Asklemmy

44160 readers

1482 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

208

Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Hammocks4All@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] weeeeum@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Monopolization. If you have become the standard, there's no reason to improve.
Technological advancement. If the speed of new processors continue to double every year, why bother optimizing your program?. This pisses me off so much, games don't look much better but are 4x harder to run compared to 8 years ago.
Cost. Having many programmers, and bug testers on payroll to improve your product is expensive. Massive companies are pennywise pound foolish and will hack and slash at their staff line up until catastrophe strikes (which usually only occurs long after the layoffs)