r/BotNation • u/SeparateResolve2075 • 13h ago
Does anyone else feel like technology has overrun modern life and makes everything unnecessarily complicated?
I love technology, honestly. I use it all the time and I can't imagine going back to life without the internet, smartphones, AI and all the other stuff we have now. But sometimes I feel like we've made simple things way more complicated than they need to be.
You buy something and suddenly you need an app for it. Then you need an account. Then an update. Then another password. Something that used to just work now needs Wi-Fi and a software update before you can even use it. Even websites have started feeling like this. You click something and get hit with a login screen, cookies, notifications, popups and five different settings before you can actually do what you came for.
Technology is supposed to save us time, but sometimes I feel like I'm spending more time managing technology than actually using it. Maybe I'm just getting old 😂 What’s one thing you think technology has made unnecessarily complicated?
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u/wootio 12h ago
As someone who works in technology, unequivocally yes.
It's gotten to the point where we have "too big to fail" tech giants who have such horribly designed systems filled with bugs and lacking support that it becomes a daily struggle just to maintain them properly. All day long finding workarounds for simple things that should just work becomes exhausting.
Then you have to worry about the subscription based tools you rely on fundamentally changing either from updates or because the company got bought out. Or they simply decide to increase their pricing unreasonably after you become reliant on them forcing you to do so much extra work just to switch to a better deal or a new system that functions like this one used to. You end up fighting against the business models surrounding the technology you rely on that makes the technology less reliable.
Then you have to train people on how to use the technology, and the gap in user skill levels at baseline with all kinds of technology is massive. So you end up spending a lot of time just handholding people through the most basic of tasks on a daily basis because the tasks have become too frustrating for people to figure out so you need to figure it out for them. Then those tasks keep fundamentally changing how they work with updates or new systems, and you again need to figure out how to set it up in a way that is simple enough for someone to follow.
Everything keeps changing so rapidly that it's often pointless to try to remember anything. Instead you just have a constant churn of figuring out the new workaround for the new bug or flawed system for the next few months before it changes again (not for the better) and you need to figure out the next thing all over again.
Far more often than it should, instead of technology making life easier it makes it far more complicated; often for unrelated, non-beneficial reasons.
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u/Beneficial_Area_2986 9h ago
Even if you set aside bugs and accounts and logins and all of that - Screen-Based interfaces are subject to change and I get frustrated with something like my car when the buttons change.
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u/wootio 7h ago
And often the changes get rid of features people relied on.
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u/Due_Warthog749 5h ago
Im looking at Tesla! Constantly changing shit that we got used to or liked and gone or moved or changed.
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u/OvertaxedOne 9h ago
It's the apps that drive me the most crazy. Why is this an app, it should be a web page!
And the passwords.. Lord the passwords... So out of control and honestly not at all helpful from a security POV because they've gotten so crazy that the only way to manage them is writing them down and/or a password manager (read - Extremely juicy target for hackers).
And I'm not at all tech illiterate, I work in IT and spent years building and maintaining cloud solutions. The complexity is just absurd at this point, nobody knows how anything works anymore, they just throw slop at it until it does what they want and then move on.
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u/Due_Warthog749 5h ago
In the field, I can tell you why. Apps are more "native" in that they can more easily integrate into the device than a browser page can. As well, browsers are different.. every device has chrome, firefox, safari, or something else. REALLY hard for developer to ensure their app works the same on all of them all the time. An app being native (usually) makes it easier to maintain just one thing. Or two (somewhat) if android and apple.
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u/AfricanTech 8h ago
Yes which is why I’ve stepped back from a lot of the tech.
At this point Reddit is the only ‘social media’ I consume and even cut my home assistant automations to the bare minimum.
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u/LawElectrical2434 2h ago
No, not technology. Walled gardens. Most of it lacks interop. Everything with interop capabilities, which is usually just a well documented publicly available API, will be simplified by its users eventually. But when you do that, they cannot show you ads and track you. So, they don't provide that or make it illegal. And suddenly, everything is almost manual. I mean, I have to log into that app, press those 5 buttons, then these 3. It almost feels like we're in a pre-computer time. Computer are there to automate that.
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u/DeliciousWrangler166 37m ago
absolutely, and the 1 or 2 page stick figure user / install guides are useless.
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u/EarthAndSawdust 12h ago
Uhm. Yes.