I liked this post by Terry Crowley: https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fda https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd..

I liked this post by Terry Crowley: https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fda https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd... "The classic response to accusations of bloat is that this growth is an efficient response to the additional resources available with improved hardware. That is, programmers are investing in adding features rather than investing in improving performance, disk footprint or other efforts to reduce bloat because the added hardware resources make the effective cost of bloat minimal. The argument runs that this is in direct response to customer demand. It is most definitely the case that when you see wide-spread consistent behavior across all these different computing ecosystems, it is almost certainly the case that the behavior is in response to direct signals and feedback rather than moral failures of the participants. The question is whether this is an efficient response. The more likely underlying process is that we are seeing a system that exhibits significant externalities. That is, the cost of bloat is not directly borne by the those introducing it. Individual efforts to reduce bloat have little effect since there is always another bad actor out there to use up the resource and the improvements do not accrue to those making the investments. The final result is sub-optimal but there is no obvious path to improving things." Web pages/applications are probably even worse in this regard because I'm not sure users even conceptualize them as using resources on their local computers, so they don't get blamed for it (people seem to attribute resource usage only to the web browsers, not the sites themselves)