Quick thought. I wonder to what extent this is a phenomenon of the social media era. I feel like it used to make sense for apps to know who their customer was. But now we live in a world where the measure of success is just how many users you have as an undifferentiated number. Regardless of who those users are or whether they are actually being successful with your platform. So every app converges to "this app is designed for whoever wants to pay us money".
https://toot.majorshouse.com/@majorlinux/112678898222874747
To be clear, I haven't put much thought into this. I can't actually remember what it was like before the social media era. That's a whole issue in itself. But I'm just pondering if it's a big change to see businesses that don't really have an opinion about who gets value from their software.
Social apps are designed to be addictive and sticky. Not useful. Discord has the same roots. It doesn't actually matter if people don't like it as long as they keep using it.
@polotek I think it's just an issue of visibility.
The ones that do tune only for revenue are the ones that get the VC backing and the huge marketing budgets and become household names.
There are *tons* of apps that don't tune for revenue, but they just aren't as visible, because their revenue doesn't support advertising during the Super Bowl.
