this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
126 points (92.6% liked)
Programming
17385 readers
281 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is still a business problem. The truth is, we solved basically all the technical problems that could be practically solved by the 2010s. We have all the technology, we know what people want and need. We could, and should, build a lifetime personal computer (phone form factor) for every person on Earth that provides for their communication needs, acts as a personal assistant and organizer, and more. And we've had those, dozens if times.
But how do you keep selling people stuff once you've met all their needs? You tear it all down and keep rebuilding and reselling it. You enshittify to squeeze money out, customers flee, so you encircle them with another capitalist enclosure and rebuild the same shit again. Repeat.
Software devs should basically all be making games and trying to teach AI to be smarter but instead we're replacing internet search (a problem we solved in the 90s!) with LLM enabled advertising engines that literally can't find info for you so they make it up. And we're iterating on the 10 thousandth version of an e-commerce site because all internet shopping is part of a giant global MLM now. Seriously, "drop shipping" is the latest iteration of the same old scam they used to run on diet pills and knives and magazine subscriptions.
But every college student with a fresh business degree can set up a Wix site to resell sunset lamps. It's uber for scams. The reseller takes on all the risk, sets up the e-commerce site with a builder, firehoses ads all over their social media, and does all the work. There are multiple industries now entirely supported on conning desperate people into being your salesforce, workforce, advertisers, and customers all at the same time.