Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

For those that don't have to customize it, it 'just works' right? Also, their only major competitor was blogger at the time which, IIRC, was far less customizable and monetizable.

A good design is as simple as possible but no simpler. The problem with ticketing and document authoring platforms are that they are arbitrarily complex. I have some sympathy for Atlassian on managing the complexity of these things. We could say that they should limit their features better, but predicting the cost of adding another use case to a pile of them is not a solved problem.

Slack et al work great for arguing and discussing, but confluence is the best Wiki for recording long term conclusions and providing long term structure for projects. Google Docs is a jumbled atrocity by comparison ... confluence linking and navigation just work.

spend 10 minutes with Rally and you'll be begging for JIRA

Enterprise-scale.

This is probably the right answer. Between oldness, amount of money made, and general bad design, I think EHR systems take the cake.

Dreck does not mean shitty. It means garbage.

and a pun on "dirty sh*t" (stool)

Jesus yes! Clearcase is the only software that ever made me cry actual tears of rage and frustration. I haven't used it in years, but in a prior incarnation at Informix had to use Clearcase multi-site. I think we lost about 10 plus company wide workdays that year due to Clearcase outages. Every developer ended up writing their own 300 line spec file so no builds were ever reproducible. Oh yeah, the "VOBS" got corrupted so they had to move all the sources to an entirely new Clearcase installation, but could not move the history. They kept the old installation online read-only to serve history. But mainly, it was incredibly slow and since it provided the repos as a filesystem that meant builds were slow too. To build the product from the top on a workstation took about 40 minutes. To build from Clearcase was over 8 hours. Basically, touch a header file and your workday is over.

Ima stop now, cause it still makes me mad.

I always make a backup of all my work before trying to check it into ClearCase. It should not be possible to accidentally delete files when adding them to source control or checking them in.

In what ways is svn light years ahead of Perforce?

Skype for Linux was OK for years. It worked reasonably well till recently on my old laptop.

Recently (may be a few months ago), MS upgraded Skype to make it "better". I must upgrade Skype since old client stopped working as they break backward compatibility.

After upgrade, new Skype started using a lot of CPU, memory and disk IO. To the point that I can't work in browser while running Skype. If you launch Skype, it started very slowly. Since I still have HDD, I can hear scream of my HDD during heavy Skype launch. New Skype is so bloated and slow that, I had to remove it because I didn't want to torture myself and my poor old laptop.

You may say that I have to upgrade hardware but I find this argument quite annoying because Skype is just a messenger and video/voice call app. This functionality worked perfectly well for years and now just because of Skype developers, I have to upgrade my hardware in order to use the same app with the same functionality.

In the bigger picture, I see that modern apps have a tendency to be fat and bloated. And it looks like many developers are totally OK with that.

I would recommend Skype developers read this:

https://suckless.org/philosophy

To add to that, most business conferencing solutions in general are pretty bad: Skype for Business, WebEx, and Google Meet. Have seen a big pickup in Zoom which is decent.

just yesterday 2 out of 4 people could not hear shit.

I second this.

Ah, and let’s not forget JIRA. JIRA is a real dumpster fire.

It's a buggy mess also.

Really? How so?

The page loads fairly quickly for me, and the design is highly optimized. Not optimized for users, mind you, but optimized for profitability.

If you don't like Facebook, that's one thing but it's hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.

Why is it like that? Are people not interested to design better products or it’s the “don’t fix what’s not broken” attitude?

SAP, Siebel, Salesforce

And Workday! It’s a paradigm on badly designed user interfaces. Confusing as hell and not precisely fast. Entering any input (select, date fields, etc.) takes on average 5 clicks.

Except gov.uk, that site is amazing.

It's a nice OS, but could do with a simple lightweight music player.

While that was true for quite some time, it has dramatically improved to it's current state such that it is only noticeable during peak 'tatkal' booking time.

The UI/UX is still horrible though.

As an Overcast user, I don't disagree about the design aspect here, but for whom does this make money?

I agree. UI is awful, it's like every page you visit has a different design (compare browsing products to account management pages). Completely different interface again on mobile.

I also find it ridiculous they have some much advertising on it - both buyers and sellers are producing revenue through seller fees and paypal transactions. Why do they need ads as well?

I've tried to use other selling sites but always end up back at ebay as they have far more stuff for sale, and more buyers.

They change stuff seemingly at random, usually for the worst, I always imagine various competing groups in the organization just add and remove features and how things work when they feel like it or need to show that they are "doing something."

I shop a lot on Ebay, I think it really works well.

PayPal too.

Not necessarily... If I said MS-Word, would you decide to go out and create a word processor, probably not since the market is pretty much a done deal.

By and large the apps that are bad will be in markets where the purchasing decision makers are not buying based upon the quality of the app.

In which case you could create a better competing app and it wouldn't matter.

> That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation.

And yet, 25 minutes and 42 comments.

Yeah coinbase is total shit, its insane that they are dominant