I think many of us have noticed the trend that modern tech just… Doesn’t make things better. There’s little to be excited about, because anything even remotely innovative is going to be filled with tracking, ads, etc.
Let’s say you had a bored software engineer or 2 at your disposal and the goal was to improve something you do often, by creating an application or website that isn’t owned and enshittified by a megacorp looking to extract maximum short term value - what would your project be? Is it something you’d be willing to pay for, maybe with a free tier available?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m a software engineer and in the current hard-ass market, while I’m lucky enough to have a stable job, I know that experience alone isn’t cutting it anymore in the recruitment process. You need to be able to show side projects too. Plus I have an unemployed software engineer friend who also has no interesting projects to show. So if we make any money out of it, that’s awesome. If we don’t, it’s just something for our github accounts. Probably the latter.
PS: Yes, I know this is not a tech community - I want ideas from regular, non-techy people too.
PPS: This doesn’t have to be something in your personal life, it could also be something that would help you at work if you had it.
There’s a lot of things where there used to be good software, but it has been ruined by megacorps.
Mint, for example. It started as a fantastic website to track your different financial accounts. It was simple and intuitive. Ad-supported, but not egregiously so. Then it got bought by Intuit. “Updates” removed features and previously available chart options to review your transactions. The ads got worse. I can’t remember if the app released before or after the Intuit buyout, but it started off with less features than the website and slowly became the better option as the website got worse. Then the app started getting worse with updates too. Finally it was shutdown this year, with Intuit recommending people use their other, similar, subscription-based software. I still haven’t found a proper replacement.
Sonos is a great concept with a few fundamental flaws. I received a couple of units several years ago as a gift from the in-laws. The biggest issue is that if I want to have TV audio (from videogames or video streaming services), the only way to do that is to use a physical cable, but not all of the units have an auxiliary input. The system was always buggy, with delay and a not particularly responsive app. They famously rolled out a new version of their app earlier this year that… Had a ton of bugs and removed a lot of features, leading to the CEO apologizing (but not rolling anything back, lol).
I remember when Adobe products used to be one-time purchases. There are of course alternatives today, but none of them are ever quite as good to actually use. Same thing with the Microsoft Office suite- I use it for work all the time, but for personal use I use LibreOffice. It gets the job done, but it’s way clunkier that Microsoft’s offering.
Music Production is similar. Luckily I still have some Cakewalk software from before they went bankrupt that works, but the servers to verify the product activation code are down so that will only last as long as my current desktop does. I’ve tried using other software like Reaper, but it’s a big step down. I bought CakeWalk Sonar around 2013-2014-ish for ~$150 (which includes a large sample library). Pro-tools is a similarly featured program that does not seem to have an option to purchase, but instead has a $300/year annual subscription.
I used to have Duolingo, but uninstalled when they got caught harvesting data they said they weren’t a few years ago.
I used to use LoseIt to track my meals and exercise, and it helped me lost weight. I got out of the habit and went a while without using it, only to find out it had been enshittified too. The name changed to “Calorie Counter by LoseIt”, and the app has moved from a straightforward resource to trying to be a personal trainer. It wants to ask me questions about my emotional relationships with food and exercise. It’s trying to gather as much data as possible from me and then tell me what to do, when all I want is to be able to scan some barcodes and keep track of my calories and macros for the day. The last time I logged in I think it wanted me to upgrade to premium to track macros.
Dark Skye was by far the best weather app. Until it got purchased by Apple so now I can’t use it.
The UrbanSpoon was a fantastic app for finding nearby restaurants. Perhaps over time it would have faced the same issues that any other business-finding service faces: businesses are willing to pay for promotion, users leaving reviews for free is sketchy, bots and paid reviews exist, etc. Still, it was pretty good up until Zomayo bought it and shut it down.
Maybe not software, but StumbleUpon was one of my favorite websites back when it existed. Once again, got bought by a corporation who shut it down when they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it properly. It feels like we just can’t have nice things- everything needs to be lining the pockets of a billionaire or it isn’t allowed to exist at all.
Coordinating RGB components from different manufacturers and across different devices sucks. Coordinating smart devices without some dedicated piece of hardware spying on your whole house like Alexa sucks. I think I’ve seen some open-source attempts at unification, but the last time I looked into it that was still janky and annoying to deal with.
Also why does every single business need its own app? I know the answer- it’s to harvest data, push notifications to encourage spending, and push loyalty rewards programs. But if everyone is harvesting my same data, isn’t that going to result in oversupply and devalue that in the market? Are these companies selling this data actually profitable? Apps, especially good ones, are expensive to make and maintain. Maybe that’s why the my seem to have gotten so much worse. I have wondered if maybe the answer is for businesses to join together with joint apps. Especially brands that are already owned by one company, like KFC and Taco Bell. Slice is an interesting app for local pizza places, and I could see that model taking off.
It’s really hard for me to think of new software I would want when there’s so much old software that used to exist but has gotten ruined. I don’t want to become an old man yelling at a cloud, but I feel like everything has just gone straight downhill for around a decade. I even remember back around 2013 being in college and talking with friends about how Google search results seemed to be getting worse, and that’s gone downhill. Even the ideas I have, I am guessing probably already exist and have probably already been ruined.
Most of those ideas are similar to a lot of the above apps: make it easy to do data entry on a regular basis, maybe pull in some additional information from publicly available datasets, and maybe send a reminder. Homeowner stuff like cleaning out the bathroom sink trap, keeping track of when/where appliances were purchased/serviced, keeping PDF’s of manuals together, looking out for recalls. Home inventory for tracking cleaning supplies,groceries, etc (although that might be too much data entry for me to ever want to do properly). I have a notebook where I keep track of the strings on our guitars that I would prefer to be digitized. A lot of stuff that could be handled with a generic calendar and/or spreadsheet, but could benefit from a dedicated application.
This is it exactly. There are a lot of great use cases for software, but I’m uncomfortable relying on them, because i know once i start using an app or program in X area of my life or to manage Y problem, it may change or become less useful or start to exploit users in some way. Not everyone doez this, but unfortunately the way the market usually works makes me less and less likely to want to rely on or use software for most things. I want analog, private ways to do things that I control. It sucks, because there are still creative people like op who want to make neat projects. But i’ve really been burned.
I like to use community-developed open-source software for this reason…
Even basic stuff like operating systems (especially Windows and Android), chatting software, music playback software etc has gotten so terrible. Microsoft constantly adds unnecessary and intrusive features to Windows, Teams needs a supercomputer to perform decently, and every app is now a poorly optimized electron app that tracks everything you do.
So I read your comment and did some research. Mint seemed like the best example that a small team could reasonably get started on.
Some of the original people behind Mint founded Monarch and the CEO put out a very reasonable article on why your best bet would be to replace it with a subscription based alternative. Essentially - since anything free is eventually going to become an ad company, the company will never have your best interests in mind.
I hate the subscription model, but I somewhat agree - unless we’re talking about offline software, there’s always maintenance involved, also further development. If your software is ad-supported, it’s on shakier ground.
I don’t think we’re likely to see another Mint. The more functionality you want, the more expensive it is to develop. BUT if what you’re looking for is just the core functionality then yes, that could reasonably be ad supported, or even free and open source.
Subscription models are the thin end of the wedge of enshittification.
Imagine a world of television. No streaming, mind. Broadcast television. You had to orient your day around what you wanted to watch, if it was even possible. Or you had to buy expensive equipment to use terrible UIs to try and make an inferior copy of what you wanted to watch at a given time.
We weren’t animals of course. We had this spiffy thing called “cable”. With a cable package you could get a dozen channels clearly instead of maybe two clear ones and a half-dozen more fuzzy ones via the antennae. Life was great! But … it was about to get better. Because the cable companies had cooked up…
PREMIUM CABLE!
And the centrepiece of premium cable was specialty channels, the most popular of which were the movie ones! Just think! You could get movies in their entirety, not hacked and slashed for television audiences. Not torn apart limb from limb by commercial inserts. You’d watch a movie from beginning to end, non-stop, and could do this 24 hours a day, if you liked, all for the price of seeing two movies in theatres per month. (And back then theatres were dirt cheap by comparison to today!)
O frabjous joy!
No commercials. You paid a subscription for these channels, so no commercials.
And then the commercials started.
It started off sanely enough. A scattering of “hand-selected” commercials between movies/episodes/whatever. (And, weirdly, despite the cable companies having opened a new stream of revenue, prices edged up a bit for the premium channels.) Then it was 10-15 minutes of solid commercials between movies/episodes/whatever and they didn’t seem too discriminating in what they advertised. Almost as if it was “anybody who paid” instead of “hand-selected”.
Then, in the more traditionally TV-oriented fare, with episodes, rather than full movies. the specialty channels started putting commercials during the episodes.
Salami tactics. Slice by slice. Prices edged up. Services got worse. And ads infested everything. Until today you can’t even check out what’s showing without being flooded with ads.
Subscription models are not a bulwark against ads.
They’re no bulwark against ads, but how is a free service supposed to be sustained? Free only works if it’s offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.
All depends on whether the company providing the service is public too I guess. As soon as it’s public, you have shareholders to please and then you HAVE to squeeze every cent out of your customers. Tale as old as time.
I’ll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn’t enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It’s still a fiver a month and you can’t pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.
That seems to me to be a powerful argument against “free” services. Because there’s no such thing. Not even:
“Self-hosted” isn’t free. You have to pay for the hosting site one way or another, even if it’s on your property. (Those bandwidth fees? That’s payment.)
What are the trade-offs associated with it? It was made in 2009. Fifteen years later it hasn’t changed its prices, even as everything around it (including its network fees) has increased? Colour me a little … dubious.
There have been many times I’ve passed on something because it had a subscription fee but would have bought as a one time purchase. I feel like everyone’s forgotten that it’s an option.
Eh, we’ve also started expecting continuous updates of our games and apps. That’s why SaaS is such a popular model.
You used to be able to buy Photoshop and own that version forever. Now it’s a SaaS. Personally I prefer the old model too, but a lot of people prefer to get updates apparently.
It’s expensive but I like YNAB. All the functionality Mint had and more, no ads.
For a Mint replacement (which I’m still angry about), might I suggest Simplifi by Quicken? For me it’s mostly been a one-to-one replacement, after getting over a few… eccentricities. I could never get into YNAB because it’s so manual. I want something automatic, and Simplifi scratches that itch.
The catch: it’s not free.