Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?

Old school RuneScape is an mmorpg where each game update goes to a vote, and if it doesn’t get 75% approval the updates are not worked on by devs and don’t get released. The community feels a strong ownership and connection over the game. So much so that when the development company (Jagex) makes a wrong decision, it’s common for users to “riot” in game. They go to a specific world, at a specific town, place down specific items, and chant.

While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

Wiki article about an example with a video. Occurred prior to the voting system, but still occurs even 15 years later https://runescape.wiki/w/Pay_to_PK_Riot

Secondary to the question, but I live right by the Epic campus and use the Epic MyChart platform to communicate with the University of Wisconsin health system. It is phenomenal as a patient; I can handle all billing, message any doctor I've seen, view test results as soon as they're uploaded, etc. Recently I saw the results of some bloodwork in the ER before the nurses had time to come and tell me about it. (The UI/UX is awful, though.)

I look at the screens of the medical staff when I'm in the office and I can see why they don't like Epic; bad UI/UX and they definitely reorder and rearrange common menus when there's a big update. For overworked medical staff it's got to be a nightmare.

There must be a middle ground. I never want to go back to a healthcare system where I don't have something like Epic, but also it would be nice to have a platform with a more stable, simple design philosophy.

There was a case more than 20 years ago of a similar revolt against a Canadian hospital's automated drug dispensing machine that would only let nurses withdraw the exact dose of medicine a patient needed in a short window around when patient was supposed to take each dose. It was so bad it got written up into an academic article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016224390202700...

Sure. Public servants rally in Ottawa to protest Phoenix payroll system: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/public-servants-ra...

Highly doubt that this is the only time a Peoplesoft clusterfuck inspired demonstrations, either. Some software is just unbelievably shitty.

There is the infamous "Windows Refund Day" http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/

Here you go, from a UK protest against a programme for automatically grading students. If I remember correctly, there were street protests across the UK.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/129527788941230489... https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/feb/18/the-studen...

I've seen a few people protesting against GitHub, mostly because they profit of the code that is hosted on there (notably GitHub Copilot) More on that here: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ Though this is online.

For real life, people in Germany went to the streets a few times already because of the so-called "Staatstrojaner" (Basically a trojan that they can inject into all devices of someone who is "suspicious" in the governments eyes, they're probably using Pegasus, but I'm not super deep into that topic). Ref: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/protest-so-war-die-erste-demo-g... (There is way more on that though)

Having worked in IT supporing doctors, nurses, scientists, and academics for the last 23 years, in all honesty, it doesn't matter what they would have chosen it would have resulting in a percentage of them complaining. Doctors like change that they control and understand, such as research leading to new treatments and improved patient outcomes. They do NOT like having their workflows challenged, though. They have very specific prescriptive actions that they live by, and again, they only like changing those when it benefits them in some tangible way. EHRs benefit their -institutions- in tangible ways, not them. EHRs benefit billing, administrative, regulatory departments more than they benefit providers... in the eyes of the providers.

I work at an institution made up of components institutions, many of which use their own independent EHR systems. What doctors LIKE are the ones they get used to in their residency, fellowships, and first years in practice. Older doctors coming from paper straight to ANY EHR will struggle without extensive assistance from their support staff. Nurses rarely get support staff, and usually ARE the support staff to a provider in addition to their nursing duties. The overall feeling I get, though, is that most of them that have used Epic like it. Cerner as well. Some others in the institution like Meditech, less so (due to largely archaic interfaces dressed up with some more current UI). But Epic and Cerner are the big players in the game. There are many, many others, and in the end what ends up mattering is the support staff for the EHR both local and vendor. One we use has gone to a lot of off-shore tier 2 and tier 3 support staff lately, and it truly is a struggle in unforeseeable ways (such as terrible telecom infrastructure making it often impossible to communicate with vendor support staff). They are all focused on new customers and growth and then maintaining the customers, and it certainly makes you feel like an afterthought as a standing customer.

In my industry, several "open letters" have been sent to Autodesk for their lack of response to customer requests and seemingly basic or common-sense features that have been requested for decades:

https://the-nordic-letter.com/

https://archinect.com/news/article/150324438/nordic-architec...

Doubt anyone has marched in protest of Autodesk but sometimes I sure feel like doing so

The Robodebt scandal in Australia didn't spill over to violence in the streets, but it came close. Robodebt was a debt collection system introduced by the Federal government to recover supposed overpayments of social security. It was flawed at every level, including software design, and resulted in nationwide protests. see https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6037228/robo-debt-cen...

An excerpt (hopefully apropos) from Digital Vegan

"Computing choices create real power relationships and enable invisible abuse, by exclusion or marginalisation. Computing choices probably have a far more profound effect on peoples' lives and practices than their choice of friends, religious affiliations or sexual preferences. Roughly, according to the American Time Use Survey and the 2014 Pew Research Social Networking Fact Sheet, we spend on average, 0.5 hours a day in prayer and group worship, 0.5 hours engaged in social and conversational activities, 0.35 hours in romantic and sexual activity and 8.0 hours of screen time, of which 3.0 hours is interactive [Pew14]. This places computing, and the choices of operating system, applications, and workflows right at the centre of a Western adult's life."

Street protests over software does seem a tad odd. But as power concentrates in the hands of ever fewer digital oligarchs I expect we'll see all sorts of push-back against effective mandates and life-patterns foisted upon populations by unelected power.

I've not seen anything as extreme as people in the streets, but regularly have seen employee pushback about erp system implementations, e.g. SAP. These enterprise systems are are all on the back of employees, by which I mean they are forced to take the extra time to use them while they are extremely unfriendly to the user - because they are bought by execs, and their value is not at all apparent to those who use then.

A simple example, imagine you told employees they now had to log their time and account for each 15 minutes, and do so through some kind of java.swing interface from the 90s that routinely screwed up, and they don't get any extra time to do so, and they're already busy. Now multiply that by whatever other silly management tasks they want you to use the tool for. You'd be pissed off too

Would you be able to post any links to news reports of this?

Hospital software can be shockingly bad. The comments of this article on Ars the other day digressed onto the topic, with several interesting user perspectives https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/new-t...

Edit: can only find ones which are paywalled

https://www.adressa.no/nyheter/i/0QQv6g/arrangerer-fakkeltog...

https://www.nidaros.no/demonstrerer-mot-helseplattformen-sto...

Students in France protested multiple times at least partly against Parcoursup, the government software where high school students enter their choices for higher education and get selected by universities.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20181204-high-school-protests-c...

> In the past few months, several high school student unions have called for protests against recent reforms in France's education system.

> They have also been protesting against 'Parcoursup', an online government platform designed for selecting students for university.

Same software, different country: https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apotti_(potilastietoj%C3%A4r...

It's been a very expensive disaster on the taxpayers' dime.

Similar problems in UK and Denmark (links in Wikipedia).

We had a software system screw up teachers pay for months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopay

Before that a massive failure of a Police software system https://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/insights-into-incis-de...

They didn't demonstrate against it's adoption but there were demonstrations as a result of the massive waste of funds and impact to people involved.

Related: a very good article by Atul Gawande (author of The Checklist Manifesto) that talks about not only problems with medical software, but also user-led efforts to make it better [1]. Worth reading to the end.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha... (Archived: https://archive.ph/PlnQl )

Not actual physical mobilization but when the amount of mistreatment the team (and founder) behind Roam Research became too much, users started switching en masse and very vocally.

It was a lot of drama, I don't think I've ever seen a promising start-up blow the lead in this way. All because the founder thought himself to be the next Steve Jobs and thought that he had a defensible moat (spoiler alert: he didn't) so he could treat his users however he liked and charge them for five year plans without offering a road map.

Epic timeline in Scandinavia

2013 - Sundhedsplatform in Denmark chooses to go with Epic system. Go-live was a huge mess is 2016 and the system still doesn't work properly

2016 - Apotti platform in Finland chooses to go with Epic. In 2022 600 over doctors signed an petition to get rid of epic.

2020 - Helseplatform in Norway chooses Epic. And well, how is it going.

Isn’t that what the farmers did against John Deere’s “lock your tractor through software” software?

> Have this ever happen in history before? How bad can something be that users go out in the street to demostrate?

We used to have this in Ukraine but the war successfully halted all the strikes. To tell shortly, any shop which sells anything must report on any buying to the authority. This is kinda stupid because if you are selling something on weight, you need to jongle with too many devices: a weight-meter to weight (it can accept a cost of something being weighted), then a calc to sum if number of goods is more than 1, then a laptop to fill a message to an authority, then a terminal to let client pay with card. The programs the authority gives us just can not deal with goods which are selling on weight, so we are cheating them kind of I can not tell the government that I have sold a one kilogram of rice for ₴60 but I can tell that I sold 60 candies each per ₴1 (the fact that ₴60 is going to my bank account is definitely visible by thems and this number requires to be grounded). Imagine a girl who do not like to be a technician and she goes to be a seller in a grocery shop, and what she gets today? A lot of typing job. Guess how many seller girls in Ukraine can touchtype if there are no mandatory touchtype lessons in our school even now.

And do you know what the laptops are doing in Ukrainian grocery shops? They are running an account software in browser.

I actually have a translated copy of this book:

https://www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/matusow/beastofbiz.html

Also see: https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526160720/978152...

"The result was the launch of the International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines (ISADPM) – President, Harvey Matusow. The society was in many ways a media construct and little substantial activity took place on the ground, although much was promised. It was a minor, but for a time significant, part of a broader public debate in England around the emerging database society. It resonated with a cultural unease around computerization and its medium effects felt in the late 1960s, what might be termed a database anxiety. For many at that time computers seemed alien and the proposition that they might be ‘far more deadly than the Beatles’ yellow submarine’, as one US Congressman put it, 4 not entirely absurd."

there was that one time laura loomer chained herself to the twitter building, but that was more a one-person publicity stunt than a protest.

this does seem about par for the course for Epic installs, which suffer a great deal of typical enterprise software disease. i have fond recollections of their user-facing staff training including a dedicated section for "how do i, a new grad with a sociology degree and 3mo of EMR training, convince a bunch of decade-veteran nurses and physicians that i have enough industry knowhow to effectively advise them how to navigate their complicated EMR install?"

if not a in-person protest, this did remind me of an extremely early 2010s meme format on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt1BPvMbNpk

Many complaints and a long standing campaign against software for managing post offices in the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56718036. It caused a spate a wrongful fraud convictions.

I haven't seen literal protest, but at my old job, there were several forums (one public, one pseudo-anonymous). When software rollouts didn't go well, there were loud protestations on those forums. Examples include new video streaming software botching a live event; VPN software that performed inconsistently; and business software that made the front-line business workers' jobs a lot harder.

No one ever staged a walkout. It was at a company serving military members and had many workers from that background... I think "stuff sucks" was part of the life. But after sufficient complaining, some projects were fast-tracked for improvement and frontline buy-in.

Sometimes the "demonstration" is inaction or refusal to use it by key staff. I've heard of this in hospitals in the U.S., senior doctors refusing to use EMR, databases, or other technology because they prefer the old processes.

In the UK NHS, the staff have software that they think is working, but the management thinks its best to change. They are changing systems every year, once they have adapted, there it comes a new platform that is "going to solve everything"... their email provider, the patients management, drugs stock, the staff management, reporting... then they get tablets, then laptops, the PCs on wheels, then barcodes... Combined with their understaffed shifts, errors are increasing, and people dying

Obviously people are tiered, but they can barely finish their shifts, let alone have strength to protest. The whole thing must be about to implode soon

I've had this happen with doctors as well. Not the whole torches thing? That seems wierd to me. Additionally also teachers and police do this.

I as a project manager and tech implemented a solution in parallel to an old system. I had a pilot group who approved, but that group wasn't selected by me. It didn't include anyone important or basically anyone who cared.

The 'powers that be' said go forward and when the doctors were told about the new system them walked off the job. Literally all of them. I wasnt the one who picked the software, I just installed it. Still made me feel very small. I learnt years later that whole software package was never used and the doctors walked out again to demonstrate against 'the old software they have to deal with'

I basically learnt we were just an excuse to take a break.

My experience with teachers was a different one. I implemented a new 5ghz N aironet with controller for 1 school. Didnt inform anyone because the actual connectivity mechanism wasnt going to change. Teachers all walked out because... wifi causes cancer. Mind you, its not like I really introduced anything particularly new.

Police was more old school, it was more along the lines of 'we arent techsavvy enough to use that'. But this was only so many years ago, it wasnt really appropriate anymore.

I mean 'exit voice and loyalty' right? A few paying users, getting a little loud about the product they pay for, can change priorities pret-ty quickly

Or like enterprise software -- some of these were initially built for a single client. Others have many customers but a few whales that cover most of payroll.

Harder w/ consumer stuff (google reader), there's less 'voice' and more 'exit', and 'exit' sometimes doesn't get the point across until it's too late

It's that flaming torches and pitchforks moment we always feared would come...

The only other time I remember this was when Lars Ulrich showed up at the Napster offices in San Mateo.

As teenagers we protested encryption on DVDs around 1999. A dozen of our local 2600 meetup gathered in front of what is now a Best buy and handed out DeCSS flyers.

There was this

https://www.provokemedia.com/latest/article/the-launch-of-sa...

It has also been said that employees and unions were negative on government plans to switch to Linux and off-brand Office software in Germany and lobbied to get Microsoft back although I think they were more quiet about it.

Benioff staged a fake "end of software" protest against Siebel as a marketing ploy, successfully attracting news coverage. https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-staged-protest-that-kic...

Yes however my direct experience in having to walk through protesters to get to work was not based on bad software but instead religious beliefs. As a software architect for what was then the world's first biometric payments company in the mid 2000's, PayByTouch, I spent a lot of time in the San Francisco office solving reliability and system scaling issues. These techniques, now commonplace, were learned from my personal solutions in scaling my own server software which had processed all of PayPals transactions from the late 1990s up until their departure which cut us out, the EPX middleman. It is difficult to forget the first time I experienced this "vague hate" targeting me as I walked through protesters based on my employer and what I did for a living. I learned immediately to hide my badge and avoid the crowds which is something many others have learned that is even more applicable at this point in time in society.

The Ultima Online protests might qualify, but the protesting was on the streets virtually. They wanted bug fixes, reduction in lag, etc.

https://www.wired.com/1997/11/chaos-in-britannia-ultima-face...

Google DragonFly. Though technically it's SAAS

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-s-project-drag...

A bunch of us were pretty grumpy about Diebold touchscreen voting machines, imprinting our ballots with our voter ids, automatic signature verification, new tabulators.

We activists organized, got press, managed to make election integrity a campaign issue, and nudged some laws and rules towards sanity.

This might not be exactly what you're looking for but maybe 10 or 15 years ago, Defective by Design (organized by Free Software Foundation) was putting together in person demonstrations outside of Apple stores to protest against the use of DRM in iTunes.

Put yourself in the shoes of the staff. They have a workflow that works for them that was taken away. It’s replaced with a new system that they do not know how to use. Now they can’t even do their jobs normally. I could see them being really upset about this.

Of course - our dear IE was crowd's favorite:

https://www.theregister.com/2010/02/02/internet_explorer_6_p...

2 things will make this happen:

1. rapidly deteriorating quality of software; 2. The goal of software is shifting from actually solving problems and simplifying workflows to doing data farming and enforcing workflows for people who like control

Lately I am fighting with few organisations who claim they can't do that because their IT system "doesn't have this selection therefore we can not do that" although they are legally obligated to do so.

People are becoming extremely reliant on all sorts of software and amend their own beliefs to adjust to what the IT system tells you.

If you don't find this trend at least severely concerning, I am not sure what it.

I sometimes wonder if these types of administrative systems, which are really important for the well being of people and the development of society as a whole, are made to have a horrible user experience on purpose.

If this truly is the first time I can't think of a more worthy target. As a patient I loathe MyChart and based on my conversations with friends in the healthcare industry it isn't solving any of their problems either.

Not sure about a physical protest but wasn't there a LOT of online commentary etc about algorithms that were showing bias when used to making hiring or recruitment decisions?

As a healthcare consumer, I’ve been pretty dissapointed with EHR - apparently transferring medical data between hospitals requires an “hourly fee” and consultants, possibly even if both hospitals use Epic MyChart?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/epic-systems-ju...

Usually that appears to stop at protests that aren't so publicly visible, and by smaller cliques of technically sophisticated users.

It seems to me that most unsophisticated users tend to view software as mysterious and immutable. Something which can not be amended and no-one can be held accountable for. They will suffer, but mostly without grasping that they could resist.

I'd be happy to be shown wrong I'm wrong for a substantial amount of places or cultures.

Something about implementing a workflow process that involves collecting inputs from multiple users is really hard. Epic's system basically collects inputs from schedulers, front desks, nurses, technicians, doctors, billings, etc. Each step of the process depends on previous step. If step X fails, but the result of the failure can only be recognized at step X+10, it will probably throw the workflow engine into chaos ...

> an adaptation of Epic to the Norwegian Health system

> How bad can something be that users go out in the street to demostrate?

I'd have to know more about Epic to judge but I'd like to note that these hospital systems can have a major impact on productivity and how much money you make per hour. These systems are usually really bad, they are usually purchased by hospital staff that doesn't have to use the software.

In Denmark something similar happened a few years back. Sundhedsplatformen is also an implementation of Epic. But I don't think there was a big demonstration like this. There was a lot of bad press when this happened, but today we don't hear a lot about it, probably because the system in the end proved to be better than what it replaced. Also, a lot of bugs was closed.

Not to that extend. I remember that when Left 4 Dead 2 was announced, there was a boycot movement: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/one-zombie-of-a-chanc...

Yes, there was a protest in Seattle, SF, NYC a few weeks ago against Google's Project Nimbus (used by apartheid regime).

The Australia Card. This was a unique identifier for residents of Australia, for which the legislation did not proceed after nationwide protests. Protests marches featured depictions of government ministers in Nazi Gestapo dress, a reference to a government minister's agreement with a question asking if Australians might choose to tattoo the number on their wrists.

The government refused to bend. The public reaction lead to sufficient numbers in the Senate to disallow the enabling regulations (the very body which has previously passed the bill).

If I recall correctly, the book "The Toyota model" there was a quote saying "Toyota is not an IT company, we are a car maker" - this was the reason why they rejected using IT systems for many many years, simply focusing on physical kanban boards in the factory etc. etc.

Any suggestion of using Linux for end users, even if they really only need a browser, is quickly beaten down.

I've heard about similar circumstances when I briefly helped a startup that provided software in the hospice industry.

Supposedly a big client in Oklahoma City trialed their software one week and employees said the would quit if they were forced to use it.

Yes. I worked for a company that converted a pay-once app to a free app with a paid subscription. In protest, one guy made his facebook profile pic our app’s icon but upside down.

Whole thing was a bit of a shitshow but we got through it and it makes a good story for job interviews.

Just this year, Canada invoked its federal emergencies act against protesters who were revolting against a mobile app that was being used as a vaccine passport. It is still required for some travel, but since it only impacts a minority of the population who don't work in media, it's not part of the popular discourse. The irony is that the public inquiry launched in response is only into the use of the act against protesters, and not into the abuses that led to it.

All the big tech company HQs regularly have protestors for random issues, some software-related.

Someone mention Luddites this on HN recently, so I will repeat it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite. Not software, but still about automation.

I have seen it, also in healthcare. When the software gets in the way of providing care, or the implementation is so buggy it can put patients at risk, or when the burden it places on providers impedes their ability to work, then they will protest.

We need more of this.

https://www.seiu1021.org/article/sfusd-classified-staff-prot...

Yes. Many people pirate software when they are unsatisfied with the price or features.

Years ago I talked to a guy who worked there and at that time they were using VB6. I am sure it has changed now. Anyway I read that Epic sue TCS because some of the contractors from TCS stole its code.

this month a bunch of people closed their paypal accounts in response to a planned policy change that claimed the power to take $2500 from accounts that published misinformation. paypal claimed it was a mistake

https://twitter.com/hashtag/BankruptPaypal

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/10/10/how-to-delete...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/xzdu8x/whats_...

Maybe not real "demonstrations", but users of popular websites tend to riot when ui changes.

On wikipedia, the relationship between editors and devs can often be quite tense.

Is there a news article about the demonstration? I couldn’t find anything from 3 Norwegian papers with an English translation, Google, or HealthCare IT News.

Sure - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKr9wcQyyHo

I would like to demonstrate against a k8s. Sign me up.

I have heard rumours that one of the company, that was aquired by IBM, protested against using IBM Notes. Which I can totally relate.

I've experienced pushback to new software implementation but it's usually due to processes having to change.

Man, if they're rising up against Epic, then I can't fathom how they'd react to other EMRs.

I demonstrate (alone) against QR code only menus in restaurants. It excludes a large chunk of people.

I didn't follow the news on this but there used to be regular protests against Google

Not in the street, but there was a lot of noise a while ago because of WhatsApp EULA issues

Reddit mods shut down their subreddit after a few bad decisions that they didn’t like.

Yeah. Ever tried to convert Classic Editor users to Gutenberg in Wordpress?

They revolted against the "Software" in the Matrix.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this further up. I suppose it might be because it’s less perceived as software but, there were definitely protests against Uber.

Not only was Uber protested against, in some places successfully, but there were pro Uber protests as well.

Also as a somewhat funny anecdote, it wasn’t a protest as you describe, with people on the street but my aunt told me how a few years back there was an upgrade for the OS at the place she worked at. We’re talking completely non technical boomers having to switch from Windows 98 to Windows 7 or something like that. They were pissed! They were arguing with the boss about it, complaining non stop, saying how they don’t understand anything anymore and pretty much did an informal go slow for a few months.

the EHRs in the vision care space have been neglected even longer. At least Epic's is being worked on.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/28/facebook-...

SJWs and Parler

We had users complain about migrating to MS Teams as the text part of it is almost entirely a piece of shit that every competitor does orders of magnitude better but management said "fuck it, we're migrating regardless", throwing oh-so-great arguments like "our customers also use it"

I have never heard of uber, just like you

It can happen in countries where life is very peaceful, people have a lot of time, and where people are so accustomed to be in their comfort zone that any change feels like a danger to them.

Just my 2 cents as I may be wrong here :)