Utilitarianism

Strava intends to float itself on the stock exchange. In my experience of Twitter, Facebook and other social media apps this is the beginning of the end for the app. In my experience when an app such as Zwift gets VC funding it loses control of its app. Users go from being the customer to investors becoming the client. In this situation user experience degrades continuously. Years ago, when I was using Zwift, they got VC funding, and within days bluetooth pairing between the speed and cadence sensors and Zwift failed and their solution was “Have you tried turning it off and on again” rather than “Which devices are you using, we’ll see if we can recrate the bug and patch the issue?

Today I saw the headline “Content creator camps help kids become online influencers” and to me, this represents a nightmare, rather than a dream. It represents a nightmare rather than a dream because the notion of creating content to sell, to influence, and to market, rather than to amuse, inform, educate and entertain seems wrong. YouTube and Instagram are awful. They’re awful because people are creating content to get views, likes and subscribers, rather than to produce individual videos of special interest.