I tried to sign up for a tutanota email account the other day through a VPN and when it came back and said "We don't trust your IP, use another connection." rather than being annoyed I was just glad they gave me a straight answer for once. It wasn't the answer I wanted but it sure beat being gaslighted into thinking I was having connection timeouts or browser incompatibilities to waste my time.

It's a straight answer sufficiently couched in jargon that a non-technical person still isn't likely to understand the problem or how to resolve it.

Sure, but "only technical people will understand what the problem is" is infinitely better than "literally nobody will understand what the problem is".

I mean, I'll agree that it's slightly better in absolute terms. "Infinitely" is a strong word choice for a case where 95% of users will still be in the dark, unless you insist on using the term in a pedantic mathematical sense.

>What's worse is that the the error messages never explain the problem. It's just an endless sequence of "Oops! Something went wrong" "We could not fulfill your request" "Please try again later".

You're absolutely right. They each carry the tone of "This content isn't available right now", like when trying to view a tweet from a shadowbanned user. I've seen that drive people, particularly family, into a kind of aggressive version of frustration.

> They each carry the tone of "This content isn't available right now"

At this point it's merely static deception. Wait until they run a GPT bot programmed to interactively lie to you, deflect, stall, misdirect and stonewall you based on your personal profile. These companies are devious and untrustworthy to their core, and the only reason anyone uses them is because they're forced to.

No need to wait: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/becoming-...

Quite staggering account of how technology has created the worst of all possible worlds for everyone. There are no winners here. People, we have failed. Give up and grow vegetables :)