There has been a severe erosion since then. From car dashboards to web design, software apps to online communities - it’s an erosion on all fronts.

Fuck everything after 2010. It sucks. Fight me.

Windows XP was considered a memory hog because it needed a whopping 256MiB of RAM to run properly. I run text editors that use more of that these days, and they still feel slower than notepad felt on XP.

The good news is that almost without fail, the content on these sites is as good as the coding, and I've proven to myself time after time that I lose nothing by just closing the tab. In fact, I gain the time I would've wasted on reading low-quality content that rarely adds anything to my life.

We have, among countless other things:

- mobile devices, networks, and services that are allowing developing countries to leapfrog their progress in the world

- development toolchains and frameworks that empower a single person to create an order of magnitude more output, enabling smaller teams or even solo enterprises to create major value

- reusable rockets bringing high quality and affordable internet access to the underserved

- mass produced electric vehicles for goodness sake!!

And that's only a few tech-related advancements, the world is largely moving in the right direction in so many areas. I'd never bet against the steady drumbeat of technological progress.

We need to look at what we can improve. Of course things have improved, but not uniformly across all domains and many things have gotten worse.

If we keep patting ourselves on back, these too will degrade. Using hindsight to definitively say what has gotten worse is how we improve including the things you are mentioning.

I kind of think of progress as navigation on a complex multidimensional domain space filled with lots of local optima. To not consult hindsight (gradient) is a bad strategy. Similarly, to not explore is to stay at the same spot. Sometimes, it is important to roll back and go to the old days and try to explore in another direction.

What does a new flagship phone do better, compared to a 2year old one? A slightly better camera, maybe more storage space, and that's it. "Back in the days" we had phones with 9,10 7-segment displays, then single line lcd screens, multiline, graphical, color, touchscreens and smartphones (each step taking only a couple of years), and since then (so, the last ~5 years) not a lot of "new stuff", that would warrant buying a new phone (except the failing battery on the old one).

Websites have got massively bloated and slow, even on modernish computers, and show even less informations than they did in the past (fscking gallery pages). We've gone from text-only sites, to basic html (with images!), javascript, to 'web 2.0' with dynamic loading... to bloatware.

As mentioned... word has gone from a five, ten...ish megabytes to hundreds of megabytes while not offering much more compared to older versions. Yes, it's a bit more polished, some things are easier now... but not a lot. Going from text to graphical mode was a "revolution", but again, not a lot new after.

Even operating systems... what does windows 10 do, that windows 7 didn't?

I mean... we do get a new feature here and then, but the push to "make a new version" is stronger than the actual need for a new version.... not at first, but once the software gets mature enough, there's (almost) "nothing new to add".

However, this particular thread seems to be about the quality of user-facing software, which, overall, has been on a continuous nosedive for about 10 years, and every time I think it can't get any worse, someone figured out a new way to make it suck.

I think this is one nice thing that is very easy to take for granted.

Mobile connectivity is a wonderful thing as long as it is a means rather than an end. Sometimes it takes a glance into the past to understand the former, to realize that networks were created to enable communication rather than to captivate audiences.

Modern development toolchains are great, yet they typically cater to professionals who have the time and incentive to learn them. We don't have to look very far into the past to realize that there was a time when accessibility was as important as productivity.

Creating a world that everyone wants to live in requires a great deal of reflection regarding what we need and how to accomplish it. Letting technological development run amok may achieve some of those goals but it can also be regressive.

I don't know about PS3, but the thing that bugs me about PS4 is that it requires installing games. It can't just run a game straight off the disc like PS1 and PS2 did, it has to copy it to its hard drive first.

> Modern ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in 2009 in every respect.

Modern processors are, generally, great and very fast, regardless of the instruction set. Their greatness is usually compensated with mediocre software that is being constantly rushed to meet imaginary deadlines that no user cares about. The result is that the end user never really realizes how fast and capable modern hardware actually is.

I'd still say modern ARM is a major improvement simply because performance/power ratio-wise it's already neck and neck or better than x86 in a lot of areas. x86, dating back to the P4 era and onward, has been a painful slide into power consumption/waste heat hell.

And it's only worse in modern systems that round-trip EVERYTHING to the "cloud" for reasons understood only by Google.

...and that's a problem, because it encourages half-baked non-solutions and a "we can always fix it later" attitude. As a result, nothing actually improves; it just erratically surges around a local maximum.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/137703/article.html

And this time around, it will be even better!

Do you know of any sites where people just talk and share, without political nonsense, flamewars, and such? Perhaps focused primarily on humor?

Hacker News is indeed such an oasis, but has a rather narrow interest range. Few people are interested in discussing spirituality here, for example.

Reddit originally had that goal. And was self-sustaining, basically funded by users. This has all changed, and that's all I want to make for a point here. (why is another discussion)

HN isn't self-sustaining that I know of, though it's also not needing to make it's users into products too.

So, is there a middle ground?

Take the HN code base, clone it, and enable these discussion norms?

We have amazing moderators here. Wise.

That's needed too, or the outcome is something we will see elsewhere, and that's by definition, not what we have here.

How to fund that?

Need hosting, moderator or two, and what else?

Maybe not too much. So maybe it won't take that much money either.

I would find any experiment along these lines both something I would want to participate in as well as very interesting to observe, depending on my role, and the nature of the discussion focus.

I'm on an Apple Silicon MacBook Air but still often run WordPerfect 4.2 and DataEase 4.53 under DosBox (also Boxer is good but not tried it on M1 yet).

BTW if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of running WordPerfect DOS in emulation, Columbia University (NYC) has a great site at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ which may even help fixing other DOS software issues.

The only Office app that I strongly prefer in its modern form is Excel. Modern Excel has some really nice enhancements (sequences and spillover, let and lambda, flash-fill, table formatting, etc) that I miss when I use older versions.

When XP was released, there was intended to be no support for Office other than Office XP.

Thousands of questions were raised whether Office 97 would work in Windows XP and it was totally discouraged by Microsoft every time.

After about 6 months somebody (like a big company) tried it and since it worked quite well, the news began to filter out.

Within another 6 months there was all kinds of support info for Office 97 under XP as if the disinformation campaign had never existed.

I also have the VM set up already for IE, which def does not work right in Wine.

Do you mean Wine? It's imperfect emulation for large apps, and it's slower than a VM.

Accessibility. Everything, every single little nook and cranny is keyboard-accessible. And I mean accessible not in the sense that I can keep pressing the Tab key, and eventually the barely-visible focus rectangle may arrive at the control I want to use. I mean, everything has a visile keyboard shortcut, and the Tab key also works, and the focus rectangle is visible, and it works every time, not just when the application feels like it.

Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the application is thinking.

Fast as heck startup time. Fast menus. Fast application startup. Fast, fast, fast. My current daily driver is a 10-year-old laptop with a spinny drive, and Windows 95 is running inside a VM, which is competing for resources with my entire dev environment, so it's not like the hardware is not comparable to what it was designed for.

Consistency in look and operation. Everything has the same widgets and dialogs, and they all work about the same way, at least between Microsoft apps. Netscape and other browsers are a different story.

Flat, dull, boring interface. Everything is a flat gray, nothing is shiny, nothing is animated. Everything is a frame around the work that I'm doing, and feels like it wants to just help me, assist me with what I'm doing, and then get out of the way.

Oh yeah, and I the Save and Open File dialogs are fully-featured file managers with sorting, multi-select, copy, paste, rename, the works.

And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like createElement() getElementById().

IE3 has the most beautiful toolbar of any browser I've seen to date, and also has focus rectangles and basic CSS support. I can still use it to post to my blog.

It also has a proper (native!) settings dialog with tons of configurability and security zoning. While modern browser's rendering engines and JS have gotten more featureful, I think the UI has gotten much worse in contrast, with everything going in the same direction of dumbed-down-Chrome-clones. My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers.

If you don't mind a learning curve and primarily keyboard driven, e.g. if you already love Vim, consider giving qutebrowser a try. You can even run it straight from the source tree, since it uses Python for its wrapper.

It uses QtWebEngine and Chromium, which does mean some issues and drawbacks, but the frame around it is nearly perfect. It's an amazing piece of software, and truly next generation browsing for nerds, IMO.

It's a bit like Vimium, but the keyboard bindings are native and always work, as opposed to being at the mercy of JS injection into the page. All of the settings are accessible via :command mode, and permissions are as granular as you can imagine. There's no graphical settings, but other than that I think it matches your description.

This annoys me to no end. Some applications (Firefox) even reorder keystrokes!

I'm beginning to think we've been using the wrong programming paradigm for user interfaces for the last 20 years. I never had these sorts of complaints about DOS programs, or even Windows up to version 2000. Then something changed. Computers have been feeling slower and slower ever since.

another factor is that computers were limited in presentation and computation, they'd present to you abstracted, dull tables and operations on data. But it did serious jobs. Now we have extremely (extremely, as a CGI fan, I cannot deny that) fancy presentation systems, but the actual data displayed is linear list of paragraphs, a few pictures and data points. Well computer is hypermainstream so obviously it talks to the average user.. but it says something about what computing was and is now.

Got me thinking about why computers in the first place.. in the 90s a computer was mostly sold as an office like tool for the home. "Get access to big corp tools !" marketing feeling. You get to write document, print them, organize your stuff (some people had movie tape databases), finance etc. But in retrospect we didn't use much of that (it was more a gaming machine for me, and later CGI tool) and with the web.. printing went away.. local db went away. People probably still do financing. But now electronics have become a social gateway .. see news, pics, chat. A billion dollar device production requires either a nation, a big company or 7 billion customers :)

Do you ever try to imagine the face of a 50-80s scientist if you came back in time to show him an iphone ? he'd faint of laughter I guess.

Is there a FOSS program with a comparable user experience?

It was made at a time when Microsoft cared a lot about user experience, poured millions of dollars into user studies, design, and ensuring that every pixel was perfect, every function was keyboard-accessible, and every workflow was smooth. And it shows.

Trying to use e.g. LibreOffice or Google Docs, after that, it's like comparing a science fair project made by a kid who just wanted to pass with a C versus an A+ student whose project was also made by their parents, who also happen to be scientists.

Compare to the DOS days where every major program (wordperfect, lotus 1-2-3, etc) had a function key template. It was annoying to learn at first, but easily discoverable, and eventually you get muscle memory. Modern apps have lost that, in many ways.

I've used Abiword a bit, but it has been a few years, and Abiword doesn't really come close to the Microsoft Word experience back in the day. People generally have their favorite MS Word version that they like before it "went downhill", and mine is Word 5.1a for Macintosh. This is the last version of Microsoft Word that was specifically designed as a Macintosh application, rather than a cross-platform application with a Mac port.

Microsoft's turned out some very high-quality Mac applications in the 1990s and 2000s. Another notable one is Internet Explorer 5, which is unrelated to the infamous Internet Explorer 5 for Windows (the one with poor standards compliance), other than the fact that the products are made by the same company, have the same name, and have the same version number.

IE5 is also the most ported IE ever, it was ported to close to 10 different platforms.

Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Solaris, and HP-UX.

In addiion, as you mention, an "IE5" of different lineage is also available for both Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X.

Here is another thing which may seem crazy in today's world: IE 5.01 was officially supported by Microsoft on Windows 2000 until 2010, more than 10 years after IE5.0's release!

It's like you're re-raking the code with every port, essentially doing a partial rewrite and refactor, with all the benefits that come with that.

IE5 is one of the most solid browsers I know.

However, saving does not provide me with a default filename, so there is friction there.

In the status bar, the indicator text runs right up to the border edge, nobody took the time to ensure vertical and horizontal spacing matches up.

The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators until after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of discoverability.

The cursor actually disappears when I use the arrow keys to move around. It's not even blinking, it's just GONE, until I stop using the arrow keys, then reappears after a delay.

The spell-checker finds an spelling mistake in both "Abiword" and "abiword".

Using only the keyboard, I cannot figure out how to change the font size, except by going through the Format->Font menu. The Font dialog has invisible or nearly-invisible focus rectangles on most controls.

I just installed it to write this comment, and I found all this stuff in the first five or so minutes of using it.

It's a nice little word processor, and I'd use it in a pinch, but it's no Word 97.

> The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators until after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of discoverability.

I think this is a GTK theme setting that you can override https://askubuntu.com/questions/329668/always-show-keyboard-...

I think the fact that it is off by default in the first places illustrates my point quite well. And so does the fact that I have to seek out separate configuration for the toolkit.

Not only that, but on the very page you linked, people are complaining that even the setting does not work reliably. I know that when I tried to adjust it in the past for other apps it did not work for me.

Perhaps I just needed to reboot? :)