Why Tech Sucks Now (Part 2/2)
Well hey, you’re back. Thanks. If this is your first time, and you want to read the first part of this, it’s here. I make a visual gag about Crypto and that one scene from A Clockwork Orange. It’s pretty good.
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So, last time I talked about why I don’t think the latest “Innovations” in the tech industry are particularly innovative, and talked about the “conceptual distance” shortening that happens with truly innovative communications technology breakthroughs. This time I’m going to talk about the degradation of user experience in apps that aren’t claiming to revolutionise the world, why well-meaning attempts to unwind these apps haven’t worked, and what I think we should do about it.
I’ll see if I can work in any more good jokes as well.
Time to Seek the Rent
Ah, yeah. Wonderful. Rent-seeking.
If you’re a normal person you might think rent seeking is like a landlord letting a house to a tenant, and then seeking rent. That’s a form of it, but more specifically it’s any action of wealth creation through the manipulation of economic conditions, instead of, like, actual productive endeavours. The telltale sign of it is when something doesn’t improve, but suddenly costs more money. Rent for housing is a good example: the house already exists, and the tenant already has the capacity to occupy it, but the landlord withholds the housing until someone stumps up the lease fee.
And boy howdy is it happening in the tech industry right now. Things that are actively getting in the way of the productive and useful parts of programs. This is explored more thoroughly in Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis and Chokepoint Capitalism by Corey Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, but I think it’s worth talking through some of the steps rather than the holistic economic ideas of those books. I think most of the things that are degrading user experience online can be traced back to this phenomenon.
I’m going to start with something that isn’t actually rent-seeking, but it leads to rent-seeking behaviour and it's endlessly fucking annoying.
I’m talking about the save screen for Microsoft.
Used to be, you’d File→Save and bam, you’d be presented with your folder structure. hitting Ctrl-S would bring up the same dialogue. Now, though, if you want to save the document you’ve been writing, you get this benighted thing when you hit Ctrl-S:
It defaults to my Onedrive, a thing I didn’t fucking ask for, and to get out of that I have to hit “more options” and then “browse” to bring up the folder structure I wanted in the goddamned first place! And in the event it slips one past the goalie and it does end up in my Onedrive account, I can’t find it. Onedrive seems to just be the equivalent of sending the thing into the eternal unknown.
I realise it’s only three more buttons to get to a folder structure, but it’s three more buttons every single time I want to rename a file. And while that itself is not an exercise in rent seeking, here’s where it crosses over into it: It’s obfuscating the location of your own hard drive and storage (which you have already helpfully bought and paid for when you purchased your machine) and directing you to use your Onedrive. Your Onedrive will quickly fill up and then guess what? You can expand your Onedrive for a hundred bucks a year! How thoughtful.
For a hundred bucks I have my own hard drive, Microsoft. That’s why I bought a computer that has its own storage. Stop foisting your cloud bullshit on me.
Now, for anyone with a bit of tech savvy, I imagine that it’s pretty obvious that the message about “Onedrive” being full doesn’t mean that your hard drive is full. But, imagine for a moment you’re one of the millions and millions of users who don’t really know how computers work, or particularly care. I don’t mean people who are stupid either, I just mean people who use computers for important, technical work but don’t know what the difference is between RAM and storage. After all, they’re both measured in GB, right?
All they see is something that says “No storage space” and probably (sensibly!) assume that means that their hard drive is empty. So by hiding the real hard drive away behind those three buttons, Microsoft is building a market for itself where it can peddle unnecessary data storage on people who don’t know better.
This a great business model, if your business is charging exorbitant fees for something that costs a trivial amount. Seriously, storage on a spinning disk is about 11 bucks per Terabyte. Google charges 20 bucks per month for the same “service”.
I hope it’s obvious what I’m getting at here. Data storage is now trivially cheap for the end user, yet we’re paying more for storage than ever. I believe that it’s because companies are deliberately obfuscating how hard it is to use the storage we already have, so they can sell us data storage “solutions” that we don’t need.
This doesn’t just happen for physical storage. The main way I experience the degradation of service experience is through app dilution or paywalling.
For example, I pay a few of my favourite content creators some money every month on Patreon (I’d prefer the money go to them than to a Youtube membership). Youtube, of course, pays a mere pittance to the people on their platform that actually create their content, which is pure technofeudalist nonsense. But despite being a platform whose entire service offering has been, y’know, watching videos, it’s now surprisingly difficult to just watch a video on the world’s premier video watching website.
It’s, first of all, very difficult to find videos on the topic you want. Search results go for precisely one page before defaulting back to your algorithm. There are now popups for premium, memberships, podcasts, and other things that used to be part of the base experience but which are now hidden behind a paywall. And ads on new videos that generate revenue for Youtube so it can inadequately compensate its creators are now so pervasive that some videos are now nigh-unwatchable.
Companies are deliberately obfuscating how hard it is to use the storage we already have, so they can sell us data storage “solutions” that we don’t need.
All of this feels like a game built to frustrate users until they cough up cash, and when they do they have to cough it up to the tune of monthly subscriptions, in perpetuity.
Streaming services are notable for just how bad they are with this. Netflix keeps jacking its prices, but they have also made their base tier worse. Rather than enjoying the ad-free experience that Netflix once offered, the new and improved “standard with ads” lets you pay money to still have ads! It’s the same with Prime video, if you want the ad free experience you can pay extra, and by the way you’ll still have to pay more to rent half the movies on the platform. In each of these cases, the previously available (ad-free) option has been locked behind a paywall. This is classic rent seeking. Where before there was a service that was provided (and sure, charge a fee, I don’t actually have an issue with commerce), the quality of the service is slowly decreased for the same price (or in Netflix’s case, with a price increase).
The same thing has happened with fitness apps. Strava used to have far more functionality available for free, but rather than innovate new things for their paying customer base, they just shifted all the useful parts of their app behind a 9 dollar a month pay wall. And then they added more “features” which are only available behind the paywall. And you know what’s there because like all good rent seeking operations, they give you a hint of what you’re missing. Oh, you want a breakdown of your pace, just click here! Oh actually that’s 9 bucks a month. Click here to compare to previous similar workouts! Ha, fell for it again. 9 bucks, bucko. The entire experience is designed to feel incomplete, and the features keep getting added on. It’s deliberately hostile design.
Personally, I feel like adding features is the death knell of the useful app. Where once you had a clean, lightweight app that would allow you to, I dunno, review gadgets, someone in the design team thinks that more people will use the app if it does more. Substack is instructive here, if I can be allowed to bite the hand that feeds (Who am I kidding? It doesn’t feed. If you want to support my writing though, here’s a link to my Ko-Fi). Substack, for all its talk of redefining the way people communicate online, is fundamentally a newsletter platform. I hope I don’t need to tell you that this is not a groundbreaking idea.
I had a Livejournal in 2001, and blogs were a whole wave that people rode for ages. As a matter of fact, text was the first thing ever sent over the internet (It was supposed to be a message saying “Log” but it crashed and just said Lo, which I think we should have understood as the warning it so clearly was).
Point is, it’s not revolutionary to let people write stuff online. But, following the Muskification of twitter a couple years ago, Substack decided it wanted to be the centrepiece of media itself. So, dandy. It’s now got:
Comments
Chats
Notes
Podcasts
Video
Followers
Subscribers
As for how heavily these things are used, I have no idea. I didn’t realise there was a difference between “comments” and “chats” for ages, and the Notes was one of the most hastily thrown together addendums to a website I’ve ever seen. I think the entire tech world had an aneurism when they sensed that Twitter’s monopolistic chokehold on microblogging might have been releasing even a fraction a few years ago. I’ve never seen so many fundamentally identical websites boom and bust as when the twitter exodus happened.
Point is, when you’ve accepted a bunch of VC money to build a specific app, you hit a point of divergence. You reach a saturation point fairly quickly: users can now review widgets with speed and efficiency. Every widget enthusiast is now using your app and they’re happy with it. But you were funded to the tune of $50m, and you’re only getting $2m of turnover per year. You need to increase that. So you throw new features at the wall, bloating your app and making it less useful for its original purpose in the hope you draw more people to it. Simultaneously, you move more of the app’s core features behind the paywall in the hope you start recouping some of those fat stacks that men wearing ugly ties lent you back when you were operating out of a flophouse (sorry, incubator) in Palo Alto.
Suddenly, your app has been homogenised. It does the same ten things everyone else’s does with a slight focus on widget reviewing. Your home screen is bloated with features that are inaccessible to non-paying users (but they’re still visible) in between the ten thousand ads you throw at their screen. The app glitches, uses unbelievable amounts of processing power, and there isn’t a person on the planet who you’d consider a power user, because the app changes so often that it’s a waste of time to learn it.
But hey, what’s the alternative when this is the state of the entire tech ecosystem?
Operant Conditioning
People with a lot more ability and education than I have will have done double blind and careful studies talking about this, but I’m going to talk about it anyway and we can all understand that I’m not an expert in this stuff.
Classical conditioning is when you do what Pavlov did with his dogs: a natural response is programmed using an external stimulus. It’s natural to eat, and you can train dogs to expect food when the bell rings.
Operant conditioning is slightly different: Instead of a stimulus making someone perform a natural response, a stimulus will instead provoke a trained response.
This is discussed in Noah Gervais’s great essay about the Diablo video game franchise “How Many Clicks Does it Take to Get to the Center of Diablo?”, where he explores the way operant conditioning has been weaponised (or monetised, ymmv) by developer Blizzard over the course of the development of the Diablo sequels. The way the expectation of rewards for loot keep players hooked, similar to the way casinos keep people pouring money into their games.
Operant conditioning is a very interesting phenomenon, and it explains a great many things, from video game loot boxes to superstitious behavior in pigeons. It was found that by intermittently and randomly providing food to pigeons, the pigeons would begin to repeat whatever behavior they were doing when the food arrived. In short, the pigeons thought that their spinning, head-bobbing, or looking over the left shoulder was a causal link to being fed, and so began to do that thing in the hope that more food would appear. Sometimes it did, but it didn’t stop the pigeons from doing the superstitious behavior.
And lo, aren’t pigeons such stupid birds! Thank goodness that we, the higher order mammals, have evolved to not rely on such silly indicators of behavi- oh hold on a second I have a facebook notification.
Ah, never mind it was just telling me that someone I thought I’d unfriended five years ago has posted a picture. Where were we?
For more than ten years now, notifications on Meta’s platforms have only intermittently provided a notification of anything I’ve actually wanted to know. Before I turned notifications off completely for Instagram, the majority of my notifications were along the lines of “HEY, D’YA WANNA POST A PICTURE!?”. And yet, whenever this happens, I’ll check Instagram like an idiot and inevitably get sucked into ten thousand reels of people badly acting out tired screenshots of twitter jokes.
I complained to a friend of mine about my tendency to get stuck in a scroll-hole after these useless notifications, and he responded “Dude. don’t feel bad. Incredibly smart people are paid a lot of money specifically to get you to do that.” which made me feel better, but it also got me thinking about the way we’re all pigeons for the drip feed of notifications.
What’s more, even though the user experience on all of these websites is getting worse, we’re still expecting the websites to behave the way they used to. Let’s go back to what happened at the twitter exodus. When it became clear that the Elongated Muskrat was turning twitter into a hive of fash-friendly, eight-dollar paying dipshits, people left. Hive Social, Spoutible, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and Substack notes all appeared out of nowhere to cater for the tech diaspora, and none of them have really glommed on to what made twitter work.
It’s not even that places like bluesky or threads or mastodon are even bad pieces of technology - it’s that the algorithm didn’t function as well as two decades of twitter development had done, and the built up social rapport of twitter as an information network wasn’t there. Left and right there were people complaining about the limitations of each platform, as well as the kind of data safety and similar concerns that you get when you ctrl-c, ctrl-v the homescreen of a fifteen year old business.
What I didn’t see was a lot of discussion of the fact that the replacement for twitter didn’t have to exist. Seriously, humanity went without being able to dunk on tepid celebrity takes since before the great flood, we actually do not need twitter to exist in that specific form.
What I think has happened with the last, say, two decades of technology since smartphones became widely available is that we’re so societally used to these forms of communication that we can’t walk our way back from them. Once you’ve shortened the conceptual distance, it takes a lot for us to voluntary lengthen it again. The same thing that is stopping ideas like the metaverse and NFTs from becoming mainstream is the same thing that is keeping us dependent on a platform like twitter. It takes a rapid, gross change in the platform to result in an exodus like we saw with twitter. The slow decays we see in places like facebook and instagram work the opposite way: they keep us operantly conditioned. The snacks come fewer and farther between, but we still whip out our phones in the expectation that the notification will be worth checking.
So technology is getting less useful, more bloated, tells us less about the things we’re interested in, costs more, is being foisted on us without our consent, and we can’t stop using it because this way of communicating is now so ingrained in our lives. So what are we to do?
An Alternative View
I think it’s fair to say that the internet is functionally a public utility at this point. The ability to access and find things online is completely necessary. Nearly every business has a website, and a growing number of people earn their entire livings online.
What’s more, I think that social platforms perform an important public service as well. The ability to connect and share with people online has become critical (and for all my whining, Substack is actually pretty good at this). But the constant profiteering and feature creep of social platforms is destructive to this goal of the internet as a social good.
Things have been tried in places like the fediverse and decentralised networks of that ilk, but they have the same problem as crypto: it’s too much of a learning gap to the lay user. People don’t grok what it means to select a federated server, Mastodon, that’s why they don’t sign up. In my ideal app, I can set up a profile, put a picture and a bio, and immediately be in contact with people I want to talk to while curating my feed to the kinds of content I want to see. That’s what social media sites do when they’re at their best, before the rot starts to set in, and it’s what we societally have come to expect.
I don’t think that building an app that does this in the long-term can be effectively set up as a for-profit exercise. If you’re going to set up a utility, it has to be incentivised to serve people, not profits. Unfortunately, private business will always have a priority of making money, and there are easier ways of making money than making user experience the top priority. That much has been made clear by the actions of these companies, in the ways that I’ve described in these articles.
So all we need to do at this time is turn to our leaders, and ask them to consider that recklessly profiteering in a space that has become a public utility is detrimental to the social fabric. We should lobby them to develop a service that provides the social and economic benefits of having these kinds of networks, and let them know that they have to have the very short conceptual distances that algorithms and dedicated newsfeeds have developed.
Alright, sounds great. Now, who are our leaders?
Ah, shit.
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