[thomassmith65]

  >If some of you say they're focusing on "revenue" and "ads" then I don't think that is it. The reason I don't agree with it is due to being a short-term focus. If your search results are bad, people will start trusting you less over time and look for answers on platforms like Reddit or other search engines, therefore you can't show them relevant ads and you lose money over the long term.

In the long-term, we'll all be dead. In the medium-term, the people behind these user-hostile decisions will be at other companies, making yet more money. In the near-term, 'what about the stock price next quarter?'

Short-term thinking is a candidate for the biggest problem of our time.

[readthenotes1]

Of any time...

[thomassmith65]

Fair point, but I had in mind the particular flavor of short-term thinking that we see post-2010.

We had a couple decades, prior to that, when there was a business trend to be 'customer focused' which closely relates to long-term thinking: win good-will from your customers, from your suppliers, from your community... even from your competitors.

To whatever extent the customer-focus trend managed to saturate, it seems to have died with the success of FA*NG companies around 15 years ago.

Why bother making products that last when Apple makes billions with irreparable devices?

Why bother providing stellar customer service when Google hardly bothers to provide any customer service?

Why care about high quality design and materials when when Amazon just sells cheap knockoffs made from wax and scotch tape?

Why even be lawful, when Facebook can snow the public and regulators and not wind up in jail?

Short-term thinking has plagued various areas of life forever, certainly, but this FA*NG-era death of customer focus is why I feel things are particularly bad now.

[majewsky]

Not really. There are a lot of points in history where the bigger problem was long-term thinking, as in: emperors expending the lives of tens of thousands of their subjects on the battlefield in order to achieve glory beyond death.

[readthenotes1]

I'm pretty sure Xenophan wouldn't have felt inclined to add the advice "in times of plenty save for times of dearth" in the Cyropedia if it were unnecessary advice...

I could probably find many more points of short -sighted decisions (e.g., Marcus Aurelius letting his son inherit, Sam Johnson not regularizing spelling because it was too much work, Daniel Webster changing spelling to make a point and a $) if we had to go try to list