Youtube, twitter, and reddit have obviously been in the news a lot recently, but every day business applications also seem to just keep getting worse. Got new PCs at work which means version updates, and pretty much everything we use (autocad, adobe acrobat, and ms office, mainly) all seem to run much slower, despite the computers having substantially higher specs. Love that I can't use any old versions or alternatives because they refuse to grant me admin access.
I love capitalist innovation! Why make things better when you could just make them worse and charge more?
While this is extremely true and I think probably worth about 2/3s of the blame, I still think that there is a 1/3 blame on software engineers turning out to be second-rate (people pursuing the field just because it pays well attracts a lot of low-quality coders) AND our general unwillingness to unionize and push back against the managerial types to say that we practice a craft and it deserves to be done to a standard. We should be embarrassed.
Of course a LOT of software devs are bazinga-brained shitheads. Or if they aren't then at least they hold the opinion that they're paid so well that they don't need to unionize or care about these other things. I have seen that opinion start to shift these past few years. Even software devs are beginning to form basic class conscious thoughts even though they haven't been able to act upon them. Quite a shift from even just five years ago.