alt Hacker News> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.
just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.
edit — these are the hidden requirements.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.
now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
Replies
It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.
The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.
However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
>until something goes significantly wrong
Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.
Many such cases.
> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
> then they get angry. very angry.
Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].
Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).
However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.
Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus