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Maybe but I do find that the software industry is particularly bad. So many software companies focus more on extracting cash from their customer than adding value. I see more and more Dark UI patterns.

I agree, though I wonder to what extent I see that only because I’m deeply embedded within the software world. I do also appreciate that caring about things other than money is a luxury that lots of individuals, game studios, film companies, record labels, etc. do not have.

I don’t think the CEO of EA games has a second job cleaning toilets. Caring about things other than short term profits is not a luxury. It is a personal value. Otherwise how come larger companies are always much worse than startups ?

It is not even about caring about things other than money. It is about wether you care more about short term profits than your brand. Increasingly it seems like companies are optimising for things that are easy to measure.

Public companies and companies with investors grow this corrosive idea that their valuation or stock price is something they are obligated to maximise. It’s weird, people talk about fiduciary duty but I don’t think you go to jail if you don’t do it. You just lose perceived value.

The last point you made there is also absolutely spot on. I’d extend it to say that they’re increasingly _only_ measuring the easiest things to measure.

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical, too. I spoke to a few people recently after posting that I don’t collect any analytics. Lots of suggestions about metrics I should care about, but not many people could convince me of concrete changes I could make to my content to improve it based on those metrics.

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I especially feels this about web analytics. It seems very unreliable. No one seems to knows how many users are blocking their tracking scripts. You are basically relying on Google to report how accurate Google analytics is.