> make specific shareholders rich at the cost of everyone else
I haven't worked in a single company that have succeeded in making their owners rich without giving the clients what they want. Have you? The only entities I know that do that are organised crime and governments.
- Everything Microsoft has been doing to windows: adding ads, shuffling the UI around, resetting the defaults every update
- see also: reddit, facebook, everything else in it's
"enshitification" phase
- Anything involving ads is (imo) polluting the world
- Things that are literally polluting the world (usually not tech, but sometimes)
do on net these companies do more good for the world than bad? maybe,
but certainly most of the work going into them seems to be in "capturing value" which is of no use to me. Most of the proprietary software I've used has slowly gotten worse over time.
You're not providing arguments for the thesis that their products are bad. You're providing arguments for the thesis that their products have gone worse than they were before. However, with all the ads and stuff that we don't like they still provide a lot of value for their users. Personally, I no longer use Windows, reddit or Facebook for these exact reasons — to me, these products no longer provide value. But I don't pretend that my tastes are shared by everybody else: a lot of people actually don't care about ads, they don't care about the fact that reddit is closing the API and they like the shitty memes that facebook is putting in their feeds.
A lot of companies directly go against their users to enrich the owners, see Reddit right now. Just the rational move by companies that have established monopolies/oligopolies. Also companies that exploit negative externalities.
It seems like most of the industry is pushing bits around or trying to make specific shareholders rich at the cost of everyone else.
Rambling, but it you get any good insights I'm definitely interested in hearing them