What technologies have made your life worse?

Soft buttons and software-mediated knobs replacing real buttons and real knobs that actually do things.

Best microwave I've ever used was made in, I think, the late 70s. Didn't even have a turntable, and worked just fine without it, somehow. No clock at all. The "UI" was two heavy-feeling knobs, one for power and one for time. Turn the time knob, and it starts cooking at your selected power until the time runs down, with the knob itself tick-tocking down to zero and setting off a physical(!) buzzer. Want to add more time? Turn the knob while it's still running, no problem. Realize you added too much time? Ditto, but in reverse. Exactly as you'd expect. Simply pull the door open, no button for that, even.

Intuitive, simple, felt great to use, and did 100% of what I want out of a microwave.

Basically anything that used to have real buttons and knobs that have been replaced by shitty-feeling rubber-covered buttons and knobs that merely communicate suggestions, hooked up to an embedded computer, has a worse UI than what it replaced. And don't get me started on touch-sensitive buttons. At least touch screens have some excuse, some purpose. Dedicated touch-sensitive buttons are like some kind of practical joke, and have been central to several of my worst experiences with products.

Smartphones have had a significantly negative impact on my overall mental health. There's no denying that some of the features they provide clearly give tremendous value namely maps, messaging, and media (pictures/videos). Outside of that and limited utilities it becomes this broadly unfocused time sink that takes copious amounts of self discipline and boundaries to control. Given as an industry we've become so capable at capturing and holding user's attention there's this constant mental fixation on our phones and the continual dopamine hits they provide.

The minimalist smartphone market is developing but still rather anemic in its offering. I continue to watch companies like humane and blloc to see if they can ultimately produce something that is more compelling. Time will tell, but I feel like this is a market we really need more investment in.

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites!

It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms.

In my ideal world everyone would be using Lisp (my username checks out!) but so much power. It has a simple syntax (some say it has no syntax but I think that is a little hyperbole). In my ideal world new concepts and paradigms are implemented in Lisp using Lisp. I'd much rather spend time solving real problems that real human beings care about. I'd much rather learning new ways of solving problems with new paradigms. I don't want to waste hours learning new syntaxes and their gotchas and edge-cases!

Car touchscreens are the worst. More complicated, more failure states, and I can't feel the volume button, so I have to take my eyes off the road.

Chatbots. Cheap excuse to cut customer service or hide it behind a tedious process of convincing the if-else that it can't actually solve your problem.

Literally every IoT device! These things are terrible. My dishwasher can't wash dishes once it does a software update. My TV spies on me and shows me targeted ads. Every useless piece of hardware has a microphone and camera in it.... Heck, I've spent countless days breaking the microphones and cameras on my new "smart" devices before I feel comfortable using them.

Even after spending thousands of dollars on a car, I'm not allowed to install alternative privacy friendly firmware on it. It's bad enough that there are AI-powered cameras with facial recognition everywhere, but thanks to HD cameras in every $100 phone, it's hard to walk in a public place without being in the background of an Instagram story.

Everyone is spying on me and every damn "smart" device is turned against me..

School's curriculum and grading system being connected to email alerts + doing standardized testing 3-4 times a year.

It takes a lot of energy to raise children and be a good partner. The anxiety introduced by constantly getting notified of what is being taught, what the grades are, what is missing EVERYDAY is not only overkill, but I think harmful.

My philosophy is that school (elementary, middle, high school) is a time to explore, be a kid, make mistakes, and do your best to navigate puberty.

The constant reminder of grades, grades, grades puts too much emphasis on my more school-inclined child to be obsessed with their identity as an "A" student, and my art-inclined child to rebel at every turn with us constantly stressing if she's "missed" anything.

Modern thermometers to take my temperature (fever).

I bought already a couple of them, and somehow none of them seems to work well, or they are too sensitive and I can't figure out where to measure my temperature and what counts as fever.

I finally found some thermometers that I used when I was younger, and now I can reliably measure my temperature and I can tell what counts as fever.

They didn't actually made my life worse, I don't want to be that dramatic, but I definitely dislike them.

Automatic vehicle climate control. If the ambient temperature is hotter than the setting I get blasted with frozen air and if it's colder I have to sit in an oven until the car decides it's the correct temperature. I much preferred twisting a knob until the air hitting my face was comfortable. What is comfortable is altered by how active I've been, the time of day, the temperature I've been in before getting into the car, what I'm wearing, etc. Climate control doesn't give a shit about any of that.

Glued-in, designed-to-be-non-replaceable batteries, when we all know that they'll start to degrade after a year or two of heavy use.

We should have rejected it in phones. We should certainly have rejected it in laptops.

I don't have much hope for EVs. With the battery making up maybe half of the value of the vehicle, a top design priority should have been standardised 'battery modules' shared between as many vehicle models as possible, to allow for easy replacement (including swapping out just 1 of N modules after minor damage rather than writing the whole car off), upgrade, salvage, and recycling.

This is not new or recent, but printers, photocopiers and projectors have always made my life confusing and painful. What should’ve been simple and what could’ve been intuitive has been made hellishly complex and unwieldy. The scene in Office Space showing them smashing a printer and the scene in The Office (US) where Pam is utterly defeated by a new copier [1] aren’t just jokes.

On relatively recent technologies, Bluetooth is unpredictable and finicky across different devices. One cannot effectively carry over one’s learning from one Bluetooth device to another. One cannot predict how a particular new Bluetooth device will work (or not) with one’s existing devices.

And then there are USB-C ports and cables. They all look alike, but you’d never easily know what it supports (which cable is the right one, power delivery, how much power can/will it handle, data transfer speed, is it Thunderbolt, etc.).

I can’t imagine how non-technical people roll the dice with all these and how much they must hate technology.

[1]: Season 5 Episode 19 (“Two Weeks”)

The aggressive push towards thin devices with questionable cooling combined with the ever increasing bloat in windows/office.

Seems to have eaten up all the gains from SSDs and more modern CPUs. The hardware gets better and excel stays slow

LED vehicle headlights. How long will it take before they figure out how to make them without burning out the retinas of the general public?

Anything that listens to your searches and uses that to tailor Youtube results, future search results, advertisements, etc.

I miss the discoverability of the old internet, and I hate having to do 90% of my searches in Incognito.

inb4 DuckDuckGo, etc.

Slack. It has turned everyone's current thoughts into interrupts for everyone else. The idea that it is async has long been abandoned and if you don't reply to someone quickly, they escalate or move on to someone else. It has created a world in which everyone thinks everything is a priority and must be addressed immediately. To make things worse, people create channel after channel after channel, many with all the same people but a slightly different scope and you're expected to have read them all. It's maddening.

Super-bright halogen headlights. It's highly questionable that they really provide any benefit for the driver except in some relatively uncommon circumstances (where a classic high/low system would work fine), and they definitely blind everyone else. Overall result: negative.

Smartphones - while providing great utility in some areas, they are generally too distracting without a lot of tweaking. They also result in me having to repeat myself at people fiddling with their phones instead of listening.

Chatbots - as others mentioned.

Laptops - encourage bad posture, lots of PT and exercise to improve that. Self-control as well.

Smart watches - same reasons as phone. Lot of good and a lot of bad.

IMHO Juicero was a scam. Here's my list.

* Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support. * Touchscreens in cars (already mentioned). My Toyota is not even capacitive and it's a car from 2017. More generally... Touchscreens where they're not needed, like ATMs or vending machines: with all this covid fear, they're not hygienic. * Wireless headphones: battery, quality of sound... I fear the day there will be no wired headphones available on consumer market. I don't care about high quality wireless headphones, I don't want to charge my headphones * Messaging apps. I have to keep iMessage, Telegram, Whatsapp & Signal on my phone because I have different contacts using different apps. It was easier in the SMS era

Rechargeable AAA and AA batteries with their chargers and gadgets that need AAA and AA batteries.

I think environment-friendly and always have bought rechargeable batteries. However since about ten years I feel that rechargeable batteries don't work well anymore. They don't keep a lot of charge and die soon, sometimes only after two or three recharges.

I gave up and don't buy rechargeable AAA and AA batteries anymore and try to avoid gadgets needing AAA and AA batteries. Most toys need them, however.

What I really would like: USB-C rechargeable AAA and AA batteries by having an USB-C plug in the battery, a way to daisy-chain them during charging, a mini-display on the battery to show the charge in mAh, and a possibility to leave the batteries in the gadget during charging. Even better, don't sell gadgets without USB-C charging.

Social media. It's more addictive than fun. I feel it rewards unpopular opinions, and humiliation of others. You get into the habit of being "savage" and putting down others. And eventually it wears down your ability to feel love and empathy for a stranger.

- touch based screen/UI technologies,

- web 2.0 and later,

- widescreen ratios,

- every Google technology/product plus how Google handles them,

- the whole “smart” concept,

- x86 monopoly,

- web browser hell,

- personal systems with active cooling,

- instant messaging,

enough for a first comment.

But CRT to LCD transition was the hardest era until HiDPI + scaling comes to town (a.k.a. retina).

Voice over IP. All calls, mobile and landline, seem to run on it these days, introducing a latency that makes phone conversations very different from the way they were back when you had a direct wire connection.

Slack. It enables your worst people to monopolise the time and attention of your best, and provides pitiful tools to manage alerts.

Remember, they want to grow their user base, just like Facebook. They will use similar tactics.

Apple FaceID in general but definitely when driving, wearing sunglasses, or outside in bright sunlight.

I have a mount for the phone at center dash of my car and FaceID rarely works from there. I have to lean over while trying to drive to put my face in front of the phone to get it to work … sometimes. Usually the phone insists on the passcode which is insecure when mounted on dash for passengers to easily view and provides a further distraction.

Good old TouchID worked so much better in most circumstances.

"Smart" hardware requiring an app to do simple things. The whole space produces tings that are so convoluted to set up, prone to constant failures when wifi goes down, suffer from security issues, ergonomics, and probably steal loads of personal data.

Very specific, but: Mountain Bike 12x drivetrains.

They are extremely finnicky, delicate and built with very small tolerances for something that gets rattled around for kilometers of trail in dust, mud or water.

I never, ever had one or seen one that hasn't been very very capricious with cable tension or dropout straightness or cassette tightening or barrel adjustment. And usually they drop out of shape regularly after being maintained and re-set.

I get that the industry had to sell something new at some point, but give me any "old" 10x or reliable 11x drivetrain any day. Hell, I'd pay cash for a 9x with only the largest cogs of a modern 12x.

burning fossil fuels for energy, leaded gasoline, Facebook

- Social media

- Ad-trackers

- App stores/subscriptions

- Cookie banners

- Stupid "AI"

- Ridiculous customer service chatbots/IVR call-trees

- Cryptocurrency scams

Cars, and nothing else even comes close.

Microsoft Teams :D

Social media. From Instagram to TikTok to YT to LinkedIn

Restricted OS like Android. Awesome hardware has been dumbed down to a pathetic handheld console, turning you into a brainless ad clicking zombie.

Touch controls replacing physical dials and buttons.

-Pop music -social media -processed/junk foods -Bluetooth(depending on the device and the application, sometimes wires are just better)

Smartphone is easily the worst, too distracting and addicting. Internet I could still handle when I only had access to it in certain places.

IVRs / phone answering systems

when you need to get to a person and you don't fall within their voice prompt system you end up saying "operator" 7 times and then the computer is like "Did you want to talk to an operator?" and it says please enter your 10 digit phone number.. And you're stuck in hell for 10 minutes.

Smart devices that do not need to be smart in the first place. Mandatory apps that are supported only on iOS and Android.

E-tickets for concerts:

- need to fumble through awful apps/sites to find them and hope you have signal

- phone dead? no ticket for you

- went with other people? all the tickets are on one phone. good luck getting back to your seat without that phone

- worst of all? no ticket stub to look back at years later

Fire

things were better when we didn't have to waste time cooking our food

and don't get me started on the Wheel :P

Slack

Jira, without a doubt.

Everything that is is even remotely a negative connotation involves Jira for me.

Electron. I don’t think that needs explaining, but happy to do so if required.

mostly twitter. not that i use it but bc of the effect is has on other people (making them racist so that all they can talk about is how white people are bad/racist)

huge changes in SAAS or app UIs. When every a company totally changes the UI, they rarely think of all the time users put into learning the original UI.

LED billboards

Touchscreens.

Coca Cola Freestyle machines

Internet and the smartphone

Mobile parking apps

Social media

printers