In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. In

In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead, business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive, more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding in molasses.