EnragedParrot

It doesn't, but I've used Apple stuff for going on 25 years now and it is doubtful I will care to move to something different any time soon, so it works for me.

Always the tradeoff with Apple is choice and flexibility versus a seamless and pleasant user experience.

Apple makes this experience as seamless as I think it possibly can be. (As long as you use Safari...). All my passwords synced across all devices all the time, instantly available with faceID or or my fingerprint. Apply pay makes checking out of most online retailers as fast as using my fingerprint or double-clicking the side button on my phone. Passkeys generally starting to replace passwords on many major sites, making the process even faster.

Same for me, I honestly think people are just trying to find things to complain about. I've shopped in the Apple store many times and it's been quick and easy, no hassling by the employees.

I totally agree and everyone should be able to work in their preferred way. I'm very wary of any efforts to entice more people back into offices, though, as it's absolutely not being driven by a desire to offer more flexibility.

I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back into an office, and would only ever consider an in-person role as a stopgap measure while I job hunt.

People have different preferences, but I will never, ever, ever again in my life voluntarily commute hours every day in standstill traffic to a bland, lifeless corporate hellhole of an office to have disinterested polite banter with random people I have nothing in common with to do a job that is entirely based around sitting at my computer. Not when I can work comfortably in the peaceful surroundings of my own home office, decorated and set up exactly how a I want, or even at a local coffee shop (or halfway across the country while visiting family for a month), eat lunch with my wife, walk our dog mid-day, and spend my mornings and evenings peacefully getting household stuff done and relaxing.

The improvement to my quality of life that remote work has produced is so monumental that it's hard to even envision how I coped most days before.

This strikes me as a, "poor carpenter blames his tools" situation. Obviously if a business does a bad job considering the needs of their engineers then the needs of their engineers won't be met, but that doesn't mean that the modern development environment is the problem.

I don't think there is laziness in falling behind the technology curve - the things that worked ten years ago still work today and if you're shipping code then what you're doing is working. But new technologies aren't overly complex and they generally make a developer's life easier, not harder, but they all come with a learning curve. And the landscape evolves quickly, so in order to leverage them you have to stay on top of it.

Lack of dev familiarity.

A well-tooled development environment takes minutes to set up.

This sounds like a symptom of you falling behind the technology curve more than a problem with the technology curve. Most people are achieving vastly more with newer tech than ever could have been done in the early 2000s. You've gotta be looking through some densely rose colored glasses if you think that that the web in the 2000s was just as powerful as the web of today.

I hear the argument being made, it just doesn't make any sense. We are using React to do things vanilla JS could do eyears ago. That doesn't mean React doesn't make doing those things easier. I like Svelte as well, but it likely wouldn't exist today without lessons learned from other frameworks like React.

I think you nailed it. In reality from a business standpoint, Reddit should have taken Selig's offer and bought out Apollo and built the main app around it and injected ads, maybe offered an overpriced subscription to minimize ads for premium users. I think nobody would have complained a bit.

There's also the fact that those complex solutions aren't engineered by a solo developer but by teams, typically even multiple teams each working on a compartmentalized piece of the whole thing.

But now you have to subtract from the "plenty of people" those who are angered and disillusioned over Reddit's treatment of existing community mods and power users. You're whittling down the population of people who actually care about the subreddits they moderate and contribute to. So yeah, you could get them moderated, but the site would mostly go to garbage.

Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all of the content is driven by users, and those users are primarily made up of a small and passionate minority. The downfall of this fact from the business side is that Reddit as a company needs to appease those people because without their contributions, nobody would want to use the site.

That's a valid point, but on the flip side, Reddit's content is user driven, and 99% of users never post or contribute anything, they're just on the site to consume content posted by that 1% of power users. Those power users are really the "extremely online" people who are angry about this. If you don't have moderators running subreddits and power users posting quality content, reddit doesn't have a product.