Eventually all platforms sell out

In the greater context, I humbly acknowledge the skills and execution of the nameless heroes behind these platforms mentioned to support this lower-order-bit observation. Maintaining utility after crossing the tipping point, is only achieved only by the best of the best. I personally failed to stay fresh after initial successes of my own creations.

Search

For me, Google Search is surprisingly the most disappointing platform of all. I still love Maps, but at some point the magic peaceful text box went from serving like an oracle to seriously over crowded low quality tabloid.

the Mismatch => Worse results drive higher revenue

In short, giving people what they need faster means less time spent searching… See, as a user, you wish you could go from search box to a single vetted, accurate, up to date, beautifully composed, contextually relevant paragraph. But from a publishers/ revenue perspective, they want you to see 10 ad impressions as soon as possible, and as many impressions and clicks as you browse and weigh up multiple contradicting sources (showing more ads). Hopefully at the end you are left still confused so that you come back at a different time of day so Google (in its benevolent fairness to publishers) can serve a totally new set of resources. Worst case you still can’t decipher truth and next get stuck in a cyclic funnel of email notifications bringing you back to comment discussion threads.

When I was running ClimbFind.com for 5 years I used to experience a similar mismatch a demotivation after partnering people better and quicker directily impacting less site activity and slower network growth. I understand the motivations, but it must be 5–10 years since I remember Google Search providing more value. I wonder while often seeing 7 sponsor links appear before the highest ranked results how much better Google could be. I can visualize how our whole species could have evolved, if someone high stood up and said:

“Hey I know we’ve been around awhile — but maybe we should still operate by our PR slogan — Don’t be evil”.

Instead 2 hours ago, I left a renal ultrasound, and the specialist said as I left “Don’t Google anything”.

I couldn’t help asked why. I’d been frustrated after more than 100 hours Googleing “Tension Myalgia”, “Isolated Diastolic Hypertension” and other medical symptoms I experience so far in 2016. Her answer was spot on my experience:

“I believe the information quality is at best poor, almost always irrelevant and about cancer. Basically it always leads to anxiety”.

I’ve come to believe Google Search evolved without a focus on serving fact because in a similar way that Hollywood often focuses on remakes over risky original flicks, it’s economically more scalable to encourage the proliferation of multiple and even crappy versions of mainstream content. Thus high quality niche content stays in academic journals and printed mediums.

I wish Google would bring these long form, harder to focus for long periods of time formats and build structures to rewards content makers to let us access their superior presentations and knowledge as quickly as adWords.

App updates (downgrades?)

I'd love it know if anyone else feels they no longer like updating their iPhone apps?

Instagram went from perfect to average this year. Sponsored posts taking more and more of my feed and the app copying Twitter, Facebook and Google thinking a reordering algorithm will know what I will like better than myself.

Uber mapping never gets better. We all fell hard because its reliability was almost perfectly consistent at over-impressing in the early years. Now I can remember at least 2 years of waiting on the street, head buried in the phone wondering if my driver will make another wrong turn and I’ll be on the street another 20 minutes waiting for a new surge priced alternative. I don’t get where that went and instead dumb promotional junk comes in each release instead of fixing the core experience frustrating thousands of drivers and passengers everyday.

And iOS…

Dear iOS9, thanks for breaking my camera’s ability to focus on anything more that 3 feet away and deciding by default I should not have any location privacy by broadcasting to contacts and friends. WTF? Check your phone settings if you haven’t. At least I wasn’t dumb enough to download straight away — I heard you caused problems for a lot of people in the first 48 hours. Ohh yeah, also Apple it would be great if every app I looked up had more real reviews than fake ones.

The social web

Facebook, it’s funny to see you playing reruns of memories and at the same time make a big deal about new updates for e-commerce bots and the coming abilities to watch tv shows.

Mismatch => Prioritizing consumption of commercial content kills user generated content production

The memory reruns show you realize content quality isn’t good enough anymore. Why not attack it head on and refocus/reinvest in your core proposition and signal quality?

I no-longer respect the once drug-addictive numbers in the little red bubbles, because often none of the 27 notifications since I last visited are important. I happen to not be interested in another “7 ways to be happy”, or what my friends did 4 years ago. I only care about seeing what friends are up to, so as that continues to dilute, I’m inclined to visit less often and minimize time being exposed to overload that makes me forget after 3 second why I visited.

Is it too late to un-sell out? Do you care enough to prioritize the reasons people see better value in time spent with their friends in other places like snapchat? If not that’s cool, I really appreciate it all until now and would even pay a subscription for a simplified improved experience… But please don’t buy more instagrams and make them more like Facebook, when making Facebook more like Instagrams is what we really need.

Ohhh LinkedIn and Twitter. Both played cold moves shutting out developers who directly contributing to build data silos that once big enough to productize became unavailable.

Mismatch => Freely accessible information is hard to sell — often expensive to maintain

Another problem specifically with LinkedIN is similar to services that sell email lists (you never opted into), they generate revenue allowing users with no connection to message SPAM that bleeds by notification emails right in email my inbox.

Sure I could subscribe, potentially missing valuable communication, but I don’t want to miss out, so effectively I feel no control over the poor signal quality.

Mismatch => Freely accessible information is hard to sell — often expensive to maintain

Ride sharing

Lyft, I was there at the start. Immediately after you took your first big round, you lost me.

Step by step each thing that drew me in disappeared. First you took away donating/choosing the fare amount. Then you forced me to tip. When the app stopped being reliable, I concluded the VC money gave you cancer. It seems a pattern though, VC money didn’t correlate with better app/service reliability for Uber either.

I’m glad to see you kicking ass now, I don’t dislike where you ended up. But I’ll still never reinstall based on principal. You don’t stand for anything, even though half your brand is about community, you’ll always sell out for growth hoping no one will notice as you keep compromising.