Ask HN: Products that suck but you still use? (2020)
Fellow user albertgudl asked this question a year ago:[1]
"What are products you use frequently but still hate/they suck? What are products you use frequently but think they could be done better?"
Does anyone have something to add this year?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715548
Amazon.com
If I don't find what I need in the first few results I have to scroll endlessly. No amount of filtering or sorting helps.
The browsing experience is lacking. I think most people have been trained to buy specific items, rather than searching for the product that is good for them.
I did not renew my amazon.com prime membership this year and I'm about to cancel my prime credit card.
I think the covid lockdown really made me look at what I was spending money on. 95% of my orders on amazon were things I did not need within 2-3 days, heck even a week. And probably 50% of the things I bought I did not need at all. Not to mention I could have purchased them in retail stores.
While Amazon is convenient to shop, it is also dangerous. The ability to quickly look at products and buy things with the click of a button can be addicting.
Yeah the shopping "experience" on amazon is horrible.
However, I don't think I have used an amazon product where the UX wasn't a mess...
Spotify. The Mac desktop app often stops being able to play songs until you can restart the app, an issue they've been aware of for months if not a year. The catalogue is an absolute mess and there's no way to report metadata issues, or transparency about which editions records are based on.
But it syncs nicely with my phone, lets me download songs for listening on planes, and has decent little features like discovery playlists.
I have an issue with the android app will it will randomly show as offline. This is a pain in the ass when I'm using my phone to play stuff on my desktop, pick a new song and it plays from my phone. The only way to fix it seems to restart the app and / or wait a little while
I haven't had that exact problem.
On iOS and macOS, a new session from idling a long time often won't start playing the last track, saying it can't find it.
Another annoyance is when someone edits the playlists or licensing situation may have changed, and songs just drop out of existence, so you never really "own" anything and there's zero permanence.
It's better to have your own collection and use Spot, Last or Panda as discovery mechanisms.
The money involved in getting the level of breadth of music I listen to on any given week would be absolutely prohibitive compared to the monthly subscription fee.
I don't have that problem. :)
I listen to it in my car. There is bug after a while that songs keep interrupting exactly at second 00:10. And you have to restart everything, car included, to make it start working again.
As a former power user of Inbox, Gmail.
It has a ton of icons and labels and whatnot that for me provide only clutter. They never completely integrated the 'tasks' or 'notes' or whatever they used to call it either. It's also much slower to load.
Microsoft Outlook - because work.
Apple Music.app - gets worse with every release.
Calibre for book library management. The UI stinks to high hell but apparently developer DGAF.
Has so many great features and i'm not sure of any alternatives that gets even close what calibre can do.
Omg, my eyes hurt. Do you use it? If yes, mind giving a use case where its useful?
There are so many - where to start?
- Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word (the desktop apps)
- Google Sheets, Android, GMail
- Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects etc)
- Git, GitHub
- Apple Finder
- Dropbox, Dropbox Paper
Not products, but technologies: most programming languages, CSS, most APIs, anything with the description "static site generator"
Taking regular bicycles on elevators or other tight spaces. Getting my bike up to my apartment is a huge hassle, but leaving it outside will get it stolen. I wish there were a quicker way to disassemble a standard, non-folding bike on the fly.
Linux :) Rages me every other day, but also good enough.
Terminator, VSCode and Chrome: mostly love. GUI file managers, display stuff: mostly hate.
Apple’s mail apps. The dishwasher in my rental apartment. Slack’s API docs. Modern web browsers. Google search.
Job boards.... is it me or are they all shit?
Evernote.
Terrible UX, sluggish, indexing problems.
MS Outlook. MS Windows. Anki.
What do you dislike about Anki?
the general complaint i see the most often is it's too complicated to use -- but if you read the manual (which is good), most of those confusion goes away.
anki does a lot of things, but all of the defaults are sensible
Anki isnt that bad!
Gimp
gimp,
gitk,
xcode