Constant enshitification is a key process in maximising profits, if only the legends of the fossy alliterative ways were true, … but those arent the stories the capitalist would tell you.
I used to work for a west coast tech giant. The UI designers always laid screens out on paper (literally paper printouts with a crude mockup of a mobile phone on it) and reacted with outright personal hostility to my suggestion that their designs be tried out on focus groups before being put into production. “Users don’t know what they want” was something I heard many times. The UX people always supported them, while doing - so far as I could tell - nothing whatsoever themselves.
Our apps got tons of one-star reviews, usually with comments like “I gave this app one star because you can’t give an app zero stars”.
Hearing hundreds of stories like this from silicon valley has undermined my faith that the free market really knows what’s best
I switched from developing apps for sale to developing apps for use by internal customers. The dynamic shift was huge. I was always promoting fixes that would make our app more useful (and reducing technical debt) for our customers and I would get told no. Why? Because those fixes would often reduce income from services and maintenance.
Fuck that. The second I switched to producing for internal customers I was able to implement those changes and cut out huge amounts of shit that was left in place purely to cause external customers to purchase service contracts.
Customers DO know what’s right. VP of Sales DOES know what makes them money. The two things are often polar opposites.
Don’t forget about Redmond! Some of the biggest programming fuckups I’ve ever met in my life ended up working for Microsoft, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
We’ve improved our mobile app. Now you have to register with no benefits for you whatsoever.
coincidentally we also ruined our web app.
Plex
Especially on WebOS. It’s so slow nowadays. Was so quick and good years ago.
Sonos 😒
The pain is still real.
I still feel lost in it. “More intuitive” my arse.
“We are going to alter it further anyway, just wanted to get your hopes up.”
As a Brave Browserer on mobile, this hits hard
I use brave on mobile too, what’s the issue with their recent updates?
For anyone reading this, yes I am aware the CEO is a piece of shit and the company in general is scummy, but the browser itself is good. And they don’t get any money from me, Brave is open source so I’m fine with it.
They changed the widget a few days ago. Used to be a nice compact 1×4 widget with the searchbar and now it’s just stupid
Ouch
