> it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside

I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry.

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iknowstuff 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Its called externalized cost and its as real in software as it is IRL

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GTP 21 hours ago | parent [-]

So the cost is there, it's just not paid (directly) by the developer. But we all end up paying someone else's externalized cost, included said developer that is paying some other developers' externalized costs.

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aziaziazi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Consider also the missed market opportunity: my personal devices are 13yo laptop and 9yo phone. If an app isn’t compatible or makes it lag, I delete it and download a competing one. I’m not alone, and yes: I have money to spend on your app. I just don’t want/need to upgrade hardware that often.

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josephg 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah. I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post doing the math on that. If I spend $2000 on a computer, and that gets me a certain amount of ram and cpu and so on, we can figure out a dollar figure on that bloat.

Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software.

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jorvi 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode.

The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.

	▲	HappMacDonald an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Or they could just send the video uncompressed and then it would take even less hardware resources to decode on the client side. Why, in a sense it would be a lot more like decoding analog television signals at that point. (Not least of which since few clients would have the network bandwidth to handle more than 360-480p of that ;)