[hedora]

Also, everything has to have an account now. I just got fined $8 by a movie theater for buying a ticket without an account.

Of course, with the rise of microservices, everything that requires an account is also unreliable.

Also, there's the dark pattern of returning incorrect results during partial outages, so even when stuff is "working", it's mostly gaslighting the end user. This was pioneered by Netflix's frontend team, but it's seeped into all sorts of inappropriate things. A surefire sign of this is opening up an online-only app, and having it report stale data until it updates. My car does this. I don't care what its charge level was sixteen hours ago (typically displayed by my phone for 10-60 seconds), or four days ago (from my watch).

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Netflix has done far more damage to the software industry compared to any other large modern company. The whole microservices nonsense and the myriad of complicated tools to solve their own customer complicated situations, gosh, thankfully the company is dying out now.

[pjlegato]

It's even older than that: Amazon began doing this in the 90s.

Their initial idea was to synchronize warehouse inventory with the online store in realtime, so that users would never buy anything out of stock. That proved logistically difficult and expensive, so they decided that the frontend would merely checkpoint inventory levels at intervals. When someone inevitably ordered something that was no longer in stock, they simply sent a robo-apology note and refunded the order.

Mitigating the hit to customer satisfaction was deemed cheaper than the very expensive proposition of synchronizing distributed warehouse inventory levels in realtime over unreliable networks.