I apologise to anyone inadvertently offended with the title of this post, but if the BBC’s Technology Editor can use the word “enshittification” as an example of retrograde progress, then so will I. It was also the American Dialect Society’s “Digital Word of the Year” in 2023, so that seems fair.

You see, I’m writing this on my phone, as I wait for my PC to be rebuilt onto a new corporate setup (and as the US Election results come in, which have not lightened my mood).

One of the issues I had whilst preparing to wipe all my data was a OneNote export process which said:

“OneNote cannot pack these sections because some sections have not yet been fully synced and could not be downloaded. These pages will not be saved. Continue anyway? Yes | No”

Great. It’s probably some embedded media that no longer exists… but that message is not very helpful for identifying a problem. There are hundreds of pages of notes across about a hundred sections. Which pages won’t be saved?

Still it could be worse. There’s plenty of cutesy messages these days that say something along the lines of:

“Oops, something went wrong”.

Nice. What went wrong? Can you give me a clue please so I might be able to find a resolution to the issue?

A brief history of technical support resources

When I started working in IT, we didn’t have the World Wide Web. Admittedly, we didn’t have as much information at our fingertips either but IT support often required a subscription to a database of knowledge articles. These were created by the software vendor and were reliable. At ICL we had something called PC-PARIS (PARIS was the support knowledge base). Microsoft had TechNet subscriptions with support information and updated software. Both of these were distributed to subscribers in CD-ROM format. This was a time when a typical Internet connection ran at around 33Kbps.

Errors had codes. We could look up what they meant and identify the cause. Not now. What does “[your application] ran into a problem and had to stop” mean?

As the web took off, so did blogs. People like me posted answers to problems we found. Then big websites started SEOing their way to the top and user-submitted content was the way forwards. Some of that content was good. Some of it less so. And we’ve all seen that geek on an online forum who doesn’t answer the question but instead provides a terse comment as to why the thing being asked is totally wrong because why would anyone do it that way anyway?

AI FTW?

Now we have AI answering the questions. Google or Bing will insert an AI-generated response at the top of the search results and, sometimes it’s helpful. But it’s an LLM – it literally makes stuff up based on probability. Some of that stuff is just wrong.

I may just be a grumpy old man, but I really just want detailed problem reports, accurate analysis, and reliable search results. Because not all progress is good progress.