8 ms·

What could have been

• Glyptodon 1y ago
  More less you could say similar things about most of the crypto space too. I think maybe it's because we're at the point where a lot of things that tech can do, it's more than capable of doing, but they're just not easy to do out of a dorm room and without a lot of domain knowledge.
  • kjkjadksj 1y ago
    There is still so much one can build and do in a dorm room. The hardest part is still the hardest part in every business, which is getting sufficient money to get sufficient runway for things to be self sufficient.
• darig 1y ago
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• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  I disagree. The hype is wearing people down and making it think it's a waste of time but LLMs just came out a couple years back and even the trendline from the past decade (pre-LLMs) is up up up. The amount of interest to explore this opportunity is worth it. The bubble is worth it. I don't think it's lost years, and even if it is, the technology is compelling enough to make the gamble worth it. The fatigue of reading the same shit over and over again makes people forget that it's only a couple years. It also makes people forget how ground breaking and paradigm shifting this technology was. People are complaining about how stupid LLMs are when possibly just 5 years back no one could even predict that that such levels of intelligence in machinese was even possible.
  • jay_kyburz 1y ago
    I'm a massive AI skeptic, and I think the amount of money being spent is astonishing, but I really don't want to go back to searching the web the old way. Asking Gemini _is_ just much better at finding you the answers you need, _and_ providing links for you to verify that information. It will be a sad day when they start injecting ads, I really hope the foss alternatives catch up.
    • Yhippa 1y ago
      I still don't trust the non-determinism of current LLMs. I feel like I can't trust the results unless they are very simple ones.
      • ares623 1y ago
        Yeah. Everyone keeps comparing it to higher level languages. But higher level languages were deterministic and reliable, allowing users to offload the cognitive load of the lower levels to the computer. With LLMs you can’t fully offload the load, you need to keep a close eye on it which kind of defeats the purpose (IMO)
        • jay_kyburz 1y ago
          It's not really all that different from trusting some random post on stack overflow. You always needed to be a little skeptical. I'm asking the AI things that are easy to verify, and often ask it to provide web references. It's working well for me. I don't ask it about niche topics. I occasionally ask it about myself or my games and it's always funny. It's a good reminder how wrong the AIs can be.
  • chisleu 1y ago
    /agree We are in the infancy of LLM technology.
  • emp17344 1y ago
    Of course fairly quick progress was made - a truly astounding amount of money was poured into this industry in a short timeframe. The thing is, now it’s clear that AI isn’t really valuable enough to justify investment on the same scale anymore.
    • Yhippa 1y ago
      It feels like after people were still flush with cash at the end of the pandemic, reality hit and as people were profit taking from the market, LLMs seemed to emerge from the æther as the next best thing to glom on to. So now the hive mind dumped all their money into that and we are riding an incredible bubble. So cheap gaming hardware in the future (similar to when telecoms over invested in transcontinental undersea fiber-optic cables)? What's the hangover gonna look like after this? What's the next grift?
      • ares623 1y ago
        Quantum computing?
• lc9er 1y ago
  It’s not just the AI bubble. Think of all the public services, rights, and scientific and medical research being destroyed by rightwing extremists and their billionaire enablers. It will take years, decades perhaps, to undo the damage they’ve already done, in just over 6 months in power.
• simonw 1y ago
  This raises an interesting question. The amount of money that's been spent on AI related investments over the past 2-5 years really has been astonishing - like single digit percentage points of GDP astonishing. I think it's clear to at there are productivity boosts to be had from applying this technology to fields like programming. If you completely disagree with that statement I have a hunch that nothing could convince you otherwise at this point. But at what point could those productivity boosts offset the overall spend? (If we assume we don't get to some weird AGI that upturns all forms of economics.) Two points of comparison. Open source has been credibly estimated to have provided over 8 trillion dollars of value to the global economy over the past few decades: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 - could AI-assisted programming provide a similar boost over the next decade or so? The buildout of railways in the 1800s took resources comparable to the AI buildout of the past few years and lost a lot of investors a lot of money, but are regarded as a huge economic boost despite those losses.
  • nicoburns 1y ago
    Green energy, including generation, but also storage, transmission, ev chargers, smart grid technology, etc would be the obvious thing to invest in that I would expect to have a much higher payoff.
    • busterarm 1y ago
      Are they really? Is this one of those "just because people say so" beliefs? The countries adopting these the most are declining economies. It's places that are looking for something to do after there's no more oil left to drill up and export. You know where fossil fuel use is booming? Emerging (e.g., growing) economies. Future scarcity of such resources will only make them more valuable and more profitable. Yes, this is a dim view on the world, but until those alternatives are fundamentally more attractive than petrochemicals, these efforts will always be charity/subsidy. If you're expecting that to be the area of strong and safe returns on investment, I've got some dodgy property to sell you.
      • 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• epistasis 1y ago
  While I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view, there's another angle here too. The largesse of investment on a vague idea means that lots of other ideas get funding, incidentally. Every VC pitch is about some ground-breaking tech or unassailable moat that will be built around a massive SAM; in reality early traction is all about solving that annoying and stupid problem your customers hate doing but that you can do for them. The disconnect between the extraordinary pitch and the mundane shipped solution is the core of so much business. That same disconnect also means that a lot of real and good problems will be solved with money that was meant for AGI but ends up developing other, good technology. My biggest fear is that we are not investing in the basic, atoms-based tech that we need in the US to not be left behind in the cheap energy future: batteries, solar, and wind is being gutted right now due to chaotic government behavior, the actions of madmen that are incapable of understanding the economy today, much less where tech will take it in 5-10 years. We are also underinvesting in basics like housing, or construction tech. Hopefully some of the AI money goes to fixing those gaping holes in the country's capital allocation.
  • nicoburns 1y ago
    It would be much better if we invested in meaningful things directly. So much time and effort is being put into making things AI shaped for investors. The elephant in the room is that capital would likely be better directed if it was less concentrated.
    • signatoremo 1y ago
      If a million families each has a $1,000 to invest in new business, how would you envision the money to be invested collectively? what would be the process?
      • nicoburns 1y ago
        The money would distributed mostly as people purchasing things rather than as upfront investment (although it's far from unheard of for startup capital to come from people's local communities where those communities have the resources to enable this). It would be harder to start a business, but easier to maintain a sustainable business model built on actual demand.
• deleted 1y ago
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• wagwang 1y ago
  Yet another article that could can be losslessly translated to a single sentence.
  • anticorporate 1y ago
    That would be lossy translation... Perhaps not ironically, the careless distribution of incorrect information, combined with a dismissal of human endeavor, is such a perfect encapsulation of why so many people absolutely despise everything surrounding LLM hype.
• busterarm 1y ago
  ZIRP->AI/enshitification is the one-two punch combo that I think is going to devastate our economy for 50 years or more. We have an entire generation of executives, financiers and government that have only ever operated in an era of free money. They've never had to generate a real return, create a product of real value, etc. This wave-of/gamble-on AI slop just shows that they don't even know what value looks like. We've operated for ~40 years on a promise of...something.
• ipsin 1y ago
  I wonder about the world where, instead of investing in AI, everyone invested in API. Like, surfacing APIs, fostering interoperability... I don't want an AI agent, but I might be interested in an agent operating with fixed rules, and with a limited set of capabilities. Instead we're trying to train systems to move a mouse in a browser and praying it doesn't accidentally send 60 pairs of shoes to a random address in Topeka.
  • 1oooqooq 1y ago
    the appeal of investors to AI is anti API/access.
  • simonw 1y ago
    LLMs offer the single biggest advance in interoperability I've ever seen. We don't need to figure out the one true perfect design for standardized APIs for a given domain any more. Instead, we need to build APIs with just enough documentation (and/or one or two illustrative examples) that an LLM can help spit out the glue code needed to hook them together.
    • eastbound 1y ago
      Today I’ve compiled a few thousand classes of Javadocs in .978 second. I was so impressed, with a build over 2 minutes, each byte of code we write takes a second to execute, computing is actually lightening fast, just now when it’s awfully written. Time of executing bytecode << REST APIs << launching a full JVM for each file you want to compile << launching an LLM to call an API (each << is above x10).
      • kylemaxwell 1y ago
        The point is that you call the LLM to generate the code that lets you talk to the API, rather than writing that glue code yourself. Not that you call the LLM to talk to that API every time.
        • simonw 1y ago
• GaggiX 1y ago
  >"while delivering absolutely nothing of value" Well maybe for you and not the millions of people that use this technology daily.
  • gavmor 1y ago
    Unlike "value demand," which is genuine demand arising from customer needs, failure demand is demand caused by failures such as errors, defects, inefficiencies, or poor service delivery. For example, if a service does not fulfill a customer's need properly, the customer must come back, creating more demand that is essentially avoidable. Failure demand leads to inefficiency, additional costs, and deteriorated customer and employee experiences.
    • GaggiX 1y ago
      So you're implying that ChatGPT and similar are so popular because of "errors, defects, inefficiencies, or poor service delivery", how does this make any sense in the context?
• user3939382 1y ago
  I've been watching this my whole life. UML, SOA, Mongo, cloud, blockchain, now LLMs, probably 10 others in between. When tools are new there's a collective mania between VCs, execs, and engineers that this tool unlike literally every other one doesn't have trade offs that make it only an appropriate choice in some situations. Sometimes the trade offs aren't discoverable in the nascent stage, a lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do which is the case even today with React and cloud as default IMHO. LLMs are great but they're just a tool.
  • justonceokay 1y ago
    Wait until the kids find out about LAMP
  • wnc3141 1y ago
    you forgot IoT
    • Gigachad 1y ago
      IoT wasn't exactly a waste of money. If anything, the problem was that companies didn't spend enough doing it properly or securely. People genuinely do want their security cameras online with an app they can view away from home. It just needs to be done securely and privately.
      • _carbyau_ 1y ago
        I want a Wireguard-like solution - preferably with an open source Home Assistant plugin - rather than yet-another-subscriber-lockin-on-company-servers. Investors want otherwise.
        • genewitch 1y ago
          synology has surveillance station, synology supports wireguard (tailscale, too), there's ios and android surveillance station apps. The software that the synology uses on the backend is open source, so you could set this all up with proxmox or a debian server or something, too. you need to ensure your cameras support either direct access inside the network, or onvif or something like that. IDK, i don't use it anymore, but i did for a good long while, with wifi and wired IP cameras. My synology had a "license" for 12 cameras, but lightning took it out (something about a bunch of ethernet cables in trees), and my new synology doesn't have enough licenses to bother with. anyhow, just thought you should know - "software" "NVR" is available, and has been for over a decade.
• jh00ker 1y ago
  >What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better? I think we'd still be talking about Web 3.0 DeFi.
• varelse 1y ago
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• gmuslera 1y ago
  What could have been if instead of crypto trillions were invested in something actually useful? What about the housing bubble of which we learned nothing as we are falling into it again? There is a lot of stinky garbage in AI, but at least you can rescue some value from it, in fact it could be most of the activity out there, but you only notice what stinks.
• wavemode 1y ago
  > What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better? This is a bit like the question "what if we spent our time developing technology to help people rather than developing weapons for war?" The answer is that, the only reason you were able to get so many people working on the same thing at once, was because of the pressing need at hand (that "need" could be real or merely perceived). Without that, everyone would have their own various ideas about what projects are the best use of their time, and would be progressing in much smaller steps in a bunch of different directions. To put it another way - instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later.
  • stavros 1y ago
    > But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later. Yes, but they'd have homes. Who's to say if a massive monument is better than ten thousand happy families?
    • wavemode 1y ago
      > Who's to say if a massive monument is better than ten thousand happy families? It's not. The pyramids have never been of any use to anyone (except as a tourist attraction). I'm referring merely to the magnitude of the project, not to whether it was good for mankind.
  • bji9jhff 1y ago
    > instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later. They would have been better off. Those pyramids are epitomes of white elephants.
    • nine_k 1y ago
      Consider the income from tourists coming to see the pyramids. People traveled to Giza for this purpose for millennia, too. This was not the original intent of the construction though.
• androng 1y ago
  the recent stackoverflow survey said that only 25% of developers are actually happy at work https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#job-satisfaction-job-sat https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#job-satisfaction-j... . Gallup said its only 33% of employees are engaged in the economy in general. Not everyone gets to go to conferences and network for Godot game engine like the author, most are doing super repetitive jobs. I definitely want an AI to automate as many as possible ASAP
• Toby1VC 1y ago
  A lot of how I use AI is to assist me to build the software manually. I focus 1 function and ask it to fix or implement it. That's a good way to use AI. But if you mean using AI to improve existing systems, I also think that's being a done a lot. For instance, you know Krita the KDE drawing program? They naturally added a way to prompt image generation, based on your initial doodles, which makes a lot of sense.
• garbanz0 1y ago
  is more maintenance work on old software really the highest aspiration of the tech industry?
  • layer8 1y ago
    What's the alternative? Churning out new software for the same use cases until Kingdom come because maintaining and improving older software is somehow icky?
    • genewitch 1y ago
      Let's make a startup that is just to do PR on long-standing ignored issues that really would fix things. It would be philanthropy (not-for-profit), but i imagine if you get a few big names behind it (some around here, some not), you could probably have a fair group of developers, translators, UI experts, API experts, hardware bug experts, etc. Like a Think Tank that outputs bugfixes and incremental improvements to software. The sort that reduce electricity usage - you could get some government funding out of that, i bet. How much did Britain pay for those "delete old emails to save water" marketeering? I guess the downside is meta, google, microsoft, et al will benefit the most, but whatever. Also someone the other day mentioned something like this, where users could subscribe for $50 to pursue legal avenues - sorry i don't have the link, but: > What we actually need is a Consumer Protection Alliance that is made by and funded by people who want protection from this and are willing to pay for the lawyers needed to run all of the cases and bring these cases before a judge over and over and over again until they win. > This would mean people like you and me and a million others of us paying $20-$50/month out of pocket to hire people to sue companies that do this [...]
• janalsncm 1y ago
  Maybe the epitome of shoving AI into everything is Gemini showing up in my Gmail to help me write (which I do not need) but their spam filters still allowing obvious phishing emails through. I understand organizationally how this happens, and the incentives that build such a monstrosity but it’s still objectively a shame.
• stavros 1y ago
  More than anything, I want to get back the era when the users were the customers, not the product.
  • yodon 1y ago
    Very few people are willing to pay cash for the things that they currently pay for in attention and data.
    • MisterMower 1y ago
      That equilibrium is changing as more people discover the high costs of paying in attention.
• pixl97 1y ago
  >There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal computers. It continues to today. GenAI has almost nothing to do with it.
  • dougdonohoe 1y ago
    The point is that money that is going into GenAI or adding GenAI-related features to software should be going to fix existing broken software.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      Then you missed the point of my post. That money never did. It went back into the hands of the investors, the investors that are now putting money into genAI.
  • hoytie 1y ago
    I think the point the author is trying to make is that there are many problems in plain sight we could be spending our efforts on, and instead we are chasing illusory profits by putting so many resources into developing AI features. AI is not the source of the issues, but rather a distraction of great magnitude.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    > Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way All software is this way. The only way something gets fixed is if someone decides it's a priority to fix it over all the other things they could be doing. Plenty of open source project have tons of issues. In both commercial and open source software they don't get fixed because the stack of things to do is larger than the amount of time there is to do them.
    • IcyWindows 1y ago
• Uehreka 1y ago
  This is another genre of AI article that annoys me: The one where the author starts by agreeing with you that AI is a definitely a bubble, and we’re gonna just “know” that for the rest of the article, no argument necessary. I don’t feel like this article is trying to start a conversation, it wants to end the conversation so we can have dessert (aka, catastrophizing about the outcome of the thing “we know” is bad).
  • miltonlost 1y ago
    The basic assumption of the article is that there is a bubble. You want an entirely different article then about whether there is a bubble. You just don't like the conversation it's starting because you also disagree with its base assumption.
    • Uehreka 1y ago
      > You just don't like the conversation it's starting because you also disagree with its base assumption. Yes! That’s correct!
• idopmstuff 1y ago
  > What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better? The implied answer to this question really just misunderstands the tradeoffs of the world. We had plenty of money and effort going into our technology before AI, and we got... B2B SaaS, mostly. I don't disagree that the world would be better off if all of the money going into so many things (SaaS, crypto, social media, AI, etc.) was better allocated to things that made the world better, but in order for that to happen, we would have to be in a very different system of resource allocation than capitalism. The issue there is that capitalism has been absolutely core to the many, many advances in technology that have been hugely beneficial to society, and you if you want to allocate resources differently than the way capitalism does, you lose all of those benefits and probably end up worse off as a result (see the many failures of communism). > So I ask: Why is adding AI the priority here? What could have been if the investment went into making these apps better? > I’m not naive. What motivates people to include AI everywhere is the promise of profit. What motivates most AI startups or initiatives is just that. A promise. I would honestly call this more arrogant than naive. Doesn't sound like OP has worked at any of the companies that make these apps, but he feels comfortable coming in here and presuming to know why they haven't spent their resources working on the things he thinks are most important. He's saying that they're not fixing issues with core functionality but instead implementing AI because they want to make profit, but generally the sorts of very severe issues with core functionality that he's describing are pretty damaging to the revenue prospects of a company. I don't know if those issues are much less severe than he's describing or if there's something else going on with prioritization. I don't know if the whole AI implementation was competitive with fixing those - maybe it was just an intern given a project, and that's why it sucks. I have no idea why they've prioritized the things they have, and neither does the author. But just deciding that they're not fixing the right things because they implemented an AI feature that he doesn't like is not a particularly valid leap of logic. > Tech executives are robbing every investor blind. They are not. Again, guy with a blog here is deciding that he knows more than the investors about the things they're investing in. Come on. The investors want AI! Whether that's right or wrong, it's ridiculous to suggest they're being robbed blind. > Unfortunately, people making decisions (if there are any) only chase ghosts and short term profits. They don’t think that they are crippling their companies and dooming their long term profitability. If there are any? Again, come on. And chasing short term profits? That is obviously and demonstrably incorrect - in the short term, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and everybody else is losing money on AI. In the long term, I'm going to trust that Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, whether you like them or hate them, have a whole lot better idea of whether or not they're going to be profitable in the long term than the author. This reads like somebody who's mad that the things he wants to be funded aren't being funded and is blaming it on the big technology of the day then trying to back into a justification for that blame.
• joegibbs 1y ago
  You could have a society where there's one single spreadsheet package made by a team of 20 people, a few operating systems, a new set of 50 video games every year (with graphics that are good enough but nothing groundbreaking so they'll run on old hardware) created according to quota by state-run enterprises, Soviet style. This would be very efficient in avoiding duplication, the entire industry would probably only need a few thousand developers. It would also save material resources and energy. But I think that even if the software these companies produced was entirely reliable and bug-free it it would still be massively outcompeted by the flashy trend-chasing free-market companies which produce a ton of duplicated outputs (Monday.com, Trello, Notion, Asana, Basecamp - all these do basically the same thing). It's the same with AI, or any other trend like tablets, the internet, smartphones - people wanted these and companies put their money into jumping aboard. If ChatGPT really was entirely useless and had <10,000 users then it would be business as usual - but execs can see how massive the demand is. Of course plenty are going to mess it up and probably go broke, but sometimes jumping on trends is the right move if you want a sustainable business in the future. Sears and Blockbuster could've perfected their traditional business models and customer experience without getting on the internet, and they would have still gone broke as customers moved there.
• sublinear 1y ago
  > organizations such as Blender, Godot, or Ladybird and... So you want an open source project to really succeed? It's not money, but real passion for the work. Write better documentation (with realistic examples!) and fix the critical bugs users have been screaming about since over a decade ago. Sure fine pay a few people real wages to work on it full time, but that level of funding has to deliver something more than barely documented functionality.
  • ares623 1y ago
    > It's not money, but real passion for the work. Yeah, nah... passion only sustains a person for 3 days max before they expire. My theory is that open source boomed in the last few decades because developers had enough income and free time from their day jobs to moonlight as contributors. With the gravy train ending, I suspect open source will suffer greatly. Maybe LLMs can cover what was lost, or maybe corporations will pay their engineers to contribute directly (even more so than what they do now), but there will definitely be some losses here.
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  Greenfield development is infinitely easier than brownfield. It's damn hard work to dig in, uncover what's wrong, and fix something broken - especially if someone's workflow depends on the breakage. Flashy AI features get attention and even if they piss you off, they make you believe the thing is fresh. Sorry but you're human.
• nine_k 1y ago
  Humans are fundamentally irrational. Not devoid of rationality, but not limited by it. Many social phenomena are downstream from that fact. Humans have fashions. If something is considered cool, many people start doing that thing, because it automatically gives them a bit of appreciation from most other people. It is often rational to follow a fashion and reap the social benefits it brings. People are bad at estimating probabilities. They heavily discount the future, and want everything now, hence FOMO. At the same time, they tend to believe in glowing future prospects uncritically, because it helps build social cohesion and power structures. This is why fads periodically flush all over our industry, and our society, and the whole civilization. And again, it becomes rational to follow the trend and ride the wave. Say the magic word (OOP, XML, Agile, Social, Mobile, Cloud, SaaS, ML, more to come), and it becomes easier to get a job, press coverage, conference invites, investments. Then the bubble deflates, the useful parts remain (often quite a bit), the fascination, hype, attention, and FOMO find a new worthy object. So companies add "AI features" partly because it's cool (news coverage, promotions), partly because of the FOMO (uncertainty is high, but what if we'd be missing a billion-dollar opportunity?), partly because of social cohesion (following fashion is natural, being a contrarian may be respectable, but looking ignorant is unacceptable). It's not about carefully calculated material returns on a a carefully measured investment. It may look inane, but it's not always stupidity, much like sacrificing some far-future perspectives in exchange of stock growing this quarter is not about stupidity.
• aidenn0 1y ago
  TFA kind of assumes that the companies involved would have improved their software in a world in which those resources weren't spent on AI. Since much software contained long-unfixed bugs well before the GenAI boom, I'm not convinced.
• zoeey 1y ago
  I've been using an app recently that added a bunch of AI features, but the basic search is still slow and often doesn't work. Every time I open it, I kind of brace myself, but it still disappoints me. It feels like more and more products are focused on looking impressive, when all I really want is for the everyday features to just work well.
• DoctorOetker 1y ago
  The author doesn't seem to appreciate that investors aren't incompetent, but malicious. Investing 100 years of open-source Blender does not give them any fraction of monopoly. Even if scientists present 100's of proposals for computation (optical, semiconductor,...) they will specifically invest in technologies that are hard to decentralize: growing monocrystalline ingots, reliant on dangerous chemicals, ... if there is no money in easily decentralizable processor manufacture, then it could easily be duplicated then proposals to pursue it would basically be equivalent to begging investors to become philantropists. Quite a naive position. It's in the interest of the group to have quality software, manufacturing technologies, ... so the onus is on representatives of the group of taxpayers to invest in areas investors would prefer to see no investment in (even if someone else invests it). Perhaps those "representatives" are inept or malicious or both. There is real value being created by creating interactive summaries of the human corpus. While it is taking time to unlock the value, it will definitely come.
• Nevermark 1y ago
  Let's see. 1. Unwanted but coercive upgrades. 2. Delivering genuinely upgraded complexity and incoherence, under the cloak of new feature theatre. 3. In a context where customers just wish they could keep using what they have already paid for. Without paying again. 4. But they have to, because of artificially introduced cross-user new-version incompatibilities and strategically scheduled bit rot. 5. All so a company can keep extracting money from people it is no longer actually serving. This is very similar to enshittification. Customers invest (time, money, data), in something they love. Their common investment has been transmogrified into a dairy, er, prison. And now they are all milked by all the dark patterns and milk pumps their supplier/master can insert between the users and water, users and grass, users and the midden, er, I mean into every remaining useful part of the service. While they shamelessly and unconvincingly claim to still be their hope, light and beloved benefactor. Encrapification? No... Fucked-up-grades? Choose which ever silla-bic em-fassis you prefer. (Sorry for the saucy stout boldness, to you of youth and gentle heart. But the point of crass terms is to not let targets off the verbial hook, with a weak or cute euphemism.) Quickbooks, anyone? The list is long.
  • Nevermark 1y ago
    Brevity for the win ——> "Fuckup-grades".
• AuthAuth 1y ago
  Hopefully users can start banding together and paying for the features they want directly instead of having all the income be funneled from ads.