Because 99% of the time these errors are caused by something on their end that the user is unable to fix, even on the off chance that they understand the problem in the first place. So there isn't any need to give you more information than "something went wrong, please wait a minute and/or try again".
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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This is a rant about how so many apps on many different platforms (TVs, mobile devices, computers, etc...) have decided to not actually show detailed errors any more. Instead, we get something along the lines of:
Oops, somehting went wrong. Please try again later
.... and then, well, we get to figure out what just happened and what in the world we need to do about it. And good luck with that, since you have no idea what just failed.
Why software developers?!? Why have you forsaken us?
EDIT 24 hours later: I feel like I need to clarify a few things:
I've worked for 8 software companies over 30+ years. I know why putting a DB error into the message users see is a bad idea. I know that makes me uncommon, but I still want more info from these messages.
You all are answering as if there are only two ways this can work: (a) what we have now (which is useless), and (b) a detailed error listing showing a full stack trace. I think the developers could meet me half-way.
What I want is either (a) "Something went wrong on the server, you can't fix it, but we will" or (b) "Something on your end didn't work. Check your network or restart the app or do something differently and then try the same thing again". And if they're blocking me because I'm using a VPN, fucking say so (but that's a whole separate thing...)
Some apps do provide enough info so I have a clue what I should do next, and I appreciate the effort they put into helping me. I think what I am really ranting about is I want more developers to take the time to do this instead of reporting all errors with "Oops, try again". (If the error is in their server, why should I try again?) Give me a hint as to the problem, so I have something to go on.
Cheers y'all. Still love you my techy brothers and sisters.
OK but then inherent in what you're saying is also the message, "... and don't contact us about this, because we don't want to deal with it" which is also mildly infuriating to me.
Iit’s an internal error that is not handled properly. They don’t want to tell you the exact error message and detailed information around that, because it would expose the internal state of the backend and that would be a security issue. There is really nothing more that they can tell you, except that a developer needs to look at this (and possibly thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of similar logged errors) and they probably already are.
Maybe then, the message could be, "An internal error has occurred and we're going to work on fixing it but there's nothing you can do to fix it yourself right now". It's the "Oops" that fries my grits.
I do agree, the whole "oops sowwy" with a sad Labrador vibe is a little irritating. But I guess they do it cause it's a harmless and layman-friendly response.
If you're tech-savvy enough to want detailed error messages, you should also be tech-savvy enough to understand the implied message you just typed out. The 'Oops' isn't for you, it's for the average user.
LMFAO. I probably have to truncate at least five error log files a week on various vps servers at my company because they fill the SSD and crash the OS. We rent servers we don't dev them for our cx.
Largest error file I've seen so far is 32 GB
Site owners are normally clueless. Site developers normally can't give a single fuck and systems administrators like me. Get to pick up the pieces and tell them to tell their Deb to fix it and then we pick it up again and tell them to tell their Dev to fix it let me know when you sense a pattern
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You're assuming they aren't already aware of the issue.
Sorry but how does that help me?
What I'm saying is that when you see one of these messages you should interpret it as "something is wrong on our end, nothing you can or need to do on your end, please hang tight as we're aware of the issue and working on it". They don't give you more info than that because that average person is probably not a dev and doesn't have any need for more details than that.
But it's MY Internet, and I want it NOW!!
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How does telling someone about a problem they're already aware of help you?
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Of course if their servers and whatnot are shit they won't straight up tell you they are shit.
It's why modern multiplayer games don't even show everyone's latency anymore. It would let players know imperically that their servers are shit.
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In theory, maybe. In practice, I've had a lot of errors in that vein that very much wouldn't go away, and where made much harder to diagnose by their obtuseness.
Honestly, I even dislike the mindset. Just make a big header with the generic error message and a little one below that gives some details. Having users interested in how your software works is not a bad thing.
I give my users instructions on how to report an error if they seek assistance. It’s regularly ignored. Instead we get the ubiquitous “Something bad happened … somewhere. HALP!”
"I got an error"
"What did it say?"
"I don't know, just something went wrong"
"👍"
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Error messages are a common way for hackers to gain information about a system. Useless error messages are recommended for security.
If you enter your username as Robert''); DROP TABLE Students;-- giving the error "Oops, something went wrong" is better than "NoSuchTable: 'Students' Table doesn't exist in the database" because now the hacker knows you're using a database that interprets SQL commands and inputs aren't being sanitized.
Hacking programs like Burp Suite have functions that spam sites with all kinds of garbage data and uses error messages and delays in response times to highlight potential vulnerabilities.
This comment belongs on masterhacker
Yeah but most of these errors don't even give out a uuid that could be used to relate the error to logs to be resolved by someone.
Not that that someone exists anyway. Let's face it the entire industry is a massive joke and a pile of shit and with AI coming fast and hard soon you won't even get the privilege of venting to a call center person about it.
You'll vent to some made-up chatbot named veeblezorp and he will give you an impromptu therapy session about the state of the world. Your computer/tablet/phone/app still won't work properly and veeblezorp will try to get you through the stages of grief about that.
Just unplug it and don't plug it back in again. Go for a walk. Play with the dog. Hug your children. Stop buying crap online that scales up infinitely to take new customers (and their dollars) but is forever stuck at the sub-garage startup level when it comes to support.
Security through obscurity is still wack tho
Even if you don't buy into this logic, you still have to do it in quite a few places because the security auditors have a line in their checklist about being able to extract any internal information from error pages
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What are you planning to do with information about the error? It’s not like these places have customer support. Usually it’s something like a caching layer failing, and there’s literally nothing you can do about that.
Edit after reading your edit:
I still don’t see why you want more information here. Those kinds of errors are almost always server side errors, and reporting more detailed information won’t help you.
You asked “why should I try again?” Answering this would almost always be unhelpful to the vast majority of users. “Try again later, because one of our cache layer hosts was down, and by the time you try again, it’ll have been taken out of the load balancer rotation, so you likely won’t hit that host on your next try.”
It would also cause more confusion with a non-insignificant portion of your users. Users start to misunderstand copy when sentences start to exceed eight words. “Something went wrong. Try again later.” That’s understandable by 100% of people according to that study.
Even saying “there’s nothing you can do about it” will probably be taken negatively by a certain portion of users. Not saying it’s incorrect, just that when you write an error message (or any microcopy for that matter), you should avoid sounding negative to the user. “Something went wrong. Try again later” conveys all the information the user needs in a way that won’t be misinterpreted.
If it's an error code I've worked around before, apply same troubleshooting.
If its a new errror code, search the error code to see how other people solved it.
If no one else has solved the error code, try analogous troubleshooting, post results online with the error code name, successful or not.
I agree with Nouveau_Brunswick here.
And to add: to @hperrin@lemmy.ca , are you not also a user of software and do you not see room for improvement in many apps? That's where I am rn: I just want them to try harder to communicate a tiny bit more info when things go so wrong that a message has to be displayed on my screen. Telling me "There's nothing you can do to fix the problem" would be a big help, for instance. Make sense?
I am a developer of software. I can guarantee you that what you’re asking for would make my job harder, because I’ve done it, and it has made my job harder. If an error is transient (like, a caching layer error, a db connection error, an external API error, an endpoint connectivity error, etc), giving the user an error code will make it more likely that they’ll file a useless bug report or support ticket. The errors are all logged internally, and we can see when there is a spike in the error count. There’s no reason to give the user an error code, because there’s nothing helpful that the user can do with it, and there’s a lot of unhelpful things a user can do with it.
There are times where a message to the user is appropriate, like if they made a mistake with their input. But there are so many things that could go wrong that the user can’t do anything about. You’re not going to work around your DB shard going down, and a replica will replace it in a few seconds anyway, so giving you an error code does more harm than good. Telling you to try again later is exactly what I would tell you if you filed a support ticket. I don’t want to deal with useless support tickets, and you don’t want to deal with useless error messages.
Modern software stacks are big, complex systems with lots of failure points. We monitor them, and we can tell when you see these errors. If we chose to not show you a specific error code/message, there’s almost definitely a good reason.
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Users ignore error messages.
I have seen my users request support, proceed to demonstrate the issue they're having, and click through error messages so fast there isn't even enough time for me to say "WAIT!" Forget about being able to actually read even one word of the message before it's dismissed from the screen.
They treat the error messages like they are just an annoying mosquito to be swatted away as quickly as possible. This despite the fact that the whole reason I'm standing behind them is so I can see what it's going wrong and, you know, read the error messages.
Them:
"What? Oh that? That always happens"
Me:
Grrrrr
Yeah, you're right, but I still would prefer to see something telling me whether something I did caused the problem or something went wrong in the software / on the server. From this thread, I'm getting that my wishes will not be heard.
So the solution is to remove the error messages? That makes no sense.
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That's Windows' training bearing fruit.
As a developer of many years I hate to tell you sometimes that it's all the information we have when something breaks also. Most code is a god awful mess. Thankfully I love a good mystery.
I hate the process of debugging, but good god, once you've spent 5 hours tracking down the dumbest shit and gotten it to work, it's better than an orgasm.
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I agree that it's (weirdly) uncommon to be the one saying "please give me more info about the error!"
A simple error code can be endlessly helpful (bonus points if there's a corresponding support article explaining common codes)
Even if some codes are only useful to internal support, it's handy to be able to search an error code and see "oh I can just jump straight to submitting a ticket/calling their support" or "oh, this fix might work"
Exactly, it's especially infuriating on newpipe. WHAT went wrong? It's an error 500 from YouTube (rare, unfixable, try again) or Google changed something and need to wait for a client fix? Or simply Google blacklisted the IP address or put some captcha that prevents playing the video??
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I hate the oops part. When you get an error message and it's not even professional or technical but flimsy, I lose all respect.
At my job an Oops design was suggested. I'm glad I was able to convince us to implement it differently, without that shit tone and unprofessionalism.
professionalism is so last millennium. we're hip and young and human. and definitely your friend.
Reminds me of the old "Oopsie woopsie we made a fucky wucky!!" post
Most common place I see those is when the site doesn't want to talk to a known VPN endpoint. Like another mentioned site owners don't want to given any more info to what they perceive as a possible threat than needed, so they just give a generic failure page.
The why is easy. As others said, the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you, the user, because there's not a single thing you can possibly do to address it. What are you gonna do about a database connection issue, or bad cache, or broken Javascript? Nothing. So don't worry about it. Besides people are less panicky when they see an oops rather than a stack trace or a cryptic error message.
And don't worry, people who know how to write up useful support tickets and bug reports know how to do it even when all they can see is an "oops". Builtin browser dev tools will have information they can use to help the devs.
the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you
Hard disagree. Maybe half, at most. And most importantly, if a user can't do anything about it, what's the difference between a "error code 487" vs "oops there's an unspecified error"? What's the harm in showing an actual error code?
The VAST majority of errors I see are connection issues, or some of my VPN or adblock stuff causing me to be denied access to the website. That's all stuff I can fix. And it would be a lot faster if I didn't have to trial-and-error my way to the actual problem first.
See my update/EDIT above. I feel like most of the replies here are on the same track as you but I still think there's a better way.
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Let's talk about the growing number of websites that won't work with a vpn. Even a local government website won't work.
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