Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.
Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.
Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.
There's dozens of things to optimize for in software development, with resource usage being only a few of them (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who are you to decide which are the most important? And if you think that you can do a better job at picking the right trades while keeping companies in business, then you would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities. The majority of people would rather trade some performance for a "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than lightweight text to give a product overview, and want that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their profile photo and if the competition has it they'll switch.
Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid? Absolutely. I hate bloated web pages and slow applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars of evidence, these are decisions driven by users' and customers' priorities.
Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant, because they cater to customers that care about those things.
It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
The customer.