Meh. Plenty of commercial products have feedback mechanisms which are basically user-placating black holes for one reason of an other.

Sometimes it’s because it’s a small product and the dev has a specific vision, but more generally it’s because the PMs want to lead flash so they get hierarchy visibility and the devs either have to work on what the PM says or want to work on fun stuff, which user feedback drudgery often is not (not to mention you first need to trawl through it in order to evaluate and classify it)

Just look at discord for instance (because it infuriates me), their zendesk is full of stuff which is broken or requests for more polish / improvements to recent features (like making threads more useful).

What were their most recent releases? Fucking Party Mode. And breaking notifications (I assume due to the Highlights beta). And whatever the fuck “land-io” is.

Meanwhile there’s still no way to rebind or disable the application’s built-in shortcut, in a gamer-oriented program.

Github’s “feedback” repo is a similar graveyard.

Ha ha, Discord. You can map things like mute to joystick buttons, but the lazy devs/people couldn't be bothered to enumerate the device ID along with the button number.

So if you have multiple USB controllers, the assigned button number on every single one of them will send the toggle mute signal.

Meanwhile we get the Party mode like you mentioned; cute typing games with overlays telling us how many key presses we managed to string together without pause..

Sometimes you wonder whether there is more than one full time paid dev working on those apps..

Usually there’s loads.

However, there are lots factors which cause this issue, partially repeating the previous things:

- devs want to work on fun / sexy stuff

- or they want backend work and there’s a lack of staff on the client side (because the hardcoded shortcuts or the random beeping are entirely client-side issues)

- PMs want to design new whizbang stuff they can wank themselves over or add to their portfolio or whatever, triaging and fixing papercuts and usability bugs is not sexy unless an n+x hit them and tells you to get them fixed, this is even more of an issue if development is PM/manager-driven and deviating is risky

- you may not want to put your finger in that trap if that tags you as the person who fixes the shit bug, doing it once in a while can be nice / interesting / rewarding, doing it all the time less so

- discord is a social network (or at least social-network-adjacent), meaning they probably have a lot of staff involved in mitigating abuse (spam, scams, fraud, …)

- discord has received a lot of investment (500m last year), I don’t know how their cashflow is but the issue of investment is growth chasing, chasing network effects is more useful than fixing minor usability bugs here and I doubt anyone’ll leave discord over random beeps

> devs want to work on fun / sexy stuff

I've heard numerous times developers saying that they'd gladly fix some annoyances in {{megacorp product}} but product managers couldn't care less to allow spending time on those.

I agree, but why present the facade of collecting bug reports via a community forum? Years ago Spotify implemented gapless playback because people asked for it. Then they got rid of mail because it wasn’t popular enough.

I think they have the capability to improve their product, but they have become too reliant on what casual users want. Crowdsourcing isn’t a replacement for product management.

> they have become too reliant on what casual users want

Isn't that the fate of all software as it grows big? Optimize for the casual users, leave the power users in the dirt. Companies keep forgetting that casual users eventually become power users on the most expensive plan, if you give them the freedom to do so.

That is false. That’s like saying most gym members become gym rats that take premium classes.

No, most users never use it and just forget to cancel and those are the most profitable users to have. Just like for gym memberships.

Let's get rid of the heavy weights and squat machine and fill the gym up with stationary bikes. Then you piss off the power lifters and the mum that wants to go from stationary bike to a more serious routine will have to look for another gym, because here they're only catering for the casual users and people that forget their membership.

This is what happens with popular software.

You just described Planet Fitness to a T.

Don’t drop your weights or the alarm will go off!!!

Yeah, I wouldn't say everyone becomes gym rats, but I think that a lot of users have some power user functionality they use.

In the same sense gyms do not only contain machines being used by everyone, there are overlapping subsets people use.

The feature equivalent of Pareto's principle or something.

Why does a public issue tracker lead to not being disconnected from reality? It's only a tiny minority that contributes to that and I don't see how that helps them be more grounded in reality. I am not saying it can't help but I don't think it is a sufficient condition.

with github you are basically significantly reducing the psychological barrier of entry toward the action of reporting bugs or feature requests. I very frequently create issues on OSS projects. I've ~never done it on non-OSS projects, which is ad-hoc.