Shareholders are the customers now. People are livestock to be milked dry, worked to the bone, and chopped up and served to corporations.

It's like they're in a race to see who cand develop the shittiest product.

Because it is. That's why it is called enshittification.

They’re not ultimately making it for people to use. They’re creating a playground for AI to work and learn in, thereby letting their AI access human behavior data that other companies don’t yet have.

Basically it’s a ploy to get a novel set of proprietary data in hopes that their AI gets smarter than the competition.

AI is so hot right now and these incompetent doorknobs have FOMO.

I bet you plenty of people absolutely do want this.

Most people can barely use a computer and would love this if it worked well.

You forget a huge percentage of users can barely access their emails.

Lemmy is very techcentric and most users on here are far from the average consumer on technical literacy.

You just aren't the target audience.

I could see the appeal as open source, self hosted software.

Not from data vacuums.

They are monopolists/oligopolists, operating like a cartel.

They create new paradigms as they please, because there is no alternative.

Consumer preferences don't mean dick in a highly uncompetetive market with absurd costs to entry.

Because people are the product, and these anti-features improve the extortability of that product.

They will implement it, they are just trying different methods until one sticks.