alt Hacker News> If I was on the design team they would have fired me for screaming at everyone.
Oh man. I really do start screaming sometimes.
At user interfaces, too often. At unbelievably bad product choices of all kinds.
The simpler & dumber the issue the louder I get.
Someone creates a quality flat tine garden rake with about 40 metal tines, and charges accordingly. The person who manages stickers, because everything needs stickers, creates huge stickers they glue across all the tines. You try to peel it off and now you have over two dozen tines with long streaks of shredded paper glued hard to them.
Screaming is an appropriate place to put the high spin WTF-a-tons that might otherwise feed the universe’s dark energy.
And that, dear reader, is my theory of dark energy.
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You start with something that works but is obviously wrong for reasons unknown. Then you think you've unraveled one of the wrong doings and think you've found a solution to make it better. Both are most likely wrong and your solution made things worse. This becomes obvious later on when you have a whole list of imaginary improvements. You keep at it and slowly the stupid simple truth comes out or so you think. Hey, at least it improved over what it was? You then have people use it, dumb people are best so that you can feel dumb together when it becomes obvious that obvious wasn't what you thought it was. You fix everything until it is good enough to alienate existing users. More effort goes in and finally you allow yourself to add one new button. This is it? Everyone asks. YES, this is it. But what about... and you tell them why that is not going to happen or they come up with one more something that sounds actually good but most likely isn't.
The analogy is probably to start with a 5G wifi HD camera doorbell with cloud hosting, night vision, human body motion detection zones and you end with a heavy duty cast iron door knocker that has one moving part and instantly reveals something personal about the person at the door. A small art work depicting something about you. They come as dragons, goats, unicorns, vikings, snakes, Bumble bees, Longhorns, Moose, Neptune, Bacchus, all kinds of tools and all kinds of symbols. Build to last many times longer than the house.
And then people cant find the bell...
You ok man?