The average HN user has some idea of what is simple and intuitive. This has very little to do with what the average non-technical web user thinks or feels.
I've made many decisions in my career that boiled down to: we're not going to do what the users want in this case because the complexity of maintaining that feature is not worth the value it provides. And many times, that's true. Sometimes, it's not true.
At Netflix, it's common for engineers, especially new engineers, to say, "Who even uses dubs? Just use subtitles." The answer turns out to be "at least 50% of people when watching content not in their native language."
There is a floor on app complexity that naturally results from trying to build something that many people want to use. HN User #82983 may not see the point in a web-based note taking app because he just puts all his notes in a `notes.json` file. But, that app has many users who love it, and the developer doesn't want to tell them to kick rocks just because it would corrupt their precious codebase.
> The average HN user has some idea of what is simple and intuitive.
"Simple" and "intuitive" are rather orthogonal concepts.
See eg Lisp: an objectively simple language which many find unintuitive. WordPress I guess might be considered intuitive, but is not simple in any way.
Something is intuitive if it jibes with your preconceived notions. When you experiment with it, you form certain hypotheses about how it will react or how by what means to get a certain behavior. If those hypotheses are usually true, then it's intuitive.
And the question "who uses dubs?" belies a fundamental misunderstanding of use case: A lot of users aren't watching Netflix. They put it on the background for noise. They need dubs to follow the plot at all.
While true, I don't think this is even close to a majority of that 50% of users who use dubs. (Though I'm just guessing)
I'd say the more common use case is people in the many countries that are used to dubs, culturally, vs. using subtitles. I've found it to be very much a cultural thing.
Also, kids. Kids movies/shows are probably a not insignificant fraction of Netflix watch time, and below a certain age subtitles are unhelpful to them.
The Netflix subtitles and dubbing for foreign media are both so bad, we just don't watch any of it. My friends and family are not the only ones. I'm pretty sure we're a dark demographic.
This is very culturally dependent though. In Germany, for example, dubs are typically the default, and people would very rarely use subtitles for foreign media. If you want to be able to show non-German films and series in Germany, you need to be able to support different audio tracks.
I've made many decisions in my career that boiled down to: we're not going to do what the users want in this case because the complexity of maintaining that feature is not worth the value it provides. And many times, that's true. Sometimes, it's not true.
At Netflix, it's common for engineers, especially new engineers, to say, "Who even uses dubs? Just use subtitles." The answer turns out to be "at least 50% of people when watching content not in their native language."
There is a floor on app complexity that naturally results from trying to build something that many people want to use. HN User #82983 may not see the point in a web-based note taking app because he just puts all his notes in a `notes.json` file. But, that app has many users who love it, and the developer doesn't want to tell them to kick rocks just because it would corrupt their precious codebase.