Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck? - eviltoast

Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Arrogance. They’re attitude is basically “we built it, so it’s golden. If you can’t understand why we did it this way, then put the device down and flip burgers”.

    I saw this starting around the year 2005. I spoke out about it and told people stop buying /using products that aren’t logical and easy to use. If it takes a Google search and a YouTube video to figure out how to use it, then it was built wrong. Return the product and get a better one. No one listened to me. We have what we have.

    It sucks and it will only get worse. People will not change. People will keep buying shit products, then bitch that the products suck. Instead of returning the crap, they will keep it. Because they keep it the companies have zero reason to change.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      LOL, those last three sentences wrap up lemmy’s capitalism hate perfectly.

      “We keep spending money on bullshit and kept getting fed worse bullshit!”

      “Have you considered not spending money on bullshit?”

      “We HAVE to!!!”