In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment".

People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.

The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.

So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".

This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.

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drfloyd51 a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

There are a lot of ads where you are “empowered” to choose between provided choices.

“Manage your privacy your way! Simply sign in to choose what is right for you!”

Nah, I am going to use something else.

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ryandrake an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.

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munificent 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm not sure when it happened

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

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vitally3643 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

	▲	rapnie 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> We stopped considering the user as a human being Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.
	▲	carlosjobim 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wish! Most companies try to make it extremely difficult for visitors to actually purchase their product online.

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austinthetaco 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.

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osjdiwnfiwjfi 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread.

No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.