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I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ > User is dead. User remains dead.

I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/ > User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our A/B-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent? Tasteless, but I felt, and still feel, like the notion of a user is truly lost. Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.

rjbwork 2y ago
>Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships. Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".
crabbone 2y ago
> Somehow? Oh no! Working with end-users is madness. It's tiring, exhausting, counterproductive. Users don't know what they want, and will demand the worst possible solution for them. They will resist and circumvent security measures in the program. They will make sure to use the program in an unintended way and then endlessly complain about it not working in the way it was never meant to work. The day I transitioned from B2C to B2B my emotional well-being improved tenfold. Now, on a more serious note: making an individual user facing product is more expensive. It's easier to pitch and sell the product to an organization managing multiple users because the organization will agree and compromise on many aspects of the product, and then will create internal organizational policy for its users to use the product only in permitted ways. It will make feedback and improvements requests expensive for the users and will serve both as the customer surveyor and as the first tier of the customer support for the software shop. It's a match made in heaven (and that's how Microsoft and the likes built their empire). There's nothing surprising about that.
- card_zero 2y ago
  See also: customers, and clients. Getting in the way, wanting things, causing chaos. Every business runs much more smoothly without them.

rjbwork 2y ago

>Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships. Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".

crabbone 2y ago

> Somehow? Oh no! Working with end-users is madness. It's tiring, exhausting, counterproductive. Users don't know what they want, and will demand the worst possible solution for them. They will resist and circumvent security measures in the program. They will make sure to use the program in an unintended way and then endlessly complain about it not working in the way it was never meant to work. The day I transitioned from B2C to B2B my emotional well-being improved tenfold. Now, on a more serious note: making an individual user facing product is more expensive. It's easier to pitch and sell the product to an organization managing multiple users because the organization will agree and compromise on many aspects of the product, and then will create internal organizational policy for its users to use the product only in permitted ways. It will make feedback and improvements requests expensive for the users and will serve both as the customer surveyor and as the first tier of the customer support for the software shop. It's a match made in heaven (and that's how Microsoft and the likes built their empire). There's nothing surprising about that.

card_zero 2y ago
See also: customers, and clients. Getting in the way, wanting things, causing chaos. Every business runs much more smoothly without them.