Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.
It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
Is Apple Music any better?
YouTube has the same problem. It seems to insist on recommending the same 3 rabbit holes every time I visit the site. I know there’s more stuff out there I’d love that I’m not seeing, that I don’t think to search for. But I have no idea how to get YouTube to show me any of it.
Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.
I wish I could universally blacklist a song (at least for a couple of months), but that only works for entire artists. I've seen the exact same complaint for the exact same song on reddit, which makes me wonder if it has something to do with their program that lets artists jump ahead in the algorithm (https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...).
Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be able to carve out a pretty decent niche for them.
Sadly if they we're a public company their investors would probably be unhappy because they'd be sacrificing the all important "growth", but a private company might be able to get away with it.
It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".
And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.
When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.
I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test
I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.
So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.
I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.
The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.