Many of us complain about how much better things were in the good old days. And sometimes it’s even true, especially when it comes to products from big tech. With less competition, these near-monopolies know we have no alternatives. As a consequence, their services, apps, and other products are getting harder to use. It’s all by design.
As many of these companies grow and dominate, rather than deriving new revenue from attracting new customers, they look for new ways to squeeze more money from their existing customers. And that usually makes their products much worse and more frustrating to use.
As an example, Google search used to be the best search engine on the web. But Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019 made it much worse, injecting the search results with dozens of ads of different types, making it more difficult and time consuming to find what we were searching for. Raghavan is now known in tech circles as the guy that killed Google Search.
When you search for a product on Amazon by its brand name, you now need to wade through five or ten sponsored ads before you get to the product that you were looking for. Amazon now sells ad space on their site to third-party sellers and brands who bid for placements. These ads appear in search results and all over the product pages.
Email and messaging used to be an efficient way to communicate until everyone we did business with required us to register so they could then bombard us with spam mail and sell our names to data brokers who then sold them to hundreds of other companies. Remember when we’d carefully review each day’s email to be sure we didn’t miss something important that might have gone to spam? Now we have folders full of ads that we never even look at and rarely worry about a wayward email. And some email apps such as Outlook inject ads into your inbox. What used to be a simple, clean design, now requires us to clean up our email much more frequently.
Even a highly respected company such as Sonos was bitten by the lure of finding new revenue opportunities from their existing customers. They decided to revamp their app to make it subscribeable and able to generate recurring revenue. As a result they rolled out an app with fewer features and full of bugs that crashed sales, upset customers, and cost the CEO his job.
One cannot cover this subject without a mention of Facebook. What used to be a benign, useful way to connect with friends, has become re-engineered for clicks, engagement, and targeted advertising. No longer can we connect with our friends without having to wade through conspiracy theories, hateful posts, and tons of ads.
What about Apple? Apple is the one company that’s much more attuned to their customers’ positive experiences and they do make it easier than most to get our problems resolved. Yet, over the years their products often seem more complicated than they need be and they are slow to make improvements.
And let’s not forget apps. They are now filled with ad trackers, optional plug ins you can buy, and requirements that we give up our privacy to use their products. Then they bombard us with email, messages, and notifications, creating a wake of digital nuisance in their path.
One of the more astute columnists, Ed Zitron, has covered this area in depth, and is even more outraged:
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.