Ask Lemmy

1.) Everything is a "smart" device. Household appliances, as a general rule, should not be connectable to the internet or require an app.

Cheaper components, poor build quality, and lack of user serviceable parts are the primary reasons your washer and dryer last 10 years compared to your parents Maytag set that was still ticking away after 30. Cheap, unnecessary electronics, which don't have as long a lifespan as mechanical timers and switches, only exacerbate this problem.

2.) Cordless tools as a means of vendor locking customers.

The trend to more complicated but cheaper instead of doing it right. Result is news about security incidents every single day.

Nothing is fun anymore. Seriously. Modern designers do not design fun things anymore. No matter what it is, cell phones, cars, dining chairs, there is nothing fun. Nothing invites interaction. Nothing invites relationship building.

I saw this thing the other day. The "Jack in a Box" Television by Timo Salli for the short-lived studio SNOWCRASH. Made in 1997. Where the fuck is this energy nowadays?? Everything looks either angry or bored with us now; antagonistic with no justification. Zero whimsy, zero intrigue. Why does this walmart toaster look like it wants to fight me? Designers' personalities are erased with nothing to show for it but row after row of the same matte white or piano black plastic SHIT (30% OFF!)

So many things. Most things seem designed against humans instead of for them. Most are designed to supposedly look pretty, when I'm someone looking for content and information. Those are often hidden. Add to that malpractice, misleading, and lying.

Sort of meta, but: Alienation.

Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what's inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It's like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, "fuck you."

Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a "ghost kitchen." Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor's headquarters? No way to tell.)

Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they're either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.

Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They're getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you're lucky. They're working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you're sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.

A lot of people say that they're introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so...

All the app icons looking the same. Most prominent example are all the Google apps, but it doesn't end there.

• When interface shifts around due to information update (e.g new bluetooth devices found).
• When primary content in a website is hidden behind hover effects.
• Expensive animations, blur and gradients with no functionality.
• When an app treats me like a baby and asks me 20 questions one at a time instead of giving me a menu of options.
• Excesive round corners
• Excesive padding on apps.

I just really hate when webpages take 10 seconds to load a cluttered mess of an interface with no sense of direction

Every appliance, monitor, speaker, clock, really anything that plugs in has to have a blue LED.

Got a modem from the cable company installed in my bedroom, the indicator lights were bright enough to read by.

If I ever meet the asshole that invented the mouse-off function for webpages so that when you go to close a tab, a pop-up jumps up so that the website owner can scream, "wait, no, please subscribe, give us your email, send us money, something holy fucking shit, dear god ah!" at you I swear I will break their fucking fingers and punch them in the dick.

LED indicator lights on things that have nothing to indicate. Does an electric fan need an indicator? Will you be confused about whether it's operating or not if it doesn't have one? Oh, it's in swivel mode! Good thing it told me that, or I might have thought it was swiveling for other reasons.

Rounded corners everywhere

Give me back my God damn full keyboard and headphone jack. (Phones)

Colors. Society has been getting more monochrome for years. And now black and white houses are all over.

Minimalism.

It's everywhere from company logos, to fast food interior design, and now the vexillology community swears by minimalist flag designs.

"Squircles", Just make shit square you fuckers I hate you

1. Blue LEDs are BORING! You have the entire specturm of colors, stop using only blue!
2. Touch buttons are terrible, and should be illegal in cars.
3. Flat UI design is boring and lazy, give me the UI design from the Ubuntu Humanity theme in Ubuntu 9.04, that shit was great!
4. SUVs all look the same, they are boring and too big, hot hatchbacks are great!
5. Smartphone design has stagnated, you used to be able to get some cool colors, but that has mostly gone away, folding phones are an interesting development though...
6. Stop building boring grey buildings that looks like boxes, get some jugend or cool brickwork buildings (do NOT paint the brick building!)
7. Stop tracking everything we do, I just read about how Meta is using a new secret tracking technique that enable tracking ocer VPNs and other services, soon we will all need a sound isolated anechoic chamber with an airlock that you only enter through a double faraday cage with a full body hazmat suit to access a dedicated burner device to access a specific service, I don't want that, enough is enough.

That appley design. Mouse, keyboard, bubbley UI it all just disgusts me and I hate that it affects Windows 11

Electron apps. Write native apps. I don’t need a simple todo app using 300MB of RAM.

Long winding UI Dialouge trees that you can get "stuck" in! If my settings are invalid, let me out of of the menu with as little consiquences and sacrifices as you can manage. I may need to back out to go grab data or change a setting on a page you decided to make before (hell even after) the one that wont let me continue and/or go back.

Windows's "wizard" style dialouges just suck!

This button “style.” WTF even is this? It’s objectively and functionally terrible.

Also McDonald’s brutalism. But then, I’m happy not to eat there.

Every electronic item whether it be a hot water kettle, air conditioner or an UPS backup in my camper, even my electric toothbrush has to make a noise, a bing or beep when either the things starts, changes phase or finishes.

Infinite scroll

Enshitification of search results when shopping

Planned obsolescence