futatorius

A strategic objective is to understand the most efficient way of disabling that propaganda firehose.

the west represents liberal democracy and the east represents authoritarianism

That has never aligned closely with the east/west dividing line. In the 1930s, Western countries like Germany, Italy and Spain were controlled by fascists, who along with the Soviet Union, were trying to impose authoritarianism on the rest of Europe. At that time, there wasn't much democracy in the East because anything worth stealing was still controlled by imperialists. And since WW2, some Asian countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India for a while) have ditched authoritarianism.

Forced speech is just as odious as restricted speech. And with Trump and his band of wreckers, you can be sure that the end state will be a combination of both. Platforms will be forced to disseminate MAGA propaganda, and any user with the temerity to talk back will be banned.

OK, now take that to the next step: what do you do when optimizing ease of implementation and support limits the user needs that can be met? How do you decide which objective is higher priority?

I would say, it’s them caring about the product and their needs, rather than the underlying stack.

That's the idealistic fairy tale that only the most fatuous of UX people believe. But anyone who looks at any process closely enough will soon realize that a system's stakeholders often have objectives that are in conflict with each other. It's not all about the users, it's about low operations cost, it's about collecting and selling data on user behavior, it's about minimizing support costs, improving monetization, up-selling, cross-selling, and a number of other things the users neither want nor need. And that is the root cause of enshittification.

every one of them sucks

They went to the cheapest bidders, and those poor devs in Chennai have no fucking clue about proper UX design.

Do you know why banks are still running COBOL on new, old architecture, IBM mainframes? Sure, it’s in part due to risk aversion, ignorance and inertia. But it’s also because, if in the end the result is the same, then the tech stack doesn’t matter.

I've done extensive consulting for financial firms, including mainframe-replacement projects, and that's not the reason. There are two reasons: banks regard IT as a cost center, so they systematically underinvest. They never budget for lifecyle maintenance, they just kick the can down the road as far as they can. In addition to that, hardly anyone who wrote that COBOL code is still alive, and when it was written in the 1970s or 80s, the requirements and design were seldom documented, and after decades of code maintenance, they're no longer accurate anyway. So to replace that COBOL, you have to reverse-engineer the whole business process and the app that embodies it. And you can't do like-for-like replacement, since a lot of the business process is actually workarounds for the limitations of that legacy system. And it's even worse than that: sometimes that COBOL has some custom IBM 360 assembler behind it, and nobody remembers what that shit does either, and finding people who know that, or CICS, or the quirks of ancient DB/2 versions, is even harder than finding someone skillful who can write COBOL. So until there are new requirements, usually new regulations that cannot be weaseled out of, they let that sleeping dog lie.

They care about your site being compromised or down, and your choice of tech stack has a lot to do with how likely those things will be.

I know a lot of people who have moved away from smartphones to basic feature phones because of the expense and annoyance, as well as the relentless intrusive surveillance.

Economics is much harder to understand when you realize how little the basic fundamentals actually tell you.

And now imagine if you've got some dimwitted pudge-ball rich kid with daddy issues, who admires tough guys and wants to act like he's a mobster. The asset is handed to you on a plate in that case. No need for blackmail, flattery and a bit of dirty money is all it'd take.

It has enough predictive power to be useful: if Trump were a wholly owned Russian asset, what would he do? In every single case, using that hypothesis, that's what he has actually done. So his motive is irrelevant, how much he's aware of his being a Russian stooge is irrelevant, but his actions are, and will continue to be, painfully fucking relevant.