MSDN

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with MSDN, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Default options are hidden, forcing a hunt across other pages to find them2025-09-22
Hard to build a mental model of how things work, so docs fail unless needs match exactly2023-12-30
After reorganisation, documentation became impossible to find and mixed with poor docs2022-09-10
Links to articles frequently lead to 404 errors, breaking research2020-11-10
Impossible to find wanted documentation without a search engine2019-12-15
Hard to find documentation without using a search engine2019-10-08
MSDN pages load unacceptably slowly2017-04-19
Documentation pages take 5-10 seconds to load2016-11-17
Hard to find exactly what you want because results push .NET content2016-11-14
Finding answers on MSDN is slower than searching Google then Stack Overflow2016-09-26
Hard to navigate through the site2016-05-04
Internal search is slower and less effective than using Google to find pages2016-04-30
Hard to find how to do simple things; COM interfaces poorly documented2014-12-29
Has to puzzle out which root certificates can sign code-signing certificates2012-07-14
Navigating its documentation is so hard that users must rely on a search engine to find pages2010-10-12
MSDN search returns stale or broken links, forcing users to use Google2010-09-17