You do realize of course that every service that now employs all these dark patterns we're complaining about was already profitable and making good money, and that simply isn't good enough? Revenue has to increase quarter-to-quarter otherwise your stock will tank.

It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, but every product absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the internet wants an email and a password so they can have you activate an account, and sell a known active email to their ad partners.

I wish I could put 10 votes on this instead of just one. It just bothers me how success can be defined as something absurdly impossible like that.

We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)

ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.