2 - Is The Web Getting Worse?!?!?

Summary:

This episode of the Bikeshed Podcast explores the concept of "enshittification," the idea that the quality of products and services deteriorates over time, often accompanied by increased monetization and decreased customer value. They further discuss how this relates to web development and the broader tech industry. They explore potential cultural factors behind this.

Key Discussion Points:

• Enshittification Examples: The hosts provide examples of enshittification in popular services like Spotify (increased ads with subscription) and Netflix (higher prices for premium features). Facebook is also mentioned as a product that has seemingly declined in popularity as it has aged.
• AI Integration: The hosts discussed the trend of tacking on AI to products just to say that they offer AI features, which can often be annoying and not serve the original purpose of the product.
• Lost Focus on User Needs: They discuss how companies sometimes lose sight of their original mission and focus more on monetization through KPIs rather than solving customer needs. The hosts share that as measures become metrics, they become less valuable over time.
• "Nobody Cares" Blog PostOpens in new tab: They discuss the Grant Slatton blog post, interpreting it as a reflection of how engineers may be disempowered from caring about the overall product due to narrow focus and lack of agency in larger organizations.
• “Shadification of the Web”: They introduce the term "shadification" to describe the growing trend of websites looking the same due to the widespread use of component libraries like Shadcn/ui (copy-paste) along with Material UI and Bootstrap.
• Optimization vs. Innovation: They discuss how companies often prioritize optimization and A/B testing over true innovation, resulting in a lack of creativity and unique user experiences.
• Performance Costs: Optimizations made at the expense of performance degrade the customer experience.
• Blurred Ownership: In larger companies, it becomes harder to draw ownership lines when there are more people owning things and there isn't clear defined guidelines.
• Impact of AI on UI Creativity: The hosts explore the potential for AI to further standardize UI patterns and stifle creativity, as AI models are trained on existing designs and may not generate truly novel solutions.
• AI Dependency: Discussion of companies choosing to support new libraries based on the amount of support AI models know about them and recommend them, which can lead to everything becoming the same.

Personal Updates:

• Scott has been digging into AvanteOpens in new tab, finding it helpful for learning Go. He plans to build a backend service in Node and then refactor it to Go as a learning exercise.
• Matt has been experimenting with Cursor's Composer agent feature and a tool called Codename GooseOpens in new tab, which uses AI to infer functionality on his computer.