Here, I’m talking FinTech specifically, but this applies to most other industries, too…
There’s a (very large, publicly-owned) transaction platform and online payment provider shutting down in Australia, next month. It started in 2006, and was useful because it allowed you to avoid card surcharges and bank fees. It was particularly useful for large, instant payments like for flights.
Why is it shutting down? Not because of a security breach, or any issues within the product itself, but because the Big 4 banks here want to kill off their competition, and have forcibly removed the ability for their customers to use the service. They then followed this up with relentless paid propaganda around “security” and how the system is “outdated, so use our in-house product instead”.
I encountered something similar from my bank, recently, while looking at overseas travel cards…
Yet millennials and zoomers lap up the propaganda, just like they do against cash, and think that anyone who still uses these products is a “tech illiterate boomer”. They actively called for the banning of the service I mention, because their banks told them “It bad. Trust us instead.”
Yet these same stupid fucks will happily sign all their private info and banking over to social media companies and shitty crypto exchanges, because “tech”, and shiny new thing, so must be good…
The Kool Aid sure is strong, with my generation and younger, smh… 😑
Can’t wait until we all get de-banked for not being woke enough, and then have no alternatives because we allowed them to develop monopolies on our finances, lol…
I disagree about UX design. I think it is important but can admit that it has allowed the filthy unwashed masses in which has lead to catastrophic ruin.
Git is my go-to example of why UX design is important. That tool is an abomination of interface design and I will fight anyone who tries to tell me different.
For my own tool building, I make a conscious effort to make things work in a way that will encourage users (other sysadmins in this case) to adopt the tools because they're straight forward and easy to use. There is no excuse for an interface to be as badly designed as Git. Absolutely none.
There is one, potentially unintended, benefit. Gatekeeping. In a public access platform that benefits from preemptively filtering out some of the junk, an interface that is unfriendly to novices is an easy way to ensure only the capable and motivated stick around to use your resources.
If only idiots got filtered! Then you wouldn't have the commie infestation changing the default branch name from master to main.