It's probably safe to claim that part of it (and what likely killed Flickr) is that the original owners are usually more able to make coherent product features and explorations. They built something in the field because they knew something about the field.

Once they're bought up by some other company, in particular any conglomerate, it gets worked on by a bunch of people who are experts at building products in general, not experts in that product's field. So they naturally try stuff that is less of a fit for the field it was originally targeted at... and potentially a better fit for "can make any money at all", I'm not trying to claim the new owners are all idiots. Just that the driving interests and expertise have shifted from what originally made it compelling, and that'll nearly always become less coherent as a product. At least until they have fully rebuilt it in their image.

And then purchasers in the same field can sometimes escape this "now built by generalists" trap. Sometimes.

You raise a good point but you are too generous. The buyer tends to be mercenary. I think generic "professional" management only ends well in mature products and companies, where the main task is to increase efficiency. I don't expect the buyer to innovate the product.

Conglomerates are IMO almost always mercenary and damaging, yeah.

They're far from the only company purchases happening though, e.g. many small companies that grow too quickly sell to something larger to simply have the manpower and money to handle the new scale, and sometimes that ends up better for everyone. You just don't usually hear about these because they quietly work, and they don't involve globally-recognized names.

Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?

I think its because you need feature parity with smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity, otherwise it becomes too hard to use with just your fingers, compared to a desktop website where you have a keyboard and mouse to use outside the screen.

This is an often used argument by PMs, definitely. Kind of a headshot on anything sophisticated

The fact that it also kills known useful things like VS, Photoshop isn't recognized and we continue to allow this invalid argument

> smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity

this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.

image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.

IMHO it's both. There will always be the possiblity of gaining more users by dumbing down the app, but the more things dumb down in general the dumber people get. It's a positive feedback loop.

> Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier,

> or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?

or, in search of increased customer growth, is deeper product penetration into the bottom half of the sophistication bell-curve continually sieving ideas through fewer synaptic connections/simpler semantic nets

The average user used to be an 18-40 year old person with post-secondary education, in a mid to high income country, using a laptop.

Now, The average user is a 10-65 year old person using a smartphone.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Companies dumb down their products to appeal to the masses, who then get dumber because they have nothing nudging them to get better. It's a vicious cycle imo.

>Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction loops too but that wasn't the main focus.

Though Flickr does exist (owned by SmugMug). No idea how their finances are. I expect so so.

You're right that community has gone away to a large degree. But I'm not sure how much power Flickr had to influence that other than becoming Instagram--which the prosumer crowd would mostly have hated.

Sometimes the mainstream crowd moves on from you and your choices are to more or less either let them or adapt in ways that aren't true to your vision.

Yes, in this case I don't know. Flickr originally was developed by Stuart Butterfeld (among others) and he for one went on to do another amazing job at Slack. So clearly product was awesome there. Personally for me flickr got super slow and crappy for me, and also deleted my dad's 40k photo archive w/no warning and ignored appeal messages from multiple people on BS charges (He'd scanned an old newspaper article mentioning his father which tripped an auto-copyright system). Prior to that it was the clear market leader. But it basically stopped ever being linked to or showing up later on. So I think Yahoo effectively sped up the decline. It's not clear whether something like insta would always have won. Or even whether instagram is actually even economically ideal right now.