Bored by Tech

I’m so fatigued by tech products/software companies/streaming services (whatever they are). None of their changes are interesting to me, on the contrary I have to roll my eyes so far back in my head, I’m afraid they might get stuck. Why does Netflix have to go into gaming? Why does Spotify have to push podcasts so hard? (I have many thoughts about how Spotify sees podcasts and how they want to transform an open part of the free and open web into their corporate money-machine, but that’s for a different post).

I am naïve when it comes to capitalism and growth; and in 13820 days of my life so far, nobody has been able to explain the need for growth to me (to be honest, I didn’t care about it at all for the first ~4000 days).

Does anyone remember the earlier days of Spotify—when there were Spotify apps? You could connect it to Pitchfork or Rolling Stone Magazine and listen to the reviewed albums directly in the review. The Putpat integration was glorious, you could choose up to five different genres or artists, weigh them, and get a unique playlist based on what you chose. Lazify was another great one, Spotify Song Radio is similar, but Lazify didn’t consider your listening history when creating these playlists.
Today, the Spotify app is really buggy. It seems that with every update they add more UI/UX bugs because they add more features I’m not interested in to their existing app. Yet, your library is still capped at 30,000 songs, once you hit that you can’t add more songs to it even if you delete old ones. The algorithm seems to become dumber by the day and can only recommend songs that you’ve just been listening to. I can’t remember when I last discovered new music through my “Discover Weekly” playlist. Music and music-discovery, the app UI, etc. are getting worse every day, but Spotify is only concerned with disrupting a different market.

So has Netflix decided it has reached the end of the video-streaming path and there is nothing left to improve in videos; therefore they need to go into gaming? Is there any good argument besides some vague growth aspect for Automattic acquiring Pocket Casts? Does Spotify not see any need in improving their original core business, which was streaming music?