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Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (9 children)

The difficulty of keeping something working scales exponentially as its complexity grows. Something of 1x complexity take 1y effort, but 2x complex is 10y effort, 3x complex is 100y, on and on.

Phones/computers/apps are at hilarious levels of complex now, and even 100k people running flat out can barely maintain the illusion that they "just work." Add enshittification heaping its intentionally garbage experience onto the unintentional garbage experience that is modern computing, and it's just gotten stupid.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 children)

Seriously. Millions of things have to go right for your consumer electronics or software experience work seemingly flawlessly. Think about the compounding probabilities of it. It’s a monument to human achievement that they work as well as they do.

[–] shalafi 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Been saying that about the internet for 30 years. It's a damned miracle it works at all and people whine and cry about every little hitch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Yes, people often want things that work. If there are good reasons why there is clunkiness, then, if these reasons are commonly understood, more people will be more patient. Knowledge is power. That’s the point of this entire thread.

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