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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

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.

123pie123 5y ago
This process is similar to the old software bloat/ bloatware for applications it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies
kbenson 5y ago
> 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 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.
- _jal 5y ago
  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 https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    That phrase has a very specific meaning rooted in racism; I would not advise using it to describe any other situation that you don’t want to bring that context into. If only to avoid misunderstandings.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I think that would be rooted in anti-racism, and anyway the next sentence after it "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." I think establishes the universality of the idea, the same idea expressed in phrases such as if voting could truly change the system it would be outlawed. that idea being that systemic change cannot be achieved within the system that is to be changed. on edit: I am not necessarily a believer in the idea, as I think the 'if voting' expression of the idea can be shown to be wrong by various historical examples.
joemi 5y ago
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.
maccolgan 5y ago
>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)
djbusby 5y ago
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.
armchairhacker 5y ago
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.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
> 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.
ssalazar 5y ago
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-2021-interview/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...
- kamranjon 5y ago
  Another good example is Craigslist. I always wonder about how great it would be to work there.
  - jzawodn 5y ago
    We're hiring. :-) https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring
14 5y ago
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.
mattferderer 5y ago
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..
- yakubin 5y ago
  > Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally. To many it happens after hitting 40.
daxfohl 5y ago
As they say, if something is free you're not the consumer you're the product.
panic 5y ago
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.
0fuchs 5y ago
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.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
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.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> 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.
emodendroket 5y ago
> 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.
adam_klein 5y ago
Exactly that!
jliptzin 5y ago
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.
user743 5y ago
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.
fphilipe 5y ago
> 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". 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.
grishka 5y ago
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.
eloisius 5y ago
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.
- 1024core 5y ago
  > 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.
  - taneq 5y ago
    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.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      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?
      - 1024core 5y ago
        > 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.
taneq 5y ago
> 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.
- rgbrgb 5y ago
  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.
rgbrgb 5y ago
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.
- kleer001 5y ago
  > 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.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Netflix has started to hide away "continue watching" for their algo feed crap for me.
  - SrslyJosh 5y ago
    Netflix on AppleTV has done this for a long time, and it sucks. =(
- wilsonnb3 5y ago
  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.
ryandrake 5y ago
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.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  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.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  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.
- djbusby 5y ago
  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
tqi 5y ago
> 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.
- axlee 5y ago
  >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.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    > 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/balenciaga-t-shirt-shirt-twitter-reactions/ https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      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-vagabond-sleeping-bag-puffer-coat-black-green-3766098/ https://modesens.com/product/vetements-black-and-green-vagab...
SantiagoQ 5y ago
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.
dboreham 5y ago
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).
motoxpro 5y ago
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.
- krageon 5y ago
  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.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago
  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.
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    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.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  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.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
> 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.
stirfish 5y ago
> 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
vlunkr 5y ago
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."
pverghese 5y ago
Then the product managers are doing their job well if engagement improves
human 5y ago
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.
Gtex555 5y ago
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.
- dzonga 5y ago
  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.
smugglerFlynn 5y ago
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.

123pie123 5y ago

This process is similar to the old software bloat/ bloatware for applications it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies

kbenson 5y ago

> 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 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.

_jal 5y ago
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 https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  That phrase has a very specific meaning rooted in racism; I would not advise using it to describe any other situation that you don’t want to bring that context into. If only to avoid misunderstandings.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I think that would be rooted in anti-racism, and anyway the next sentence after it "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." I think establishes the universality of the idea, the same idea expressed in phrases such as if voting could truly change the system it would be outlawed. that idea being that systemic change cannot be achieved within the system that is to be changed. on edit: I am not necessarily a believer in the idea, as I think the 'if voting' expression of the idea can be shown to be wrong by various historical examples.

joemi 5y ago

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.

maccolgan 5y ago

>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)

djbusby 5y ago

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.

armchairhacker 5y ago

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.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago

> 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.

ssalazar 5y ago

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-2021-interview/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...

kamranjon 5y ago
Another good example is Craigslist. I always wonder about how great it would be to work there.
- jzawodn 5y ago
  We're hiring. :-) https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring

14 5y ago

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.

mattferderer 5y ago

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..

yakubin 5y ago
> Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally. To many it happens after hitting 40.

daxfohl 5y ago

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

panic 5y ago

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.

0fuchs 5y ago

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.

Schroedingersat 5y ago

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.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> 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.

emodendroket 5y ago

> 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.

adam_klein 5y ago

Exactly that!

jliptzin 5y ago

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.

user743 5y ago

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.

fphilipe 5y ago

> 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". 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.

grishka 5y ago

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.

eloisius 5y ago

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.

1024core 5y ago
> 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.
- taneq 5y ago
  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.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    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?
    - 1024core 5y ago
      > 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.

taneq 5y ago

> 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.

rgbrgb 5y ago
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.

rgbrgb 5y ago

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.

kleer001 5y ago
> 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.
rightbyte 5y ago
Netflix has started to hide away "continue watching" for their algo feed crap for me.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago
  Netflix on AppleTV has done this for a long time, and it sucks. =(
wilsonnb3 5y ago
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.

ryandrake 5y ago

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.

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
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.
hotpotamus 5y ago
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.
djbusby 5y ago
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

tqi 5y ago

> 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.

axlee 5y ago
>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.
- airstrike 5y ago
  > 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/balenciaga-t-shirt-shirt-twitter-reactions/ https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    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-vagabond-sleeping-bag-puffer-coat-black-green-3766098/ https://modesens.com/product/vetements-black-and-green-vagab...

SantiagoQ 5y ago

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.

dboreham 5y ago

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).

motoxpro 5y ago

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.

krageon 5y ago
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.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
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.
- motoxpro 5y ago
  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.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
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.

SrslyJosh 5y ago

> 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.

stirfish 5y ago

> 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

vlunkr 5y ago

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."

pverghese 5y ago

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

human 5y ago

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.

Gtex555 5y ago

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.

dzonga 5y ago
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.

smugglerFlynn 5y ago

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.