or some info on C++ modules for another project. Lots of tabs open for a hardware project. All kinds of balls are up in the air here. Why put any of this stuff in bookmarks which is a waste of time and energy to manage, when I can just leave it in the tab list, organized in multiple windows spread across different desktops? (I have 64 desktops on my 55" plasma display.)
(lol @ the other guy's reply. That didn't age well.)
hey, light power user here - for a while I was using tabXpert browser extension for this, but they have recently changed to paid-only and I havent had a chance to check out their competition but might end up just buying it anyway
it groups sessions, not just tabs, so i can (for example) have all my banking websites together as a session that i can open and close as a window of tabs. the convenience is it organizes the sessions as named things that i can manage in a UI. transfer tabs from one session to another, close tabs, check tabs that have been closed in that session, etc.
if you know of any tools like this or an easy way to manage it independently without a 3rd party browser extension, I would be interested. Sounds like maybe you are doing something similar but at the desktop level, creating a new desktop to pick up and put down? are they savable and transferable between devices? I like to close everything down at night to run some games with friends, and am going to be building a new comp soon and for various reasons starting fresh with software and importing things as i need them rather than flashing my current setup forward to the new hardware
I agree with this a lot tbh. I think we need to have better support for tiling or something iframe-like in web interfaces. Probably for deep research or focused work, we need something more tree-shaped than the flat tabs-with-back-button structure web browsers expose.
Interesting. I personally aggressively prune open pages. If I have too much open I get off task and wander into whatever random thing pops up. Anything that needs long term storage I bookmark it in a folder.
Using the session manager that is one I used to use. But backed away from. I use a lot of tools to keep me on task and not wander off into random things.
For me it is about attention and focus. You seem to have a very different pattern than what I use. ctrl-w and alt-left arrow are my buddies.
I've never explored 20-30 search results. Not since Google anyway. If I don't find what I want in the first few I rephrase the search or try a different search engine. The world beyond the first page of results basically doesn't exist.
It's a bit insulting to assume that having more than a dozen tabs open must be "disorganized", especially in a context where it is likely that the power user in question is using browser extensions. Something like TreeStyleTab makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs organized with clear, easily-manipulated structure, and lower friction than manually creating and curating bookmarks.
It looks like you're either showing off your own ignorance of tools that enable workflows you can't imagine, or you're assuming that everyone's organization methods must resemble your own habits.
> Or the people who absolutely refuse to give up Chrome, despite the whole adblock situation. "But I don't like the way Firefox tabs look!"
Or have yourself a learning moment and recognize that how things look matters to a lot of people. And It’s not wrong that they value it differently than you.
Of course, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that these people are complaining about ads everywhere and value the aesthetics of the tab bar over that.
what's wrong with Cromite or Ultimatum on Android or Vivaldi on desktop? FF is both on desktop and mobile inferior product with devs hating their own users
Yeah, you're definitely right - there is a massive anti-ai sentiment in some parts of the internet right now, and gamers haven't really been faced with the dilemma other markets have been faced with (music, code, video) yet - it will most likely fade but quote rough right now
For a while after I graduated I remember joking that school is basically prison for kids and I finally did my time.
Forced to be there against your will. Short, momentary glances at sunlight. Cafeteria food. Solitary confinement (detention) for misbehaving. etc. etc.
Again, I was joking, but the more time that goes on, the more I feel like it's more true than I realized.
What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.
The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.
And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.
I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.
This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.
Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.
In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."
If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.
Also the picture of the US is totally fictional for the vast majority of people. The US has fostered an environment where only a tiny subset of the population can start a business. Even opening up a restaurant you are usually met with an avalanche of paperwork, of requirements to fulfill, and unless you have a lot of money to fix any issue, they rule some aspect of your business in violation. Even a tiny business like a food cart you need to make sure you keep it x meters from a public restroom, that your neighbors don‘t complaint, that you provide 2 parking spaces per gas-burner (or 3 if you use an induction stove) etc. etc.
You can not like the statement, and call it whatever you like, however, it is objectively true.
You are far more likely to find a government regulation on a US business/product than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.
That is the main point I was making and it is true by any objective measure.
There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods/services globally then there is importing those things and then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
> than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.
Spotify?
If you don't mind including companies that offer multiple things: Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Mistral, SAP
I'm also assuming there that you're only referring to tech products and services, otherwise you probably want to look at the long, long, long list of pharmaceuticals, cars and other products.
I think the issue is more that you don't have a good understanding of which products and services aren't American.
> There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods
True leverage comes from import, not export of goods and materials. The thing that grows GDP is buying materials cheaper from elsewhere, turning them into something and selling on at a healthy margin (whether domestic or as an export).
> then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
I'm no fan of nanny-stating, but I don't think that that's the case here.
There certainly are examples of that, but then the ones that I can think of (age verification in particular) are also getting pushed hard in the US. In fact, by all accounts, a lot of that pushing is being driven/funded by Meta
This is a great question and the answer varies some depending on what you're selling, but here is what has always worked the best for me:
1. Offer free, tangible value in some form (articles, videos, tools, resources, etc)
2. Do number one to such a degree, that you and maybe others feel like you should be charging for what you're doing/providing
3. When you find something that hits (and its gaining a decent amount of attention) find a way to charge for a fuller, larger, more expansive version of it (better features, an in-depth class, 1-on-1 coaching, a white glove service)
4. Repeat and scale
This is very much a birds-eye-view, takes a lot of time, and varies greatly between B2C and B2B/physical products vs services. But the general idea remains the same.
The reason so much advertising feels slimy is because in many cases, it is. It's a company buying your attention and offering very little (or often nothing) in exchange for that attention.
If you do this enough it will "work" to some degree, but it's largely a volume game.
But if you're willing to invest the time, and deliver value both through free means and eventually paid; it's nearly always a much better long term strategy.
I think this is true, however, when it comes to non-coding clients I've worked with they really do like the ability to make minor edits to a site with a UI rather than having to continually ping a developer.
The problem with WordPress (and it looks like this solution largely just replicated the problem) is that it's way too cumbersome and bloated.
It really is unlike any modern UI for really any SaaS or software in general.
It's filled with meaningless admin notices, the sidebar is 5 miles long and about 98% of what the user sees is meaningless to them.
Creating a very lightweight, minimal UI for the client to edit exactly what they need or like you said, just static files really is the best solution in most cases. The "page builders" always just turn into a nightmare the clients end up handing over for a dev to "fix" anyways.
Not sure why so many people feel the need to continue on the decades of bloat and cruft WordPress has accumulated, even if it's "modernized."
There are two types of WordPress sites from my perspective as someone who got their start in webdev in that ecosystem.
The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.
The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.
These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).
WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.
4) Don't use a stack of plugins, if you must use any keep them as dumb as possible and stick to those with a longstanding reputation.
A basic instance, set to auto-update, installed on a shared webhost where OS/web server updates are someone else's problem is pretty foolproof. A VPS running a long-term distro set to auto update is almost as good.
---
That said I personally dropped Wordpress for static site generation years ago because I realized I didn't actually need any of the dynamic features and wasn't using the WYSIWYG editor. Now I write Markdown in to a file in a git repo and then trigger a regeneration whenever I update it.
I wrote my own CMS, as the core WordPress functionality wasn't too much to replicate.
But eventually the WordPress ecosystem was too strong, and the real value proposition was plugins and familiarity. That continues to be true to this day, which is why no CMS has de-throned WordPress in spite of significantly better UX, architecture and developer experience. None of it matters when the client has a suite of plugins they have been using for 10+ years, that are now core to their business.
Every dating app is incentivized to be corrupt in some way, and just not just in the storing/selling data.
What many people don't realize is that for many people, they don't really "work" until you start to pay.
Then once you do, they are incentivized to keep you on as long as they can (I've actually seen the profiles in my feed change after paying them to be 90% people outside my area/preferences/etc).
I'm not exactly sure how a non-profit one could work, however, aligning the interests of the app with the people using it would be a pretty huge step.
If they were being honest they would ask explicitly for permission instead of advertising opt-out. Now you might ask: who will explicitly give Microsoft permission to train on their private works? No one will -- and that's the point: this is a form of theft.
And how many people who use git on github go to the website? I only do when my token has expired and I need to grab a new one to push again. Which is every 90 days. Github.com is mostly invisible infrastructure to me.
I find much of the HN community insightful and interesting, but in terms of consumer feedback (especially in a B2C environment) I wouldn't touch feedback here with a 10-foot pole.
I don't mean that to be an insult, quite the opposite. Most people here are power users. But that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet.