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 technology products. But now with less competition, the big technology companies know we have fewer alternatives. As a result, their services, apps, and other products keep getting harder to use. It’s all by design.
Rather than deriving new revenue from attracting new customers, they look for new ways to squeeze more money from their existing users. And that usually makes their products worse and more frustrating to use.
Google search used to be the best search engine on the web. The results would show up neatly organized on a single page. But Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019 intentionally made it much worse, overlaying 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.
It’s the same with Amazon. When you search for a product by brand name, you now need to wade through five or ten sponsored ads before you get to the product that you were looking for. That’s because Amazon 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 apps 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 messages and then sell our contact information to data brokers who then rented them out to others.
Remember when we’d carefully review each day’s email to be sure we didn’t miss something important? Now we have folders full of ads that we never look at and rarely worry about a wayward email. Some email apps even place ads into your inbox. Email used to be simple, but now takes much more time and is less reliable.
Sonos, a company once beloved by its customers, was tempted by the lure of generating new revenue from their existing customers. They decided to revamp their app to make it subscribable and rushed it out with missing features and full of bugs. Sales cratered, customers panned the company, and the CEO lost 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 without having to wade through conspiracy theories, hateful posts, and tons of ads.
Apple is the one company that’s been much more attuned to their customers’ 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.
Apps once were simple to use programs with well understood functionality. Now they’re filled with ad trackers and optional plug ins to buy. Many require giving up our privacy so they can bombard us with email, messages, and notifications. Because the Internet runs on advertising revenue and on grabbing our attention at every turn, we’re being subjected to increasingly aggressive behavior that we can do little about.
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.
