Users of some of the most popular websites and apps in the world have been noticing some unfortunate trends in their ease of use.
An opinion is emerging as to why companies such as Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META) and Amazon (AMZN) have seemed to neglect pain-free usability of their products in favor of a different priority.
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That priority is the companies' stock values, writes Ed Zitron in Business Insider on March 27.
Searches on Google call up pages full of pesky sponsored links. And many of the non-sponsored links are often pages that are highly optimized for search engines that exist to generate revenue for themselves rather than to provide a searcher with useful answers.
"In short, Google's flagship service now sucks," wrote Zitron.
Zitron expresses a similar sentiment about both Facebook and Amazon.
"Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users' feeds with sponsored (or 'recommended') content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant," he said.
"And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year," Zitron continued, "the 'junkification of Amazon' has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want -- instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system."
Zitron believes that Wall Street has oversized influence on recent decisions the companies are making.
"All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user's experience has become subordinate to the company's stock price," Zitron wrote.
Zitron suggested that the companies are interfering with and manipulating users in pursuit of in-the-moment goals regarding their performance in the stock market.
"Instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors," he wrote.
"As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse -- it's harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for information, and more difficult to socialize with people."
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