7 ms·

Apps have become too good at their jobs

49 points by trifit 4y ago

cowtools 4y ago
But surely there is a point at which the feature bloat becomes too great? the app becomes so feature-dense that users are turned off by the complexity, and the trickle of adventurous users doesn't satisfy the costs of development and maintenance of a new feature. I've heard a lot of stories about chat-apps with built-in payment functionality. I've heard of few successes. I would like to think that WeChat is successful in the Chinese marketplace because that marketplace isn't actually very competitive. The government puts their thumb on the scale in favor of simplifying their mechanisms of control. There is a phrase associated with unix: "Make each program do one thing well". Mobile operating systems lack the inter-process communication needed to make an ecosystem of simple, extensible programs.
- _the_inflator 4y ago
  I think it is more about convenience. If you are already lured into a certain cosmos, given a certain context, some additional features can make sense and later on give an app a shift in meaning. Think about Google Maps and certain recommendations. "The goal for most apps, especially social media, is to sustain user retention for as long as possible" That's it. And that's why I chose Kindle to be my go to app. No FB nor TikTok installed.
- zoltrix303 4y ago
  One interesting part of the WeChat ecosystem in my opinion is the max size given to mini programs. The packaged app must be 10mb or less. Of course video and images can be hosted externally, but it still forces companies who develop these mini programs to pay a minimum of attention to keeping their functionality relatively simple.
- urthor 4y ago
  Hell no. Tens of thousands of businesses worldwide purchase "the full Microsoft experience." They integrate every single aspect of their digital enterprise with Microsoft's off the shelf option. The same applies to Apps. Many people want 1 thing that does it all.
  - csydas 4y ago
    I don't think that's true that people want 1 thing that does it all. They certainly want one bill, that I'll grant, but that's not exactly the same thing. People want an ecosystem that is easy to adapt to, and more specifically they want _the ecosystem they're familiar with_. In a past life with software support, when it came to large/enterprise customers, the biggest pushback/fights had nothing to do with features or price, but with a few stubborn IT Managers/Administrators who were used to another product and didn't want to change. UI/UX should have a common 'language' for lack of better words between them with a spin on it that still makes it unique for the program. We already see this with desktop OSes and mobile; if I right-click on any common desktop OS, I know I get a contextual menu on an object, if I swipe or tap on mobile likely something will happen, etc. Users mostly get this except for a small subset and can use a lot of apps; the app ecosystem on mobile more or less demonstrates this. What Meta is doing with WhatsApp isn't about the one app for all, it's just they have a huge user base that isn't bringing in money and likely they see this as a cardinal sin _not to monetize_ WhatsApp somehow. They likely look at WeChat and go "wait you can make money like that?" and are desperately trying to figure out how to get themselves there. I have not been in the US for a long time so I don't know how people there will adopt to Meta-Money or whatever Meta ends up calling it. For the EU countries I've lived in, I'm not as confident people will want to be doing that with Meta at least when Apple/Google Pay exist and work pretty alright and banking apps already handling fast direct payments without needing an SV intermediary.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Facebook has already tried payments before through Messenger, and no one really used it. I don’t really see WhatsApp doing much better.
      - skohan 4y ago
        WhatsApp might succeed because it's less of a kitchen sink. WhatsApp is mainly about private communication. It's an app you feel like you control, where you're not being bombarded by advertising. Somehow payments feel psychologically safer in that context than a social network.
- diamondo25 4y ago
  For unix, chaining programs is a way of working. Exchanging data between apps or websites is a hassle...
  - skohan 4y ago
    That's intentional. There's no reason you couldn't have apps be more interoperable through open standards, but vendors want to keep you locked in their ecosystem.
- xbmcuser 4y ago
  You are mistaken chinese market place is actually more competitive than the US. Instead of 1 amazon they have 3 instead of 1 Apple they have 3. Chinese companies have some restrictions and lines that are not supposed to be crossed but they are the same for most of them. And Chinese government is uncomfortable with 1 private app/service controlling the whole market as they want that control so they promote smaller players which results in more competitive market.
  - dejj 4y ago
    Spooky, how China figured out how to make capitalism work in the public interest. Notwithstanding that 'public interest' is defined by the party.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      When you regulate the market, you enter social democracy territory. When you do it how much China is doing, you enter socialism territory.
jeanlou 4y ago
I just wish they'd let users disable these extra attention grabbing features. In WhatsApp for example, I just want to use it as a messaging app but I find myself getting drawn to statuses and wasting my time and attention there. I try to combat it by muting each individual status but it's not an effective strategy. It would be great to have the option to either disable it or only allow certain person.
- nottorp 4y ago
  My entire whatsapp is muted. I just check if i have new messages now and then. Experiment with turning off all notifications on your device.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    I found out tgat WhatsApp is auto muted under engery saving mode in CalyxOS. Now I just have to remember to check every once in a while. The list of apps I use is pretty short anyway.
mrweasel 4y ago
Youtube Shorts are terribly good at what they do, and I presume is the same for something like TikTok. In fact they are so good at grabbing attention that I feel like a resposible company would quickly have discontinued Shorts, to avoid doing to much damage. The quality of the content in most Shorts is extremely low, yet it’s very addictive. There’s basically no psycologic break for users. You have to be a pretty cold person to think that stealing hours of people life every day as a business opportunity.
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  YouTube shorts is the biggest thing I wish I could disable on my modern internet experience. So I personally think it's a failure for me as a market
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    yep... also, why the hell can't you speed them up like you can do normal videos? (by using , and . in a browser)
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      Also they don't show the red progress bar in my subs feed, so I can't know which ones I've already watched. Just end up hiding them as they come, which is yet more busywork slowly driving me off the platform.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    There are browser plugins, and you can remove it from site for 30 days at a time, at least on the desktop.
    - pleb_nz 4y ago
      Yeah, I don't use YouTube in the browser otherwise that so3und be perfect
- Consultant32452 4y ago
yummypaint 4y ago
Companies all seem to want to create their own private "internet" and in a walled garden that they own completely. The goal is for people to feel like they are in control of what they consume while they simultaneously lose that agency. If a person really has a choice, it should be possible to use the internet in general such that it does not generate profit for the parent company. Another way to phrase it: if content a person sees is being steered and controlled so much that a particular company always profits, then the model of providing a service to the user has conceptually been abandoned. The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. Even trivial things like viewing tweets and other plaintext are incrementally being locked down behind apps that surveil users. For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile, and that fact is well known to the relevant developers. The reason it isn't improved is obvious as the pop-ups nag: "reddit is better in the app!"
- Lucasoato 4y ago
  It's absurd, Reddit isn't usable from browser anymore. I've never seen a company deliberately destroying its product user experience like this just to feed a smaller portion of its services. Where are the investors? Where's the board? Do they use the product? Reddit used to be in a dominating position for everything between 4chan and Facebook, why are they trashing everything to squeeze a bit of data? If that's benefitting the company (and I'm really in doubt of that) it's just in the shortest term... You'll see a small boost in sign ups maybe, app downloads, but the company's reputation is lost forever.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dageshi 4y ago
    Reddit won, they are the internets forum there is nothing else that comes close. Given that and the fact that the majority of their users are probably on mobile now not desktop, I'm sure their investors and board are cheering them on to convert mobile users to App users, they're likely much more valuable.
t43562 4y ago
There are programmers and there are apps that people are using in large numbers so work will graduate to wherever it has a chance of getting eyeballed. Whether or not this is desirable is immaterial. We work to get paid and we have to find things to do. So in the end all hyper commercial software will turn into crap.
w10-1 4y ago
It's calling "tying" in the economic theory of monopoly. A good/monopoly product/feature is "tied" to others, to "extend" the monopoly into other competitive domains. Anti-competition laws find this harms competition, and courts have restricted it. This is why companies get pushed to allow independent repair services, etc. However, the analysis is a bit vague and difficult to enforce, since it's hard to distinguish from product bundling. The question is not whether the product is one or many, but whether there can be multiple markets, or whether the benefits of producer integration outweigh the competition benefits of consumer integration. For attention-seeking apps, clearly a context-switch that breaks attention is to be avoided. I find it interesting that multiple small switches to new interesting (shiny) things not only is more sticky than longer formats, it also seems to reduce interest in making a mode shift, to something else entirely. There are different ways to model this neurologically, with no leading hypothesis AFAIK.
pleb_nz 4y ago
Does anyone else just read this crap and yawn?
robocat 4y ago
One advantage of the smorgasbord style app is the your personal information is only being held by one player. I like my privacy, however it is hard to estimate how your private data will be abused when your privacy is smeared across multiple corporates.
puyoxyz 4y ago
> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a decrease in the watch time for longer videos. Youtube neglected its core audience in favor of increasing user retention based on a current trend. Established Youtubers like Marques Brownlee and Mrwhosetheboss had to create a secondary shorts channel to keep up with their audience. I disagree with this. Things change, the world goes on, and you need to keep up with it. It’s not YouTube taking away their audience, it’s them not keeping up with the times (if they don’t make shorts)
- seydor 4y ago
  It is youtube. When they signed up they expected to not be treated like hot garbage just a few years down. Youtube is currently pushing shorts hard. It is incentivizing users to download clips from tiktok (legally or not) and reupload them to youtube, where they get free prioritized air time. There are many (hundreds?) of such channels with milllions of subscribers from simply copy-pasting tiktok to youtube. This is how youtube wants to grow its shorts. This is the company's immoral behavior, not the creators.
sys_64738 4y ago
Apps like these usually have a limited shelf life before they expire and die out. The reason being is that their popularity is driven by younger demographic that ages and the replacement population doesn't want to use what "old" folk use. So Tik Tok or whatever the latest buzz generating app will be doomed to die slowly in the end. The fad of short videos of people doing inane things is just the latest fad until they come up with something else on another platform. When your mom uses Tik Tok then it's time to get off the platform.
xg15 4y ago
> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a decrease in the watch time for longer videos. Youtube neglected its core audience in favor of increasing user retention based on a current trend. Established Youtubers like Marques Brownlee and Mrwhosetheboss had to create a secondary shorts channel to keep up with their audience. I think this part is the most remarkable of the article. Yes, at this point, we all know about surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, amusing ourselves to death and all that jazz. However, here is a concrete example where a platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive. That's not the invisible hand of the market driving youtubers to do a particular thing, it's the quite visible hand of youtube.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive Its all fun and games until large regulators like the Eu comes cracking down...

49 points by trifit 4y ago

But surely there is a point at which the feature bloat becomes too great? the app becomes so feature-dense that users are turned off by the complexity, and the trickle of adventurous users doesn't satisfy the costs of development and maintenance of a new feature. I've heard a lot of stories about chat-apps with built-in payment functionality. I've heard of few successes. I would like to think that WeChat is successful in the Chinese marketplace because that marketplace isn't actually very competitive. The government puts their thumb on the scale in favor of simplifying their mechanisms of control. There is a phrase associated with unix: "Make each program do one thing well". Mobile operating systems lack the inter-process communication needed to make an ecosystem of simple, extensible programs.

_the_inflator 4y ago
I think it is more about convenience. If you are already lured into a certain cosmos, given a certain context, some additional features can make sense and later on give an app a shift in meaning. Think about Google Maps and certain recommendations. "The goal for most apps, especially social media, is to sustain user retention for as long as possible" That's it. And that's why I chose Kindle to be my go to app. No FB nor TikTok installed.
zoltrix303 4y ago
One interesting part of the WeChat ecosystem in my opinion is the max size given to mini programs. The packaged app must be 10mb or less. Of course video and images can be hosted externally, but it still forces companies who develop these mini programs to pay a minimum of attention to keeping their functionality relatively simple.
urthor 4y ago
Hell no. Tens of thousands of businesses worldwide purchase "the full Microsoft experience." They integrate every single aspect of their digital enterprise with Microsoft's off the shelf option. The same applies to Apps. Many people want 1 thing that does it all.
- csydas 4y ago
  I don't think that's true that people want 1 thing that does it all. They certainly want one bill, that I'll grant, but that's not exactly the same thing. People want an ecosystem that is easy to adapt to, and more specifically they want _the ecosystem they're familiar with_. In a past life with software support, when it came to large/enterprise customers, the biggest pushback/fights had nothing to do with features or price, but with a few stubborn IT Managers/Administrators who were used to another product and didn't want to change. UI/UX should have a common 'language' for lack of better words between them with a spin on it that still makes it unique for the program. We already see this with desktop OSes and mobile; if I right-click on any common desktop OS, I know I get a contextual menu on an object, if I swipe or tap on mobile likely something will happen, etc. Users mostly get this except for a small subset and can use a lot of apps; the app ecosystem on mobile more or less demonstrates this. What Meta is doing with WhatsApp isn't about the one app for all, it's just they have a huge user base that isn't bringing in money and likely they see this as a cardinal sin _not to monetize_ WhatsApp somehow. They likely look at WeChat and go "wait you can make money like that?" and are desperately trying to figure out how to get themselves there. I have not been in the US for a long time so I don't know how people there will adopt to Meta-Money or whatever Meta ends up calling it. For the EU countries I've lived in, I'm not as confident people will want to be doing that with Meta at least when Apple/Google Pay exist and work pretty alright and banking apps already handling fast direct payments without needing an SV intermediary.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Facebook has already tried payments before through Messenger, and no one really used it. I don’t really see WhatsApp doing much better.
    - skohan 4y ago
      WhatsApp might succeed because it's less of a kitchen sink. WhatsApp is mainly about private communication. It's an app you feel like you control, where you're not being bombarded by advertising. Somehow payments feel psychologically safer in that context than a social network.
diamondo25 4y ago
For unix, chaining programs is a way of working. Exchanging data between apps or websites is a hassle...
- skohan 4y ago
  That's intentional. There's no reason you couldn't have apps be more interoperable through open standards, but vendors want to keep you locked in their ecosystem.
xbmcuser 4y ago
You are mistaken chinese market place is actually more competitive than the US. Instead of 1 amazon they have 3 instead of 1 Apple they have 3. Chinese companies have some restrictions and lines that are not supposed to be crossed but they are the same for most of them. And Chinese government is uncomfortable with 1 private app/service controlling the whole market as they want that control so they promote smaller players which results in more competitive market.
- dejj 4y ago
  Spooky, how China figured out how to make capitalism work in the public interest. Notwithstanding that 'public interest' is defined by the party.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    When you regulate the market, you enter social democracy territory. When you do it how much China is doing, you enter socialism territory.

jeanlou 4y ago

I just wish they'd let users disable these extra attention grabbing features. In WhatsApp for example, I just want to use it as a messaging app but I find myself getting drawn to statuses and wasting my time and attention there. I try to combat it by muting each individual status but it's not an effective strategy. It would be great to have the option to either disable it or only allow certain person.

nottorp 4y ago
My entire whatsapp is muted. I just check if i have new messages now and then. Experiment with turning off all notifications on your device.
- hef19898 4y ago
  I found out tgat WhatsApp is auto muted under engery saving mode in CalyxOS. Now I just have to remember to check every once in a while. The list of apps I use is pretty short anyway.

mrweasel 4y ago

Youtube Shorts are terribly good at what they do, and I presume is the same for something like TikTok. In fact they are so good at grabbing attention that I feel like a resposible company would quickly have discontinued Shorts, to avoid doing to much damage. The quality of the content in most Shorts is extremely low, yet it’s very addictive. There’s basically no psycologic break for users. You have to be a pretty cold person to think that stealing hours of people life every day as a business opportunity.

pleb_nz 4y ago
YouTube shorts is the biggest thing I wish I could disable on my modern internet experience. So I personally think it's a failure for me as a market
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  yep... also, why the hell can't you speed them up like you can do normal videos? (by using , and . in a browser)
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Also they don't show the red progress bar in my subs feed, so I can't know which ones I've already watched. Just end up hiding them as they come, which is yet more busywork slowly driving me off the platform.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  There are browser plugins, and you can remove it from site for 30 days at a time, at least on the desktop.
  - pleb_nz 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't use YouTube in the browser otherwise that so3und be perfect
Consultant32452 4y ago

yummypaint 4y ago

Companies all seem to want to create their own private "internet" and in a walled garden that they own completely. The goal is for people to feel like they are in control of what they consume while they simultaneously lose that agency. If a person really has a choice, it should be possible to use the internet in general such that it does not generate profit for the parent company. Another way to phrase it: if content a person sees is being steered and controlled so much that a particular company always profits, then the model of providing a service to the user has conceptually been abandoned. The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. Even trivial things like viewing tweets and other plaintext are incrementally being locked down behind apps that surveil users. For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile, and that fact is well known to the relevant developers. The reason it isn't improved is obvious as the pop-ups nag: "reddit is better in the app!"

Lucasoato 4y ago
It's absurd, Reddit isn't usable from browser anymore. I've never seen a company deliberately destroying its product user experience like this just to feed a smaller portion of its services. Where are the investors? Where's the board? Do they use the product? Reddit used to be in a dominating position for everything between 4chan and Facebook, why are they trashing everything to squeeze a bit of data? If that's benefitting the company (and I'm really in doubt of that) it's just in the shortest term... You'll see a small boost in sign ups maybe, app downloads, but the company's reputation is lost forever.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dageshi 4y ago
  Reddit won, they are the internets forum there is nothing else that comes close. Given that and the fact that the majority of their users are probably on mobile now not desktop, I'm sure their investors and board are cheering them on to convert mobile users to App users, they're likely much more valuable.

t43562 4y ago

There are programmers and there are apps that people are using in large numbers so work will graduate to wherever it has a chance of getting eyeballed. Whether or not this is desirable is immaterial. We work to get paid and we have to find things to do. So in the end all hyper commercial software will turn into crap.

w10-1 4y ago

It's calling "tying" in the economic theory of monopoly. A good/monopoly product/feature is "tied" to others, to "extend" the monopoly into other competitive domains. Anti-competition laws find this harms competition, and courts have restricted it. This is why companies get pushed to allow independent repair services, etc. However, the analysis is a bit vague and difficult to enforce, since it's hard to distinguish from product bundling. The question is not whether the product is one or many, but whether there can be multiple markets, or whether the benefits of producer integration outweigh the competition benefits of consumer integration. For attention-seeking apps, clearly a context-switch that breaks attention is to be avoided. I find it interesting that multiple small switches to new interesting (shiny) things not only is more sticky than longer formats, it also seems to reduce interest in making a mode shift, to something else entirely. There are different ways to model this neurologically, with no leading hypothesis AFAIK.

pleb_nz 4y ago

Does anyone else just read this crap and yawn?

robocat 4y ago

One advantage of the smorgasbord style app is the your personal information is only being held by one player. I like my privacy, however it is hard to estimate how your private data will be abused when your privacy is smeared across multiple corporates.

puyoxyz 4y ago

> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a decrease in the watch time for longer videos. Youtube neglected its core audience in favor of increasing user retention based on a current trend. Established Youtubers like Marques Brownlee and Mrwhosetheboss had to create a secondary shorts channel to keep up with their audience. I disagree with this. Things change, the world goes on, and you need to keep up with it. It’s not YouTube taking away their audience, it’s them not keeping up with the times (if they don’t make shorts)

seydor 4y ago
It is youtube. When they signed up they expected to not be treated like hot garbage just a few years down. Youtube is currently pushing shorts hard. It is incentivizing users to download clips from tiktok (legally or not) and reupload them to youtube, where they get free prioritized air time. There are many (hundreds?) of such channels with milllions of subscribers from simply copy-pasting tiktok to youtube. This is how youtube wants to grow its shorts. This is the company's immoral behavior, not the creators.

sys_64738 4y ago

Apps like these usually have a limited shelf life before they expire and die out. The reason being is that their popularity is driven by younger demographic that ages and the replacement population doesn't want to use what "old" folk use. So Tik Tok or whatever the latest buzz generating app will be doomed to die slowly in the end. The fad of short videos of people doing inane things is just the latest fad until they come up with something else on another platform. When your mom uses Tik Tok then it's time to get off the platform.

xg15 4y ago

> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a decrease in the watch time for longer videos. Youtube neglected its core audience in favor of increasing user retention based on a current trend. Established Youtubers like Marques Brownlee and Mrwhosetheboss had to create a secondary shorts channel to keep up with their audience. I think this part is the most remarkable of the article. Yes, at this point, we all know about surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, amusing ourselves to death and all that jazz. However, here is a concrete example where a platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive. That's not the invisible hand of the market driving youtubers to do a particular thing, it's the quite visible hand of youtube.

unity1001 4y ago
> platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive Its all fun and games until large regulators like the Eu comes cracking down...