alt Hacker NewsI agree, but also to be fair, I think it's always been like this. Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)? Bad coding, bad platforms, predatory platforms, whacked out design, crappy hardware...
There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.
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"Innovation" ? You mean the term that was created because "invention" was too obvious of a stretch?
Exactly how much of what has been billed as "innovation" couldn't simply have been done on a mainframe with 3270 terminals? I'd say the entirely of the "web 2.0" and "mobile app" trends could have fit into that.
The actual hard tech problems that have been solved consist of like virtual machines, miniaturized computers, search engines, and LLMs. Which are great, for sure. But the majority of the user-facing software on top has been noise, outright trash even.
While command prompts and programming languages have always been generally poor (ie obtusely machine focused), I'd say they were at least honest. As if you put in the effort to learn something, you would actually get something out of it - not just the ground shifting under your feet. Otherwise you could just not engage, not put in the effort, and that was fine, too
Now you're basically forced to engage, and when you do end up engaging it's always the lowest common denominator surveillance industry entitled-to-your-data tripe. And while you can engage a little harder to run up the hill of self-actualization, the industry is even working on plugging that "hole" with captchas, remote attestation, and their ilk.
> Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)?
I know you weren’t being quite so literal but it is worth mentioning Google until 2019 or so did, even as SEO and ad considerations nibbled at it for years. Eventually it broke though so here we are
Early consoles (except Nintendo cartridges), cassette players, VCRs, CD players, cable TV boxes, fax machines, photocopier, computer-controlled telescopes... While sometimes figuring out how to get them to do something in the pre-internet era was difficult, they would pretty reliably do it. The only glitches or crashes I remember on my C64 were from disk corruption (or my own coding errors).