Asklemmy

43965 readers

1384 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

207

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

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Hammocks4All@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago

Most tech sucks because it's closed source. Closed source products are typically made with "the least amount of work done to sell for the most amount of buck". So standards are only sloppily and partially implemented (or sometimes purposefully badly or differently to ensure incompatibility), and bugs after sale won't be fixed because why would they? They already have your money. Middle managers will work hard to ensure more money goes to advertising and marketing than to actual development.

Then there is the embrace, expand, extinguish mentality (hello Microsoft!) to force customers to stay around their shitty products. Microsoft 365 and teams shit are perfect examples. The company I work at currently uses it and it's beyond garbage shit that is expensive as hell. Not an hour goes by without me being confronted by bad design, bugs, bugs, bugs, so many bugs... And it's all designed to ensure you stay in their little walled garden. I can't change this today, but I'm planning to be rid of it in about a year from now, fingers crossed.

In my experience, open source software is fucking awesome because people built it to actually build something awesome. Standards are implemented to the letter, bugs are fixed, and it all works and looks awesome.