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?
Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.
If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.
They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.
Capitalism sucks!
continues purchasing crap
See! I told you!
But in tech, there’s often a lot of overlap in the high-end and crap…at least in terms of issues.
Expensive, high-end products can sometimes just be frustrating, or just lacking features that’d seem obvious.