Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.
Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.
I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.
I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.
Gosh, I hope the media never unearths the documents on my company.
They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
If they dig a little deeper they might uncover a vast conspiracy, that every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it.
If this isn’t Pulitzer Prize winning journalism I don’t know what is.
> every business on earth has been secretly conspiring for decades to give people a service so good they’ll come back again and again for it
You're out of touch. The modern approach is to give people a service just barely good enough so they don't leave outright and keep them coming back with fomo, clickbait, and pandering to their worldview. I doubt user satisfaction is even a column in a table at social media companies.
Most services I use are worse than they were 10 years ago but make far more money.
Edit:
> They’ll learn that keeping my customers coming back was also my top priority. The horror!
By the way, the customers here are not the users, they're the advertisers. The users are largely disposable eyeball inventory.
I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
That is the fundamental flaw of the EU model - a lack of leadership and authority at the top level.
They will have to change that. There were some small steps during Covid to create EU level funding mechanisms.
I'm not saying they have to grow a monstrous bureaucracy at the EU level - in fact they could probably do it less. But they definitely need more regulation to promote self-grown technology.
EU inc is worthless without alignment on a single capital market for fundraising and ultimately going public, sane/interoperable labor laws for hiring, and a single language market over the long term.
The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.
Political tidal forces in Europe have, for quite some time, pointed more toward fragmentation than toward strengthening common structures. What makes this particularly ironic is that this impulse is often strongest among the same voices that most loudly lament Europe’s failure to build globally competitive industries—software foremost among them.
That tension has always struck me as deeply paradoxical. In the post-Brexit era, we have had a very visible case study in what happens when shared European frameworks are removed. The UK has spent years scrambling to recreate institutions, regulatory mechanisms, and coordination structures that had previously been provided at the EU level. One might expect that experience to have clarified the value of those structures. It largely hasn’t.
A significant part of the problem is deep lack of understanding. "EU bureaucracy" is a common target of criticism, yet it is remarkably rare for critics to have any concrete sense of what that bureaucracy actually does. The EU tends to appear in public discourse only when politicians argue, or when a regulation is framed as an intrusion on national sovereignty.
The everyday, unglamorous work of harmonization, reducing friction, enabling cross-border activity, and making markets function at scale—remains almost entirely invisible.
This creates a structural communication failure. The benefits of integration are mostly preventative and cumulative: things that don’t break, costs that don’t arise, barriers that quietly disappear. These effects are hard to convey through headlines or sound bites. Dry institutional reports are a poor match for a public sphere with limited patience for complexity. The result is a persistent undervaluation of the very mechanisms that make large, integrated markets possible.
Language barriers are often invoked in these discussions, and while they are real, their relevance is frequently overstated in this context. In white-collar professions, English proficiency is generally passable to good. This is especially true in software engineering, where English is effectively the working language of the field.
That said, proficiency is often domain-specific: people may read and write technical English fluently while still struggling with more active uses such as negotiation, persuasion, or conflict resolution.
In typical blue collar-type professions, by contrast, language barriers are substantial and unavoidable.
Where the problem becomes genuinely self-defeating is in the insistence that using English as a shared working language represents some form of cultural submission or imperialism. This view, rooted more in nationalist romanticism than in economic reality, adds pointless friction. It is beyond stupid to waste resources publishing official documents in 24 different languages. But eliminating this waste is a hard sell when you ask the muggles.
It brings us back to the central contradiction: the same people who regret Europe’s inability to produce globally dominant software companies often support attitudes and policies that fragment markets, raise transaction costs, and make such outcomes far less likely.
Europe cannot simultaneously expect to realize the benefits of scale and reject the mechanisms that make scale possible.
Trump and Putin are giving a golden opportunity to revive European integration. Alas, nationalistic populism with a badly hidden sympathy for the US (on the right) and Russia (on the left) seems to catch more votes these days.
Definitely agree, this is the classic left/right contradiction that has always existed.
In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone populist on both sides, it's a stalemate.
The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private capital represents a threat to their utopian authoritarian dreams (this truth will be masked with religious appeals to the poor and the environment of course).
The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, since government represents a threat to their utopian libertarian dreams (central planners might kill the unfair arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).
While central planners are terrible capital allocators, strong central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything.
What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-government wonks (basically what the neocons were), but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.
I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.
The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately, which is why many western countries are going to fall into this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and the open web forever.
This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from government (the bootleggers and politicians for more nefarious reasons of course).
> The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
it was one person.
im writing this comment 1 hour after yours, and still only a single person has responded and you’ve called one person, a mob. you’ve declared one person commenting to be a “moral panic.”
I shall echo the comment of pibaker with one caveat.
>The exact same sentiment is widely observed across this entire website.
You do see this sentiment across this website, but this doesn't mean that it is a view held by the majority of people here, the people motivated to act can create the illusion that their opinions are more widely held than they are.
A few days ago I posted a comment which, in it's entirety reads
>Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.
>You can still criticise without being mean.
The comment sits at -4 today, and has one antagonistic response. I don't really think most people disagree with this sentiment.
The antagonistic response came from the same one person as the comment in this thread.
The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming.
It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.
Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society.
Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to have private money and make their own purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic partners?
You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones.
Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?
Your rebuttal is based on the assumption that social media is uniquely manipulative, addictive and designed by a secret evil cabal of geniuses with top hats.
This is a media narrative and a popular meme, but it is not reality when looking at the actual studies:
The idea that social media is uniquely bad is simply the same moral panic that comes up every time we encounter something new. The truth is every person, company and government engages in "psychological manipulation" when trying to get what they want, including the children themselves.
Since other children engage in psychological manipulation with each other at school, should we ban schools to protect kids from it? Since the government engages in psychological manipulation with its policies and agendas (all backed by billions of dollars), should we ban government policy-making for children?
Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site (hacker news), given you're one of the users?
I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.
Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?
You may believe this, but the classification of what qualifies as 'social media' won't be up to you when you hand over this level of power to government. If Reddit is social media so is this site, they are literally the same thing.
Watching people cheer this on uncritically without thinking through what this actually means in practice (the end of privacy on the internet, forever)...just because of some silly moral panic and people being too lazy to parent their kids...it's just sad.
Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the ultimate emotional appeal.
But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet activity to their national ID system to "protect the children from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can finally get rid of those cookie popups?
Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history & permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP address and email address together for the purpose of selling you more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?
If every idiot (I'm including myself in this) on HN/Reddit/Youtube/Tiktok/mainstream news/etc. thinks we're in a bubble and is crazy pessimistic and thinks economic collapse is near...it means we're not actually in a bubble.
When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying. Because that will mean the general public must be reaching 1999 levels of euphoria for a hint of optimism to show up here.
>When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying.
That seems to have happened around 2023 or so as people chose to laud over AI instead of understanding the underpinnings of society coming undone in real time.
No, because your pessimistic feelings only serve to strengthen my claim.
I find it amusing that, even when directly calling attention to the overwhelming pessimism that is the default-state on HN, I'm met with a pessimistic comment with zero self awareness.
I really wish this existed so that HN could go back to being a tech community of nerds and builders. Somehow HN has become overrun with more and more urban monoculture euro-fetishists and actual Europeans in the last few years. I haven't seen a headline mentioning Rust or Lisp in days! That's how you know things have really gone downhill.
European HN could focus on its favorite topics of privacy paranoia, "what regulation can we make next?" and tech safetyism, while maybe real HN could go back to Bay Area tech esotericism and fun historical anecdotes.
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
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