Software Is Hateful And Abusive

From DoesSoftwareMakeUsersHappy

Okay, apparently some people don't accept that mainstream software is hateful and abusive. Time to discredit that notion I guess. We'll start by listing popular software and then point out the vicious features it has. A vicious feature is one that's deliberately harmful to users. Deliberate because the feature exists for no reason whatsoever or it would have been just as easy to program good behaviour as it was to program bad behaviour.

A list of specific software is useless - all that proves is that some software is bad.

Yeah, I guess the fact that "some" is all the software I use is irrelevant. Why don't you just give examples of software that isn't bad?

For just about any application, it would be easier to turn operations into CommandObjects, match them to reverse operations, and log them all in a stack than to add confirmation dialogs all over the place asking the user if they "really, really want" to do whatever they damn well just sodding TOLD the machine to do.

Unfortunately, it would require some small degree of intelligence and professionalism, which things programmers distinctly lack as a group, for this to happen. I say intelligence because figuring out that confirmation dialogs are evil requires no empathy, just sympathy.

The only software I use that actually likes and cherishes the user is BlackAndWhite. The best that, say, Populous 3 achieves is to not hate the user. Actually, first person shooters are consistently better in that respect, probably due to having a well-known and extensively studied format. The design costs of a first person shooter's UI have been paid for long ago, by other people.

See also: http://hates-software.com/, the natural home of software haters.


Can software be vicious?

This is not "vicious". For software to be vicious or hateful, the above would have to be true, *and* the feature would have to be that way *because* users don't like it. Of the software below I'm familiar with, only Quicktime qualifies, because it's deliberately crippled, and that crippling is designed to annoy you into paying for the Pro version. The strongest case to be made for most of this software is that it is "poor", or "bad", but not "vicious" or "hateful". -- ChrisMellon?

Furthermore, software (being a thing) is capable of neither hate nor abuse; programmers are another matter altogether. (Not to mention programmers' bosses...) -- Anon

This is very much like the question of Purpose on FoundDesignedDesignoid. My position is that it doesn't matter to the users whether or not the programmers are lovey-dovey peace & lovingkindness kind of folk or vicious bastards. The reason why software is vicious to them doesn't matter to the fact that it is vicious to them. And you're not going to get around this perception of users by saying inane things like "software has no feelings" and "software has no motives". I mean, what makes you think that human beings have feelings and motives? Other than the fact that you routinely deceive yourself in thinking that other human beings are fundamentally like yourself?

I don't think anyone can take a single course in psychology, or listen to a single lecture for that matter, and still retain the idea that it matters objectively that computers / systems / things / objects "don't have feelings". So what? It doesn't stop actual human beings from ascribing feelings to them, nor does it stop them from acting, reacting and feeling based upon the feelings they have ascribed to those things "that have no feelings".

There's a classic experiment about people's perceptions of various simple game-theoretic behaviours such as "altruism", "cooperation" and "greed". The researchers let the subjects see the behaviour of a dumb computer program and asked them to comment on it. The program had four modes and in two of them, all it did was compare two integers and output a 1 or 2 depending on the answer. In the third mode, it added two pairs of integers before doing the comparison. And in the fourth mode, it subtracted them. That's all it did. The people's perceptions of what it did were rather different.

What the researchers got from the experiment was that people rarely perceived cooperation for what it was. What's more relevant here is that people routinely said things like "he's acting like an asshole" and "he's out to screw the other guy" or "he's being very nice".

Software has no feelings? Who cares?

-- RK

MayZeroFive


EditText of this page (last edited February 19, 2006) or FindPage with title or text search