Why Do So Many Everyday Systems Feel Harder to Use Now?

realitydrift

An illustrated collection of ordinary systems that have gradually become harder to navigate over time. Not catastrophic failures, but layers of process, abstraction, and complexity that steadily accumulate

almarcher

Restaurants that don't have physical menus, and only QR codes. The solution when you don't bring a phone is they bring you their tablet. Why?

techteach00

Buying a new phone and transferring the apps over is a complete nightmare with login issues, unrecognized device, two factor authentication etc

JohnFen

A couldn't agree with the article more. Technology is increasingly being leveraged against us and is making daily life a greater pain in the butt than is necessary, and a greater pain than before the technology came around.

m3047

Some of this isn't new, like the printer example. However I recently bought a Canon inkjet printer because it purportedly had good linux support (spoiler: it's actually ok!). Even though MacOS drivers and software were available, all of the online instructions were strictly for Windows. So I set the printer up with the Mac software. Knowing what I know now, I could have done all of the printer setup with the printer control panel. As far as I can tell, all the printer really required on a reasonably modern copy of SuSE Linux was a PPD. I haven't done pcaps, but taking it at "interface value" it looks like it ingests ghostscript-generated PDFs just fine. I haven't tried to get the scanner working on Linux.

mindslight

10. Articles with headlines promising to answer "Why", but instead just bombard you with a bunch of examples and never do any analysis or synthesis. My own answers for "why" here things like the incentives of middle managers to always be adding bullet point features (eg 2FA most places), the more of your effort something takes up the less time you can spend on competing options (eg bloated shopping websites that take 10 seconds to load each page), the ever-present desire to siphon more surveillance data from your personal devices, etc. My own response is to withdraw from these types of businesses where I can, avoid high-touch "services" that want to own the experience (ie be able to arbitrarily change them) in favor of libre software and my own digital software/systems/infrastructure, and generally accept being a "weirdo" for customer service people when I don't accept answers like "just install our app!". It helps to understand how these systems work too, like for shipping item returns rather than ever logging into the website from my phone (lol) I just save off the QR code image and send it into a Matrix chat, which is available on my phone. While the dynamic is unavoidable, solutions are there for many of these problems but it takes deliberate effort to push back against manufactured complexity.

moezd

Everything is designed around collecting your data somehow so that they know what to sell you next. You've no longer the customer, you are an agent that gets to use that interface.

musicale

> The Hidden Fees Receipt I wish the FTC hadn't exempted restaurants from junk free transparency requirements. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/ftc-exempts-restaurants-... Restaurant industry celebrates "win" on exemption from junk fee disclosure: https://www.lra.org/2024/12/17/advocacy-win-restaurants-ftc-... But delivery fee transparency may be coming: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/16/2026-07... The following should really apply (of course those "shipping charges" can be another scam, see eBay etc.): > Businesses may only exclude three categories of charges from the total price: government charges, shipping charges, and fees or charges for optional ancillary goods or services that people choose to add to the transaction. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/rule-unfair-...