Ask Slashdot: Why Do Popular Websites Add New Features So Sparingly?

dryriver writes: If you are a user of a popular professional desktop software program, it is not uncommon for that program to get anywhere from 5 to 20 major or minor new features and functions about once a year to stay desirable and competitive. But it seems that hugely popular internet-based sites and services like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others get major new features/changes much, much slower than desktop software. Quite often you'll come across a barrage of breathless news articles that say "Popular Internet Service X will add Y feature starting from April 1st." It is often one single and very obvious feature or functionality being added that people have wanted for years, not a cluster of 5 or 10 funky new functions at the same time.

Why is this the case? How is it that desktop software with just a few hundred thousand users and no more than a few dozen coders working can add 5 to 20 major new functions in just one year, and do this year after year, but a major internet-based service with tens or hundreds of millions of users and presumably hundreds or thousands of techies working behind the curtain keeps everyone waiting three years or longer to build a much requested feature into the system, and then only rolls out that one desired feature to great fanfare as if it is a huge achievement? Is it really that much harder to code major new features into an internet/cloud service, versus coding major new features into desktop software; or is this a deliberate business model that has become popular?

Comments

It is called "good engineering"

[gweihir]

Following every hype, adopting features fast and without clear goal, etc. is called "bad engineering", incidentally. The problem is that there are a lot of bad and really bad people at work on the web and on apps that I will refrain from calling "engineers" because they do not deserve that title. Hence doing it right for a change stands out. In other engineering disciplines it would not or at least not nearly as much.

Because they have more sense than Google.

[bistromath007]

Don't fuck around with my user experience. If I see something I think would help, I'll ask for it. If I didn't go looking for a solution, there wasn't a problem.

They tried.

[Leslie43]

I guess you weren't here for the last redesign.
After 3 years of beta testing and consistently being panned by users, the new owners tried to force it onto users, it went so bad that users staged a boycott to get it rolled back.

Re:They tried.

[dryeo]

https://soylentnews.org/ an interesting fork of the old slashcode with some weird users.
Interesting changes include Unicode support, more ways to moderate including the disagree and touche mods that don't affect the score or karma. Being able to mod in discussions that you've commented in, with some exceptions, so you can mod someone and then tell them why and I'm sure some other interesting changes.

Re:Because there's no need for it?

[tlhIngan]

To Wit: /. Beta. Did not want, do not want, what is now is fine... just fix the goddamned unicode problem.

There is no Unicode problem. /. supports Unicode just fine.

There's a Unicode troll problem though, which is why /. has a rather strict whitelist of allowed characters. The trolls were constantly abusing the Unicode control codepoints and adornment codepoints to screw up the page and turn it all black, reverse text, etc.

The back end supports Unicode completely and has for nearly 2 decades now. Unfortunately, nearly 2 decades ago, the admins were having to delete comments (or mod them down) continuously that abused Unicode and turned the site useless.

You'll find it on any new website with brand new shiny comments section impacted by this and they rapidly either shut down comments or filters as well. Unicode is not easy and there are many issues with it, see all the iPhones and Androids crashing or doing other things when sent some strange Unicode text.

Re:Because there's no need for it?

[Kjella]

Oh please... slashdot hasn't made any effort to even try being user friendly. For example in Norwegian we have: æÃÃ¥

Didn't parse correctly? Here it is with HTML entities:
æ = æ
ø = ø
å = å

What about a simple thing as micrometers:
µ = nope

A simple formula with like delta, epsilon or sigma?
δ = nope
ε = nope
σ = nope

Nobody has made the least bit of effort to whitelist basic scientific characters. Or tried to make characters that actually are whitelisted work through normal input. I have worked with Unicode, if you want an "open" interpretation it's pretty hard. If you just want a "closed" interpretation of basic character sets (what 99.99% need) it's pretty damn easy.

You're not paying attention.

[thegarbz]

Split your examples into major services, and small specific services, then compare them to desktop software. I mean properly!

Facebook? Features get added, removed subtle UI changes etc on a monthly basis. Google does so on an event driven basis (Have you been watching the world cup ticker updating live in your google results?) Did you notice the change to maps voice navigation that rolled out last month in how it announces locations? Did you see the added feature that asks you to confirm traffic accidents?

Of course not. You're not paying attention.

Likewise how many value added features were constantly changing on ICQ? What has changed in Skype other than the number of adverts that are shown? Yeah they move the buttons around but features? At the start of this year they added the ability to on the fly switch between multiple cameras. Back in 2015 they added group chat.

If you have small apps, websites, or special purpose programs you don't need new features regardless of the platform.
If you have large software or web apps you will get new features regardless of the platform.

Pay attention.