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Comment by andrew_eit | Hacker News Reader

Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".

Whatever product it is, whether a social media platform or an online learning platform, it will slowly be zombified into an attention sucking machine, whose goal has now become to keep you interacting with the app as much as possible (using ML and DL of course).

I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?), Udemy now has a notification service and an inbox that fills up with automated messages that are just a "welcome to the course" message. Everywhere I look, the pattern is the same, Product is good > Product adds social features > Product attempts to cluster user activity and make recommendations based on social features.

We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.

I'm deeply worried about the long-term effects of an industry that is booming by sending sending some of our brightest minds to scale the economy of distractions Or to innovate Ad-tech.

I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age. Where smog factories were built in the middle of cities and dusty kids were shovelling coal. We lack any sort of foresight wrt. the digital economy we're building. Maybe one day we'll find a healthy alternative to make software-products users love.

But until then, seldom are the days where I do not look at the internet with such savage despair.

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We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

In that light, I think the chance of a product being allowed to sit and fulfill it's purpose gracefully, at least for services that are major moneymakers, is essentially nil.

Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company. At least, that is, until some large public company sees a way they can "improve" on that model and either buys them up or uses their size to bully them out of market (it's not really free market competition to use billions of VC money to undercut competitors until they fold and you have all of the market).

It's all horribly broken.

Yeah, this is the root problem. If you want to break from mandatory upgrades (this includes "cloud" stuff, where you have even less control over software), you need vendors that aren't forced to invent reasons to build them by their operational structure.

This is a "Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" situation.

Not unrelatedly, I strongly support Debian and think everyone else should, too. Software in the Public Interest (https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.

Just FYI. The app that I’ve been working on is designed for a “comfortable stasis.” It may take some time to get there, but I have no interest in metrics-driven growth, or appropriation of people’s PII.

We are likely to introduce changes, over time; but these will all be completely focused on Serving our users’ needs more effectively.

Kind of refreshing. I’m working for a 501(c)(3), and we don’t need to show “growth”; just Serve our community.

Nice! Here's to hoping it's successful and provides benefit to people, and doesn't trigger some startup founder to think they can "monetize all that potential you're leaving on the table" or some such.

I say that jokingly, but honestly, a non/not for profit is probably an really good way to structure some of these things to do an end run around both the market and people's expectations, so I sincerely wish you the best in whatever your endeavor is (and you can consider this me politely asking what it is, so you don't have to feel like you are injecting it into the conversation). :)

I am not at liberty to discuss it, at the moment. Even when it ships, it probably won’t be mentioned here, as it Serves a very specific demographic, and probably won’t be of interest to most folks.

You can always contact me (via my Web sites), and I could talk about it a bit more.

> We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

> Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.

I'm probably just naive or missing something obvious, but fundamentally it doesn't seem obvious to me _why_ public companies should be treated differently as investments. Ostensibly the original reason stocks had value is that when companies were making money, they'd pay dividends, but like you said, this isn't really the mentality anymore. The stock is worth something because someday if the company makes more money, someone will buy it for more money than you paid...but why? So they can sell it when the company is making even more money later? It seems like if companies don't end up eventually paying dividends at some point, there's no reason why the price of the stock should be related to the amount of money the company makes. The only other thing that shares really do is give very limited voting rights, but this seems like it's not remotely worth enough per share given how much you'd need to have to even begin to influence board elections, which in itself is a very indirect way of influencing the company.

Some owners of private companies don't see the goal of the company as profit maximization - eg SpaceX.

With a public company there's always going to be a shareholder to sue you for not maximizing profit.

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...

SpaceX is somewhat expected to produce profit at some point, else it would have been registered as a non-profit

SpaceX definitely wants to make a profit. I don't think building a city on Mars is profit maximization though and this is Elon's explicit reason for not taking SpaceX public.

> According to the company, the short-term demands of shareholders conflict with his long-term ambitions.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121515/will-el...

It’s not a very satisfying answer but personally I believe that there is no material thing linking the price of a stock to the amount of money the company makes. The only thing that drives the price of a stock is whether people think that other people will want to buy the stock for more later. This kind of implies that the whole stock market is a bit of a sham. Which I think is also true. I think the stock market essentially operates as a semi-perpetual Ponzi scheme. It does suck to come to the conclusion that one of the most central systems in world finance is not based on any fundamentals, but the good news is that in no way does that mean the system is unstable in the short to medium term. Nearly the whole world, and almost everyone in power anywhere in the world is pretty heavily invested in the stock market Ponzi scheme continuing to “work”. So it probably will for quite a long time.

I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. If this were true, an investor like Warren Buffett, who has always invested by focusing on the fundamentals of the company he is investing in and focusing on real performance/value metrics, would not be able to be as consistently successful as he has been.

It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it's impossible for me to parse out the self-reinforcing effect of "price goes up because Buffett has taken a large stake" versus the sort of fundamentals I'm referring to.

edit : Having said that, I do believe there is a class of people who are able to make money off of the stock market in a way totally unrelated to the reality of the underlying instruments - profiting on churn, market-making, small percentages on massive positions, etc. But I don't think that means the underlying instruments are actually worthless/not tied to real value.

laws of nature always win at the end of the day. fundamentals are important, so long can a software saas company make money by selling software to other vc funded saas companies.

at one point the free money being thrown around then spent on saas, cloud and marketing with fb / google will be pulled back. and then we will see who's naked. it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it will happen.

hence buying a piece of a sound business like buffet does, will win at the end of the day. it's not glamorous but it will win.

IMO fundamentals win long term, but I also think that company being hyped is often a self-fulfilling prophecy: they suddenly get crazy amounts of capital for free when they stock is high which they can use to for securing loans, transactions, salaries etc. to grow bigger and faster.

It's pessimistic of me, but I suspect that once the current crop of tech is no longer appealing for large investments some other sector will be found for the long term pump and dump.

The method of Buffet/BH obviously works, but it also seems like it requires a lol it knowledge and skill and patience, otherwise it would be much more popular. Rolling a new mark (or the same marks with a game with a new name) is much easier and reliable for those with less skill.

Beside dividends there are also buybacks.

» Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.

I don't know if anyone has any chance if Stack Exchange can't stay independent. Like the product was arguably "done" years ago if you ignore monetization.

» As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (AEX:PRX) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-...

» Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

» This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...

> This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent.

Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these are actually as oblivious as they sound or is they're self aware enough to now be using this verbage to actually be messaging the exact opposite, given how many times this has been written and shown to be false, no matter how much people want it not to be.

Does anyone actually believe that SO isn't beholden to the owning entity, and that no control will be exerted?

Almost every takeover starts with this lie. I can't imagine anyone actually falls for it, it's just repeated by marketing types because it sounds good.

Or, as per NNT, Big Companies just seem to want to die.

The only thing that doesn't stop growing, is cancer.

The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society

All due to capitalism really. If you remove capitalism, growth really becomes irrelevant.

Edited: Downvoted without a comment, why?

Unregulated capitalism you mean.

Removing capitalism doesn't have a great track record. Maybe the problem is more fundamental than capitalism.

Socialist economies need growth or else all your citizens start leaving and you have to build a wall. That and it's cruel to not let their economy grow when everyone started out in poverty. China is obsessed with economic growth.

Hardly any economic motivations are removed by getting rid of shareholder capitalism; you still have markets, a growing population, and you still need productivity to increase.

Oh, and eliminating growth would destroy the environment because 1. environmentalism is a luxury good 2. low-productivity technologies consume much more resources than modern ones do.

I agree. However, the type of growth you're addressing here is different from the growth in social media companies. The growth in ad-tech based companies are by nature very artificial when put in economic terms. One can easily argue that these companies provide value by enhancing the reach and personalization of your marketing activities which results in increased sales and brand exposure. But at the very end of the day, how is an ever increasing of consumer spending GDP going to solve real life and death issues? Growth becomes relevant because capitalism is very focused on generating profit, you can either increase revenue or reduce cost, which one is easier? Increase revenue which then leads to, "let's get more users".

Probably because it was a generic ideological comment, pointing further in the direction of generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke more than one of them here—I'm sure unintentionally.

Makes sense. Thanks for the heads up.

It stops when it has killed its host.

Not voluntarily.

Please don't post generic ideological comments or flamebait to HN. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I mean, technically you can write the goals of the company into its charter as whatever you want. It doesn't need to be money/growth/etc. And you could, technically, find investors who will back that goal with their money. And you could, provided you jump through the relevant hoops, take that company public. I'm not sure what restrictions exist on the markets, but I don't think there's anything technically stopping someone from creating a non-profit-oriented public company.

Totally agree with your comment about the cancerous need for growth. If a company is not growing, immediately it's seen as if something is wrong with it.

> only one thing. Growth.

It's engrained in the money system (money as debt) but I guess the cause stems deeper from human nature.

As nomads, keeping things was near impossible, so aquiring was a permanent necessity. (And pollution no issue btw)

That's what we were for 300k years, and isn't easily changed with a few compliance rules.

What we need is balancing rules, that take the anthropologic reality into account. Not personal wealth maximisation.

If you have good product-market fit, then “shrinking” is growth. By “shrinking” I mean automating more, becoming more efficient, streamlining. Pay off excess staff in shares and free them up (and yourself) to work on something else.

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete'

Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migration from FB -> IG -> Snapchat -> back to IG -> TikTok, the core concept behind the "best" product is always changing. That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.

Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in.

>That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.

Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.

> shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades.

I'm not so sure about that... https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...

Balenciaga and Vetements seem to produce around "what will make bloggers confused"

See: $4k sleeping bag coat https://modesens.com/product/vetements-black-and-green-vagab...

I feel both enriched, and yet diminished, by clicking on that.

I think you’re making the GP’s point. No one cares about how much engagement with their pants they are getting.

They care that the whole experience delivers them what they value: fit, trendiness, status, consistency of the experience and the product, etc.

They care about innovation only when it reliability delivers an obvious gain on any of those stats, or when the market has moved to the point where keeping up with trendiness demands it.

So many brands are “premier” because they know all of this and just relentlessly deliver that familiar experience, maintaining their market position.

Software hasn’t quite, as an industry, figured out that sweet spot of innovation and consistency to be truly lasting. We’re too familiar with disruption - which is true, by and large, and sets us apart. Except once a category is defined enough not to need it. No one’s really disrupted email, despite many attempts, because it’s too ubiquitous and the consistency of experience demands are too great. It’ll happen eventually, but only as a long term evolution of overall trends and underpinning standards. Like the move away from breeches and onto pants.

But what is shipping seemingly random features (stories, igtv, shopping, reels, etc) if not trying to increase/maintain trendiness?

Right - if you stand still then you’re going to lose users to whatever the next cool thing is.

So you have two options. One is to keep iterating on features. Two is to increase stickiness, of which the easiest way is by locking people into a social network.

> Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in.

It's not that hard. Plenty of A/B testing is done along the way, and yet useless clutter still ships. Why? Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression, partly because everyone needs shipped product at the end-of-year review to justify bonusses/raises/promotions, partly because there are 100+ individual teams working on the product and they all think their feature will benefit users more than the next one... a multitude of localised decisions will necessarily gradually erode the product experience as a whole.

You see this most starkly in fairly decentralised companies like FB, Google, or Valve, less so in companies with centralised command-and-control over product experience (Apple, Amazon's device org, etc). But even centralised command-and-control can only hold this is check for so long at massive scale. Amazon's larger and less focused divisions, post-Jobs Apple... all on the slippery slope

> Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression

That is true, but again I think it's more complicated than that. AB tests are good for measuring incremental changes, but really bad at predicting the impact of 0 to 1 type products / features, because so much of the success or failure depends on public perception and network effects. Twitter couldn't AB test "Fleets" and have any confidence as to what the product adoption would look like. So companies have no choice but to launch and see.

This is putting a lot of undue blame on product managers who only have so much autonomy in a business regime set up for perpetual "growth" that is necessarily quantifiable and ultimately aimed towards economic growth. Constant growth is the underlying objective for any investment-driven software business (pretty much any of the businesses regularly talked about on this site, and certainly ones supported by this site's operators). "Making a great product for the customer" is necessarily secondary to investors getting a return.

But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...

Another good example is Craigslist. I always wonder about how great it would be to work there.

We're hiring. :-)

https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring

> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".

"Free" platforms are a dead-end, and will inevitably be ruined by the irrational demand for infinite growth.

The future is decentralization* and open protocols/standards. Anything controlled by a single company is bound to turn into a growth/engagement zombie.

*Real decentralization, no blockchain bullshit.

Even products that don't have a mandate to become attention-sucking get ruined eventually. Developers gotta develop---so once the product is pretty much done, it becomes a feature-cram-fest to try to bolt-on every crazy thing they can think of, including the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, long-standing bugs go unaddressed, security issues crop up, quality drops, and long-time users feel more and more alienated. I've seen this pattern repeat at pretty much every commercial application job I've ever had. Nobody has any concept of a product being finished. Nobody knows what maintenance mode is. It's just "Keep developing!" forever until the product doesn't even do its core function anymore.

yeah you don't just fire the PM's, gotta fire most of the devs as well; promotion driven development is the underlying theme. Just keep a group around for ops, scaling, and bug fixes. Maybe this kind of role is a 3 or 4 day a week job and becomes acceptable in a world that aligns with OP's vision.

I once heard it said that developers are like beavers - they just instinctively keep cutting down trees and building dams. Seems accurate based on my experience.

I make a small LOB type software, user request driven feature development still happens. There is a balance, fixing bugs and actual features in one zone and top-down attention drivers in another zone

I have always been baffled at how software companies start with few developpers who have this insane challenge: build an app from nothing, get traction, conquer the world. Then the company starts hiring like crazy and engineers pile on. However, it seems like the challenge is becoming less big: you should only have to maintain the code and deliver features your users ask for.

To me, it seems like the team size should actually follow more this trend:

Early: small | Growth: big | Mature: medium

As an anecdote, I just downloaded Windows 11 and it truly feels like a product invented to keep designers and engineers busy. It has a nicer UI, yes, but was it really worth the investment compared to Win 10? Probably not.

Freaking Sendgrid! Sendgrid, which I hardly use starting sending those engagement begging emails, under the guise of status reports (for me, zero messages for the last six weeks) and they started showing up daily! Now they are big and bought by Twilio be prepared for Product Optimisation via OKR (or POO)

Reminded me to close that account and finish the transition to Postmark.

>We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.

This is impossible for other reasons. When you are feature-developing a product, you will hire tons of employees, and then what do you with them when you are done with the feature development? Fire them? Lay off? When has that ever happened? Bugfixing, even if complicated takes less people than peak scale high growth development and nobody wants to maintain old cruft or refactor anyway. (cough HR cough). I'm willing to bet no company has ever downsized after feature development finished, they either go insolvent after they bolt on the kitchen sink or become IBM.

The real solution seems to be hiring a good, but sustainable sized team that you can maintain perpetually, but that never happens because your competitors will outgrow you if you do that. (Especially salespeople) We don't live in an economy of rational growth, because you'd be living on the streets if you tried to do that.

(Also remember if I'm not wrong GM makes most of its money from financing, it's not a problem unique to the computer software/hardware industry)

The fundamental issue at hand (something you neglected to mention), most of these platforms twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube are free! Now what does free entail, you being the product and thus it will always spiral down to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Basically you are getting a product that is too good for free. Someone has to bear the brunt of that cost and that person must be eventually rewarded otherwise there is no incentive to do so. So in reality the only way to solve this is a change in the users mentality of always jumping to free then crying foul about it when they end up the product. So the real problem(your problem) here is the user's mentality. You are basically just complaining about human nature from the users to the developers of said platforms.

spotify isn't free, I pay for premium. but they're hellbent on destroying user experience. finding albums is now difficult than it used to be. it auto-plays on web, all of a sudden. the web app is now more buggy than before.

end of day, it's all the same shit.

Just today I went back on Facebook and it showed I have a message. So click on the link and no message. It was just Facebook saying “are you going to reply back” to a person I spoke to on marketplace. The thing was we already talked. I messaged him and he messaged me back and gave me his phone number. Our business was done but Facebook wants to put a fake “you have a message” notification to trigger some sort of dopamine hit or something. But instead it just pisses me off. I will talk to the people I want to talk to I don’t need a reminder to finish my conversation. Or the notifications about some obscure post someone I hardly know likes. So desperate to have me engage but I already engage plenty. I mostly use Facebook for marketplace now.

This process is similar to the old software bloat/ bloatware for applications

it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies

The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term but ultimately kill engagement. You can trick my sleepy self to stay up scrolling through ads for a while, but I can tell what’s going on. Afterwards I feel bad, and your app becomes something I am conscious of being bad for me. I try to cut back and will probably quit entirely except for a few specific uses with careful safeguards around them.

I never look at the news feed on facebook. About the only thing I use it for is specific groups that exist for a reason, like trading bike parts or finding apartments. FB lost its entertainment appeal years ago, other than occasionally ironically enjoying a boomer meme.

> The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term

That's when the promos happen and the bonuses are paid out.

> but ultimately kill engagement.

Too late. The PM's already jumped ship to the next gig.

Yep, the real root cause of the rot is that the people making the decisions no longer have the long term trajectory of the product at heart.

I guess this is self-inflicted. Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one.

Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?

> Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one.

I wouldn't count FAANG pay as "shit".... and yet here we are.

Raising pay in the lower pay brackets will increase loyalty (but not enough to compensate for otherwise poor treatment) but once you get above 'comfortably well-off' pay grades, increasing compensation might also be necessary but it's not the answer, and all of the problems with product design here stem from the top. The only real answer is to hire people who drink the kool-aid, who genuinely believe in what you're doing for its own sake and aren't just there to pump their own careers and then cash out.

Twitter has shot themselves in the foot for me. I would be happy to get notifications for people interacting with my posts, but they spam me with random crap so I went to the settings app and turned off the toggle for notifications. Now they get to send me nothing. Ubereats did the same so I just uninstalled the app and reinstall it if I ever want to order something. They lost that space on my home screen because they kept spamming me with notifications which were not my order.

Re: Uber Eats, now they also mark those notifications as "time sensitive" in the current version of iOS, including asking you to rate your meal or knowing that your delivery person says thanks for the tip. Even if I'm OK with getting those notifications, they are by definition NOT time sensitive

I think Apple needs to start making this as part of the review process and reject updates which set marketing spam as time sensitive.

Supposedly it is in the guidelines. Someone provided a link to them last time it came up. Seems like it’s just unenforced. I wish they’d either enforce that, or give users some tools to filter them. Give me a naive bayes filter to train, regex, even string match. Anything.

If you are wondering why you are seeing more of these it’s because apple changed their policy on this from a “no ads in notifications” policy last year. This change in policy is a net negative for users but it’s really hard for a marketing department to resist temptation.

I don’t think it is fair to say Instagram has shifted from building functionality to increasing engagement. I don’t think you can separate these things at all.

At any stage of a business (which product is part of) you focus only on those things that contribute to your business model. All the metrics you’ve listed: engagement, retention, MAU — all of these are parts of the startup’s unit economy. Every single new feature is mapped against one of these metrics, especially at early stages of the product/business, when there are not many features, and resources to develop new ones are scarce. These metrics actually _drive_ any new features. That’s product management 101.

Back to Instagram, they’ve rolled out huge chunk of functionality this year: Reels. It’s basically another app inside the old one. All done seamlessly. Imagine amount of design and decision-making work that had to went into this. Even for very mature product like Instagram “building functionality” phase never stops.

> it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month"

The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.

Right, but maybe we should lean towards software that is less like an organism and more like a tool. My hammer is fine, ruby is fine.

I don't think there's a way back.

Software devs need to start thinking seriously about the world they're building. "Just doing my job" isn't an excuse. The only way to a sane future I can see is to quit and start using federated services for everything.

I'm glad we didn't declare the phone "done" at the Razor flip phone or that we didn't declare personal websites "done" with Yahoo Geocities.

Progress has to happen. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but you have to try.

Not a great example. Phones became general purpose(-ish) computing devices without losing the ability to function as a phone.

Facebook trying to turn Instagram into Tiktok ruins the ability to use Instagram as Instagram.

It's more like Mr. Coffee saw that smoothies took off in popularity and decided to start making coffee machines that are also blenders, but now suck as coffee machines.

Haha I hear you. I think your point is exactly what I am getting at. Instagram wants to be more than "just" Instagram. My point is that sometimes you get that shift right, i.e. iPhone being more than "just" a phone, and sometimes you get it wrong.

I like living in a world where people have ambition. I won't ever fault Mr. Coffee for trying to become Mr. Beverage, best case they succeed and give me an amazing experience, worst case it allows for a ton of new players to satisfy the people who "just" want a Mr. Coffee.

I guess some people see this as greed. I just think we should all be constantly be striving to be better, including companies. Again, sometimes you get it right like Instagram allowing video, which also allowed for pure photsharing apps, and sometimes you get it wrong.

Ha ha, Luddite here, I wish we had declared the phone done back with flip phones. And personal websites were better before Geocities (you know, when they were hand-rolled).

But I get what you're saying. I just wonder though why so many people tolerate crap — simply because it's all there is right now.

Cable TV with all its commercials was crap, so I nixed it over 20 years ago. I didn't tolerate it until something better came along, I just did without it.

In many ways Geocities was peak internet. I don't see a lot of stuff nowadays that is an improvement over it - so much so that I cannot think of a single example.

Can't agree more. I want products to be completed. I hate this constant change "because we have these people working full time and they need to be doing something to justify being paid". I want tools that empower me. I don't want a "service" bundled with everything either. I want products that don't need any form of ongoing support.

IMO modern mainstream operating systems are also a good example of this. An operating system has basically three jobs: abstract the hardware from application software, provide libraries for commonly used functions, like GUIs, and provide the user with some kind of environment/shell to run their applications in. But somehow, this shitshow of an industry has converged on needing to release a major update every year. Imagine being forced to come up with new features for, and release a major update of, a feature-complete product every time the planet completes a lap around its star just because the marketing department exists and demands that it so happens because reasons. Oh, and what if you run out of feature ideas? Then of course you redesign the UI! UI redesigns never get old.

Great point about declaring a product complete.

The internet is interesting in that it can bypass a lot of consumer protections that have been hard fought in government.

One that I recently saw on here was the government (not sure which level, federal I think) declaring that click to sign up, call to cancel is illegal.

There is so much user hostile behavior online it's crazy, generally speaking it seems we all need to find our way back to morals.

Hang in there with the despair.

> a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built.

That gamification is a relevant feature to someone.

As a ADVERTISER

I want ATTENTION

So that MORE MONEY

Best example for me: Revolut. The app and product as a whole was so simple and good.

One year ago (or maybe 1.5 years ago) it started going downhill, fast. The app got so complicated that I often simply cannot find what I'm looking for (my card or the balance in a specific currency). Everyone I know using Revolut has the same complaint, especially older people like my parents or in-laws.

I don't get it and it makes me sad.

Netflix seems good at not destroying their product... though inherently the vision is kind of a scaled distraction machine.

I agree with the thrust of your comment and wonder how we might get there. Software companies did look more like you describe in the past, and a few like (some parts of) Apple and some game companies still do. Mostly these are companies that ship a chunk of finished software rather than a "service" -- a big release once a year, little post-hoc tracking and engagement optimization. I think there's fundamentally an incentive problem with most (all?) free-to-use software services. If revenue directly correlates to engagement time it's really hard to avoid this trap because it's a very rational path to go down to optimize the business.

> Netflix seems good at not destroying their product.

So far.

I see them frequently flirting with BS tangential solutions to problems that the user doesn't care about. Like, they're hosting games on the phone app now? No thanks. And I'm counting the days until the "play something" button goes away.

Netflix isn't the worst but their site does have some annoyances. After I finish watching something, I have to close the tab as fast as possible because there is no possible way to have the tab open without it auto playing annoying clips with sound. Everything has a hover effect with sound.

Netflix has started to hide away "continue watching" for their algo feed crap for me.

Netflix on AppleTV has done this for a long time, and it sucks. =(

Netflix isn't free.

Neither is Instagram. But you just mean that Netflix uses a paywall model whereas Instagram uses a pay-with-attention-to-ads.

I mean the old adage "if something is free then you're the product". For Netflix you're the customer, for Instagram you're the product.

I understand, and that's what I meant. However, we need to get past that adage. It suggests to people that we can't have actually free things ever. But there are tons of examples of things that really are free from natural resources that are abundant to the sorts of software that are trivial enough for some volunteers to make and distribute without compromises.

In other words, we can pay with money or by allowing ourselves to be monetized (via attention to ads or other manipulations and invasiveness) *OR* we can actually have things be free. There's negligible cost to enjoying Mozart or Mark Twain, and a few orders of magnitude more stuff could be public domain if that status weren't sabotaged to support our cancerous growth-forever economic model.

Anyway, I agree with you completely about Netflix vs Instagram. And while Instagram can be described as pay-with-attention-to-ads, it's definitely valid to see it as most users are the product for the actual paying customers (the advertisers). The reason I like the "pay-with-attention" framing is to prompt everyone to always be asking "how am I paying?" and sometimes the answer is "I'm not, it's actually free, no catch" as that opens more options to consider than the binary "am I the customer or the product?"

Netflix has a fair amount of BS that has been accumulating for a while.

Refuses to put the categories in a consistent order, even things like "my list" and "continue watching" move around in the UI.

Categories available for you to browse also change randomly.

Autoplay while browsing and autoplay of other content when you finish a show or movie.

Images used in show/movie thumbnails are different for different users based on what they think you are likely to click on.

Mobile app has a tiktok style feed for comedy shows. I believe they are also testing or have already rolled out a tiktok style feed for kids Netflix.

HBO is happy to show me an alphabetical list of all of their content but Netflix will not.

Netflix, in it's early years, actually had a really good recommendation engine.

But then they figured out there's more money in not just giving you what you'll like best.

It was a really really good one, but I think it has more to do with the shift in business model than anything. When they initially set it up they had you rate almost any content in the world that was available and could recommend that because it was just dvds. Now they have to license any content they stream and are making their own content.

I’d love to pay a small monthly for an app that just used their old recommendations engine. I’m guessing there is not a large enough market for that sort of thing to offset the costs of you leaving their ecosystem.

I'm not entirely sure what you've described is the case. I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases the for-the-worse changes aren't done when a site is at the top of their game, but are instead reactionary attempts because they noticed downward trends for sign-ups or engagement or whatever that aren't necessarily apparent to the users yet. People don't necessarily need a good reason to stop using something besides they don't think it's cool anymore.

I'd love to hear from the decision makers behind such changes, whether it was an attempt to improve an already-good situation or if it was an attempt to correct a declining situation.

Humans do this with pretty much everything where there's a manager to please and bonuses to justify. Compare McDonalds with In-n-Out (which presumably at one time in the past made similar quality burgers).

> I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age.

Why wait? Like you it disgusts me now.

In short, see 80/20 rule. Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally.

I don't use Facebook but I'm under the impression they've done this somewhat with local market places, games & video streaming.

It sounds to me that you're sick of common abused marketing tactics or maybe it's just that I am & therefore that's how I read your post. Gamification, Deadly Sins, Reciprocity, etc..

> Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally.

To many it happens after hitting 40.

The problem is not that they seek to grab attention, is what they decide to do with that attention.

We might think of Web 2.1 composed by socially responsible apps.

I agree this is a problem, but IMO it's pretty specific to social media, or other free online services. Typically a business can reach 1.0, then seek to expand their market, or release the next big version, get people to pay for a bigger plan etc etc. All the normal ways a company grows once it has "made it."

This is just business in general though. It's why I am buying toilet paper and IP addresses from the same company. No company is happy just existing and solving one specific problem, they always feel the pressure to expand and grow as much as possible (from shareholders) even if it really doesn't make any sense.

There are plenty of software products out there that people love. Blender, OBS, Sublime Text, and Procreate are a few that come to mind. We don't need to come up with any new culture or methodology -- if we pay attention, there are already plenty of examples for us to follow if we want to.

> If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.

Why? I do not consider it self evident that such developments are necessarily bad.

As they say, if something is free you're not the consumer you're the product.

Then the product managers are doing their job well if engagement improves

> I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?)

I think OG Twitter sent you an SMS every time someone you follow tweeted.

Note though, the goal isn't quite to keep you interacting with the app as possible. The goal is to get the most people interacting with the app to get the most revenue.

Probably why a lot of these changes make apps less engaging for people like the author and commenters here. That random boomer photo is probably popular among the average person even though it doesn't fit into your feed. Facebook/Instagram don't care about your interaction and revenue in particular, they care about getting the most interaction and revenue in general.

Exactly that!

Entropy is an unstoppable force. The churn to save our past ways is the problem.

We don’t need industrial pipelines for everything.

Centralize logistics of biological necessity, privatize self exploration.

We should only industrially build industrial machines we need, and personal gadget fetishism can go in the bin.

Our wealth is a mathematical quagmire. No one knows who owes what really, and Dick Cheney was saying the quiet part out loud before Trump: deficits don’t matter.

It’s an emotional boondoggle. Future people will renegotiate or blow ourselves up.

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