I wish people stopped pretending that dodgy apps marketed at general public are the only things that exist.
I've just checked HN front page.. topmost post by commercial entity is by Lago [0], " Open Source Metering & Usage-Based Billing"
This is exactly what people want (they market to programmers, not to managers). There is zero "value extraction" and zero "trapping users" (except by providing a great product they want). There is no "commercializing social interaction" nor "destroying the practice of journalism", etc...
There are B2B, developer tools, hardware makers, essential services... Plenty of nice things which do not have to break fabric of society.
I think that article is just wrong. There are literally thousands of founders trying to find out what users want every day. It's just not that easy to find out what users want.
There's more software available than ever before - and yes, someone needs to pay for it. It's easy to complain about monthly SAAS fees, for example, and forget that people used to pay $800 to 'own' Office 2000, only to spend a few hundred dollars every two years for a paid upgrade. I think I spend MUCH less on software today than I spent 25 years ago. Back then many programs cost several hundred dollars, and some software development tools were in the thousands.
Classic journalism is destroying itself by morphing into activism and showing a bias that makes people stop trusting it. Or maybe it was always like that and social media just uncovered it. Anyway, classic journalism needs to adapt or will die. I don't think it's bad that people have more than a few sources to chose from.
Regarding media... today more high quality content is produced than any time before in history. And that means that viewers need to pay more than ever before. The whole pretense of 'cut cable to save money' was BS, of course, because you can't get the same amount of content while paying less than you did for cable. I still think it's much better than it used to be. You can switch services, or pay per show. But you can't expect to get the same content for less. That was always unreasonable.
This article sings the same song as Yanis Varoufakis. The whole tech market is now past capitalism, and now into techno-feudalism. Users are serfs to large tech-lords who capture labour for their own purposes while giving back as little as possible. I'm sure good hearted European lords sometimes reflected on how little they provided to their serfs that directly helped them daily.
(Said a person who just used an application to check on his financial health and a website to repeat the simulations that led to the 4% withdrawal rate retirement "rule" in a few seconds on my phone)
This is one of the several things that has made me very disappointed about where we are at as an industry.
And even when we do manage to make something people would actually want, we tend to design it in such a way as to minimize the aspects that make it desirable.
Take a look at what the EU is doing. It's not great, it's still ruled by neoliberal capitalism after all, but at least it offers more to EU citizens - forcing interoperability (chargers, standards), opening up walled gardens (WIP Apple store), more meaningful privacy (GDPR), higher taxes on digital good, attempts at stopping tax avoidance (biggest failure tbh) etc.
Tell me you work for a monopolist without telling me you work for a monopolist. It's all a nice effort to alleviate yourself of blame by casting this as something "we've" done.
Also, the reason so many companies turn to ads isn't because they like ads, or don't know about all the problems that stem from having your customers not be your users. It's because users still prefer to pay with anything but money. Not all, but the vast majority. This creates inevitable incentives.
eg Don't like google? Fastmail will happily sell you an account today, and Kagi is a great substitution for the vast majority of my search needs. Go reread the recent post on here with people whining that Kagi charges though.
If your users won't pay, then perhaps, you don't have something they actually want?
The reason so many companies turn to ads is because they are exceptionally risk adverse in this economy. They'll step over a risky dollar to pick up easy nickles. This is also the outcome of the long arm of monopoly power exerting itself.
> The reason so many companies turn to ads is because they are exceptionally risk adverse in this economy.
It's really not, and the proof is it's been happening for 20 years, in boom and in recession. Read the kagi thread, even on here. People want better search. They just want it to be free and whine if you say cool, $10/mo or enjoy Google and expertsexchange / freecodecamp / w3schools / geeksforgeeks / programwiz / simplilearn / freecodecamp / endless spam filtered by you in the results.
It's the unavailable problem with b2c businesses that we discuss endlessly :shrug:
You have one example. There are tons of counter examples. Software is a multi billion dollar a year industry. I'm entirely unconvinced by the entirely anecdotal "kagi thread" case.
The American hegemony is well into the 'bread and circuses' phase of its decline.