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Technology is still a good thing. It's certain tech business models that are the problem. Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design

Technology is still a good thing. It's certain tech business models that are the problem. Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them." Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now. IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model. The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.

nerdyadventurer 2y ago
> IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model What is your alternative?
FridgeSeal 2y ago
Fully agree. A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.
acuozzo 2y ago
> free products to get people hooked This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement. That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Yes, I'm actually starting to agree with the stereotypical Gates view in those "Linux is communist jokes" of yore. Because as it turned out, F/OSS killed the ability to just sell software, taking the basic, honest business model of exchanging money for value. So now everyone finds increasingly more abusive ways to make money off their software, and some are even shameless enough to open-source the software itself and claim that makes them the good guys. (Of course the actual reason for open-sourcing of core products is to soil the entire market segment, preventing would-be competitors from selling a competing product.)
  - account42 2y ago
    FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. Bad for WinRAR maybe but not a problem at all for users. Linux never stopped MS and Apple from selling their OS. iOS and Android are paid for with the device purchase. What killed the ability to sell software is ads as well as the VC funded startup model where the first step is to acquire users and drive out competition at all costs. This essentially means giving things away for free only to extract value later. Thi doesn't have anything to do with FOSS but is just the free samples model taken to the extreme. FOSS is completely irrelevant to the viability commercial websites (or other services) but yet you see the same problems there - ads, dark patterns, attempts to lock in users so they can be fleeced.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. You're thinking end-user software, but that's not where the bulk of the now-dead software market would be. Think libraries. People used to, and in some specific applications still do, sell proprietary toolkits or component libraries. Also, a free solution doesn't need to be superior, or even equal to, a commercial ones, to kill the latter - it just needs to give an impression that it could do the same things as proprietary offering; companies are happy to give workers shitty software, or throw warm bodies at underfeatured libraries, if it looks like they can save on licensing costs of better proprietary tools. (There's a limit to that, which is why selling software is still somewhat possible in B2B context. Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned.)

nerdyadventurer 2y ago

> IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model What is your alternative?

FridgeSeal 2y ago

Fully agree. A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.

acuozzo 2y ago

> free products to get people hooked This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement. That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Yes, I'm actually starting to agree with the stereotypical Gates view in those "Linux is communist jokes" of yore. Because as it turned out, F/OSS killed the ability to just sell software, taking the basic, honest business model of exchanging money for value. So now everyone finds increasingly more abusive ways to make money off their software, and some are even shameless enough to open-source the software itself and claim that makes them the good guys. (Of course the actual reason for open-sourcing of core products is to soil the entire market segment, preventing would-be competitors from selling a competing product.)
- account42 2y ago
  FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. Bad for WinRAR maybe but not a problem at all for users. Linux never stopped MS and Apple from selling their OS. iOS and Android are paid for with the device purchase. What killed the ability to sell software is ads as well as the VC funded startup model where the first step is to acquire users and drive out competition at all costs. This essentially means giving things away for free only to extract value later. Thi doesn't have anything to do with FOSS but is just the free samples model taken to the extreme. FOSS is completely irrelevant to the viability commercial websites (or other services) but yet you see the same problems there - ads, dark patterns, attempts to lock in users so they can be fleeced.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. You're thinking end-user software, but that's not where the bulk of the now-dead software market would be. Think libraries. People used to, and in some specific applications still do, sell proprietary toolkits or component libraries. Also, a free solution doesn't need to be superior, or even equal to, a commercial ones, to kill the latter - it just needs to give an impression that it could do the same things as proprietary offering; companies are happy to give workers shitty software, or throw warm bodies at underfeatured libraries, if it looks like they can save on licensing costs of better proprietary tools. (There's a limit to that, which is why selling software is still somewhat possible in B2B context. Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned.)