Things that used to be hard and are now easy
Would be interested in also seeing a &quot;things that used to be easy but are now hard list&quot;. Feels like basic stuff is harder now:<p>* Privacy online<p>* Google search for niche or exact matches<p>* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don&#x27;t adhere to big tech&#x27;s rules for the internet<p>* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive<p>* SEO before it got hacked to hell<p>* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)<p>* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)<p>* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren&#x27;t soldered on<p>* In general anti right to repair hardware<p>* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine<p>* Ransomware wasn&#x27;t a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back<p>* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop<p>* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable<p>* CGNAT not being as common<p>* OAuth is still annoying to implement<p>* Blocking ads was easier<p>* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common<p>* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don&#x27;t understand consent and couldn&#x27;t behave, also leading to performative&#x2F;annoying cookie banners we see everywhere<p>* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS<p>* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports<p>* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsers<p>Edit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.