logoalt Hacker News

anonymous908213today at 1:49 AM1 replyview on HN

New Reddit and Outlook.com are two off the top of my head. It is not uncommon to be looking at a spinner for several seconds. There are other websites that are not primarily for text but are still insane. Twitch.TV, an old favorite of mine, now routinely takes 10+ seconds despite having Amazon money behind it. Youtube routinely takes several seconds to load the page, which is still unacceptable even for a video website. These sites are maintained by FAANG-tier engineers being paid mid-high 6 figures or 7 figures, who I'm sure are mostly perfectly competent, and yet they are completely dysfunctional because enterprise environments inevitably create structural disincentives to producing good code.

I use Electron applications. They are usable, for some value of the word. I am certainly not happy about it, though. I loathe the fact that I have 32GB RAM and routinely run into memory issues on a near-daily basis that should literally never happen with the workloads I'm doing. With communication-based apps like Slack and Discord where your choice of software to use comes down entirely to where the people you're communicating are, you will use dogshit because there is no point to communicating to the void on a technically superior platform.


Replies

itsboringtoday at 3:34 AM

Not to mention that it seems like everything has to go through like 10 redirects just to log in, and then you have to dismiss various pop-ups before you can just do whatever you went there to do. Some will say that the last part is just a UX problem, but in my opinion, sluggishness is the king of UX prooblems.

On the topic of Electron, I’m really torn. I can’t help but feel some gratitude for the fact a few of the work tools I need work on Linux (stuff like Slack, Teams, Zoom).