Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

One of the biggest downsides is that these type of things contribute to pollute our world twice: when they are made, when they need to be trashed away. Brands that have products that in average break after a very short time should be banned or shouldn't be sold at all.

Doesn't mean it's wrong!

We can't very easily ban advertising. Any regulation has to be lightweight because it's nearly impossible to enforce at internet scale (as we've seen again and again).

Curious if you've thought about any ways to fix the problem we're in.

When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country.

As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is?

I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.

On the social media thing, I find they are always better when they just show you the things you've asked to see, in chronological order. It's all this algorithmic "hey, your aunt's brother-in-law's gardener just commented on a post by someone you don't know" bullshit that causes the problem. If I just look at Twitter posts from the people I follow it's fine, it's just my friends talking about stuff, the moment I make the mistake of following a trending topic link it's a cesspit.

And yeah, a lot of things seem to be cost engineered to the point where they are designed to look ok, but not last or take much punishment. But that's less about tech, and more about us as consumers, we seek to minimise cost and so that's what manufacturers go for.

Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified.

Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs.

The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering).

So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now.

There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

Anti-advertising was one of the pet causes of Generation X, back before more pressing things like "the war on terror" and a financial collapse and health care crisis took the stage. And those are bigger deals, but man, advertising is just awful too.

I get a lot out of using Search, Youtube, Maps, Gmail, Drive and all of Google's other services for free. Advertising probably comes out as a net positive for me if you take all of those into account.

I think your view isn't too extreme enough, frankly. I feel like if I took the time I could compose a lengthy essay showing that we can directly blame advertising for a significant portion of societal ills. Advertising promotes narcissism, selfishness, and entitlement; it convinces you that you need things you don't need, happiness can be bought, you what you have isn't good enough; it lies to you, it lies to you about lying to you, and it makes you think this is normal. And that's all when it isn't trying to outright scam you.

> Social media.

Mostly bad because of advertising.

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

A bit more of a stretch, but since advertisements lie and tell you the product costs less and is 'just as good', it leads to a race to the bottom.

Planned obsolescence is pervasive - it's hard to have endless growth when you've reached market saturation. It's also incredibly hard to go against the grain here, as it's really difficult to judge how long something will last without intimate knowledge of the product.

I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes.

I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web

The collaboration between suppliers and customers is the bedrock of how the world works. Without some form of advertising, it would be stagnant, dysfunctional and basically dead with vendor lock-ins and monopolies. Advertising allows exposure and enables a free market economy.

That said, most consumer advertising is toxic and pushed down the throat. But it works otherwise Google wouldn’t exist.

I find it so frustrating that I struggle or fail find quality products - for everything from forzen pizza to jeans. For some cases (frozen pizza) I just opt out. Others, I just give up and accept that I'll have to replace my jeans every 2-3 years. I try to buy recommendations from Wirecutter and do slightly better, but still so annoyed that everything is made so damn cheaply.

I doubt it has the effectiveness that people say it has when they are everywhere.

It's not an extreme view at all; some cities (like São Paulo) have essentially banned billboards, for example, with decidedly positive effects.

I'm quite confident that we'll eventually come to see rabid, out-of-control advertising (which is about 90 percent of it) as akin to smoking, leaded gas or asbestos - and that eventually it will be regulated accordingly.

Furthermore, truly durable items still exist. One of my favorites are my Osprey packs, which I have had for nearly a decade and expect to last for another few decades.

Human beings have ideas that organize themselves into formal groupings that need to be formally promoted in order to sustain the cost of the business. Products need to rapidly scale. And marketing/advertising makes that possible. Hating advertising is like hating the dollar for being necessary to exchange value in society.

We need advertising to make the products you engineer viable business ideas. Without advertising, 99.9% of good product will never be discovered.

The way I could cure this a bit is by starting to read books again. Now when I'm in the train I just read a book instead of scrolling through Reddit.

I've also deleted Youtube and Reddit from my phone, which also helps. But brains adjust quickly, so now I start visiting Youtube via browser instead of the app. But I do feel better about that whole situation, now that I started reading again.

The problem is, that I only feel like reading while travelling to work or elsewhere. When I'm at home, the temptation to sit in front of my PC is just too high. While working from home, I'm in front of a screen for like 95% of the day...

I can only imagine the vicious circle of decreasing attention span it creates.

All you need is to enable developer options, enable adb debugging, install adb or Android developer tools on the computer, connect phone with USB and do a bunch of "adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 some.package.name" for a bunch of packages.

Ok, now that I wrote it, it's not that simple, especially knowing what to uninstall, but it's not rocket science either.

A lot of people think they can't do it (OMG what if I miss that one important call out of thousands?), but I lost that anxiety after about a month. So nice to use my phone on my own terms and review my missed calls when it's convenient for me.

You should be issuing commands to your computer, not the other way around.

Even paid products that you'd think would have nothing to do with ads are affected, as there's still someone on the inside whose salary depends on increasing "engagement", I guess since anything could eventually be turned into an ad delivery mechanism and they're keeping their options open.

Put power dial where you want it. Put timer dial where you want it. Timer starts ticking down and the microwave turns on. Loud ding (from a physical bell somewhere inside it, not a speaker) when it's done. That's the entire thing. No buttons, no clock (god, why do you need a clock on your microwave?!) none of that shit.

Heavy, good-feeling dials that you could feel physically operating something underneath, from the clunks of the power dial to the subtle scrape of the timer dial. Great feel on the door handle. All-around solid. Nothing to learn. Just use it.

You also make it easier for the next person.

Imagine all the people who can now see these things who would never have been able to travel and see them in the past. I don't even think I could travel to half the places I want to see due to time constraints and my personal life choices (kids, etc.). I love being able to watch some videos of people walking in different cities or whatever, since I know I have maybe 2 overseas trips left in me.

Having been to plenty of places in my youth, though, I can say that seeing the Eiffel Tower on video and climbing to the top (twice in two consecutive days; man my legs hurt) is way way different, but for someone who couldn't go there, it's probably great to see the videos. Also, maybe if people saw the wonders in their own backyard, that would be a good idea, versus watching other wonders on video.

Much like when the landline phone and personal automobile increased access to cheating partners..

technology / social media especially - increases access to 'better rung (like a ladder)' sex partners, relationship, social status, money, etc. - all a click / tap away, and likely coming to you via dms/pms..

I'll add that these auto-filters on cameras seem to make a lot of people, (especially girls from what I have seen, anecdotal for sure) - think they are more attractive than they really are.. which increases attention they get via insta/tik/fbk, whatever.. but also gives them false sense of where they could be in the ladder.. which leads them to discount 'average guy is good' -

ads make this worst too many times.

There is much more to add to this - but these things are noticeable in the data as well right? isn't like 80% of women only trying to attract the top 20% of men.

with tech making it easy to have 'a grass is greener here' profile to attract, it's harder to keep a relationship in general than it used to be, even if they don't run away, I think women are less happy / take it out on the average man when they don't have the kardashian/insert reality whatever here, type of life they see others 'living their best life' on reality-social.. I don't mean to say similar affects don't occur with men vs women - I'm just pointing to what I have seen a lot of.

I agree there is too much eye candy, especially in phones.

Unlikely both would blow, but I'm a little surprised more fuss hasn't been made about it from a safety standpoint; considering being able to see where you're going tends to be important - I believe in France you can get a ticket for having no washer fluid.

And then we did new technology to “fix” the old technology. Kind of a ponzi scheme if you ask me.

I wish. Clearly you missed the early 2010s, with skeuomorphic/glass design everywhere. I would have preferred that over the flat/featureless designs we have today.

IMO, the real problem is the number of abstractions we've created, not the nice graphical stuff. The tech companies would be wise to start throwing truckloads of money at hiring game engine people and get help with the performance problems we have everywhere.

I'm not denying that things are more complicated now than in the 1990s, (unicode, high DPI displays, etc.), but we've completely abstracted over hardware to where it is no longer a concern of software developers.

Basically, for the first 50 years, airplane technology advanced at an amazing pace. And people thought it would go on to supersonic aircraft and space travel, and they tried to make that happen, but it just didn't make practical sense, and today we use jumbo jets very similar to what was introduced 50 years ago, and they still work better than the more advanced alternatives.

you can pry my 16 core Threadripper and its 64GB of RAM from my cold dead hand.

Some of us use computers for things where more CPU cycles per second and more RAM are always good things.

You know, I used to jump from one thing to the next never giving anything enough time. I would attend digital conferences, watch PARTS of courses on Pluralsight, LinuxAcademy (RIP) and youtube, hoard books, bookmark websites etc.

Something happened a few years ago where I was able to just turn it all off. I deleted all my pdfs and removed all my bookmarks. I began focusing on single thing at a time (usually in reference to certifications or new skills), and it made such a difference.