How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
Through the platforms they choose to use. Coarse and inefficient and frustrating? Yes. Effective at demonstrating mass preferences and thereby imposing those preferences on platforms? Also yes.
> That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
Using an ad-blocker is obviously extremely different than what I'm describing here.
An ad-blocker is a composable feature that you can graft onto any particular market.
What I'm describing is a relative prioritization among different features, where one has to rank what they truly value, and sacrifice some of the lower-ranked things for the higher-ranked ones. That's categorically different than just being able to flip a switch and turn off ads and save bandwidth with negligible downside.
> Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
This is irrelevant - see above comment about relative prioritization. Features are one of the "dozens of things to optimize for in software development" that I mentioned above. I can point to many platforms where the bloated ones are winning - because they have the features that users want, and they value those more highly. That's my whole point.
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.