Mildly Infuriating

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.

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".

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 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"

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.

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.

Because the error message would be meaningless for 99% of people. Expected errors are already handled correctly, but unexpected errors like these would say something obscure like “couldn’t read property ‘count’ of undefined”. Very useful

The developers are meeting you halfway. They told you something went wrong, They have the stack trace in the logs.

Being a reasonably knowledgeable individual you could make use of the deeper information at least scratch your itch for what happened, in the end there's nothing you can do about it there's a back end problem. But giving that more detailed information to the end user is a fool's errand.

Let's say we pick a simple one, the database connector is down. End user gets a message that the database is unconnectable. Forum start to light up with worries of people losing data. Armchair conjecture about backups and data loss and updates abound.

Realistically the VM host at Amazon had a critical update and got updated, but failed to come back up as they do occasionally and someone needs to go and stop and start the instance to get the database online on new hardware. It only takes 15 or 20 minutes.

Now you've got thousands of people in your forum pissed off about something that is only mostly out of your control.

Now let's replace that error with oops something went wrong.

The people on the forms mention that it's down they ponder about what could possibly be wrong, But without anything to go on it fizzles away, The site comes back up and people just chalk it up to regular internet shenanigans.

The company didn't get any benefit from giving the end user more information. Your average user just got their knickers and a twist. And a handful of knowledgeable professionals went wow that sucks sorry guys.

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.

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.

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??

Let's talk about the growing number of websites that won't work with a vpn. Even a local government website won't work.

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.

Reminds me of the old "Oopsie woopsie we made a fucky wucky!!" post

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie

Look, the majority of the software is on the server end. Even if they gave you a full stack trace, and you understood it, you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. You want them to give you a way to send in a merge request? I’m sure that would be received here as Google exploiting you for free.