[hinkley]

What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users. The first time this happened to me we had some idiot who insisted that we needed to display exactly how many logged on users there were on every page load. There was no point in doing so, and we had proven that it was at least ten percent of the cost of each page load. In fact it was higher than that but 10% is what we could proved. My current project is about our customers, not the users, and probably 80% of the operating budget is about making the customer feel like they're running the show. Often with demonstrable and even clichéd consequences for the users.

Without customization or user tracking, many, many workflows shift to read-mostly. Many are idempotent. Some can be fully cached. Some can be edge-cached.

The dark secret of 'social' media that has been slowly coming out is that they aren't social. They aren't about 'Us', they're about me. Me, me, me. So of course the whole workflow is build around who I am and what I want. That's not just unhealthy, it's also really fucking expensive. And if it's really expensive we can't just eat the cost as a 'value add', we now have to monetize it. So things were already pretty dark and then compensation came into the picture and now it's positively dire.

[urthor]

It goes beyond social media.

Software always starts by appealing to discerning customers. The early adopters.

Once it is fairly widely adopted, often the early adopters have adopted a newer, better thing.

So now you are making features for a crowd of people who are there mostly because of platform intertia.

They don't even appreciate or use new features, because anyone who actually deeply cares about your product niche doesn't use your product.

[BeefWellington]

> What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users.

To add onto this, as a security-adjacent person, it's sad how much people think user behaviour data will be worth to their company. From the well-intentioned "we must pave the cowpaths" to the harmful "harvest the data and sell it", the attitude appears to have cropped up in the past 15 or so years as a mainstay of what apps should be doing and it's absolute insanity to me.

My only victories in convincing teams are where I could demonstrate their ROI was never actually going to materialize, especially when the investment part required enough development hours that other features that might sell more apps would have to be delayed. And even then, it's been about 40% of the time, with the other 60% being met with, essentially, "we have assurances it will be profitable" hand-waving.

The painful part of this is that unless certain privacy regulations start to get much more painful economically for companies, there's basically no incentive not to do it.

It's the entire "Data is the new Oil" run amok.

[wpietri]

Absolutely. I think your last point is especially good. Facebook consumes a ton of cash for what many people feel are disappointing results. Are they vulnerable to a competitor who is less about what users want than what they need? A competitor who can do that for 1/10th or 1/100th as much money? That could be very hard for the me-me-me companies to keep up with.

[hinkley]

The thing with fads, and adoption cycles in general, is that what people 'want' can be figured out pretty quickly, but as far as I'm concerned, The Trough of Disillusionment is what happens when people figure out that what they need is something else.

So what you're asking is can someone come into the ToD and introduce a new product that steals people away? It's plausible and if I were in a better headspace I could probably name you a bunch of examples. But does it always happen? I don't think so. There are plenty of incumbents who manage to coast through and come out the other side having demonstrated a dilute form of change of heart - just enough to convince the customers that 'something was done' even if they can't quite put a finger on what exactly is better and how much.

[wpietri]

Sorry, I shouldn't have phrased that as a direct question. I meant it in a more rhetorical sense.

Oh, sure. It's a very tough field, and would be even if the incumbents didn't have billions to throw at the problem. I definitely don't believe that the better product wins; I only need Microsoft as a counter-example.

But it does strike me as a zone of opportunity. Maybe Substack is a good partial example here. Before the web, we had magazines. Then we basically had magazines on the web, preserving much of the old structure in the new medium. With lots of flailing as people tried to find sustainable business models.

And then Substack came along with an extremely bare-bones implementation mostly using 1980s technology and a lot of writers and readers are very happy with it.

So it's more that I'm asking myself. What are the products that cost 1/100th as much that might be as satisfying for my Facebook-ish needs?

[hinkley]

Way back in the long dark ago I ran into some abandonware for incorporating third party data onto web pages via a shared server. Nobody I knew understood how it was meant to work, but I got the impression it was meant to be a tool where a group of people could host commentary about a website that was not their own.

I keep wondering why nobody has really tried that again. Slashdot sort of filled in that space, and then Digg and now Reddit. Or Facebook for the 'all-in' solution. I keep thinking there was something I was missing about why that would be difficult to pull off.

Today I have a different answer for that - that ship has sailed. We are multi-device and it would be much more difficult for me to have a consistent experience across phone and personal (and sometimes work) machines.

But at the time perhaps it as an adoption thing. Just visiting a website is a cheap interaction that can lead to a habit. Having to do something special doesn't work the same way.