The curse of popularity

[mtbc]

I have noticed a seeming pattern wherein good things become popular but in time become worse. Amazon's website (or sales portal or whatever) might be a good example of that: for me, they were best in the late 1990's, maybe around when they added the people who looked at this bought that, though the gold box offers were always rubbish. Now they've made links for things like tell us about errors in the description harder to find while greatly cluttering their pages with confusing annoyances, together with increasingly heavily pushing sponsored products, Amazon Prime subscriptions, etc., at me. I recently learned that mst3kmoxie and I have independently, but accordingly with Amazon's evolution, instead started to buy more from eBay again.

Amazon's not an unusual case though; I've certainly noticed the pattern with open-source software, though at least OpenLibreOffice remains quite usable. I have become used to annoyances like Firefox's many-click on this occasion, ignore the SSL problem dialog (I think Chrome's might be worse) but what I'm more curious about is why these regressions happen. I have a couple of theories, including:

1. Simple randomness. Things keep changing: sometimes they are good, then later they are not and one must look elsewhere for what is now good.


2. Expansion and transfer of development and maintenance: the larger or different team has a new, different sense of what is good, and follow that instead. For instance, nobody else has taken Basser Lout and run further with it, so that remains good.


3. People become bothered that something isn't more popular or isn't good for some classes of users. In adjusting it they compromise or lose what made it good for those who already liked it as it was. (I'd put some changes in the software associated with popular Linux distributions into that category.)

It's an interesting phenomenon. What I learn from it is basically: expect to jump horse every so often and try to aim for projects that have become good under strongly opinionated leadership.

There are also general trends that I dislike. For instance, every library website overhaul makes it worse, but then my favorite was the Columbus Metropolitan Library's 1990's text-based interface offered via telnet. And now so many websites seem to be increasingly optimized for swiping through via a smartphone, argh.

Comments

[damerell]

In some cases I think it's bait-and-switch. If you're Amazon trying to become a de-facto monopoly, you want to be as nice to use as possible. Once you are a de-facto monopoly you switch to cash-extracting anti-patterns.

I'm looking at you, ebay.

[mtbc]

Ah, perhaps it was the business plan from earlier on, that's a thought. My thinking may have been colored by having had more exposure to the business plans of the kinds of company that stagger drunkenly for some years before collapsing in a heap.