>would be able to make a lot of money doing so.

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?

How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?

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.

>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.

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.

> Who are you to decide which are the most important?

The customer.