Progressive culture pushing change for change sake definitely sets the stage for constant updates but I think the answer is far more mundane.
Corporations are filled to the brim with useless people. People with inflated job titles and salaries to match it. They have to do SOMETHING to feel important and UI changes are an outlet for that. Someone who finally gets bored of surfing tiktok all day looks for something to do. Or the overseer of project managers of user experience wants to pad their resume for a career upgrade but can't really do anything calls a meeting and demands that we HAVE to modernize the interface to be more inclusive.
I haven't been tracking it closely but I assume that as time goes on, UIs are moving away from words to keep to with illiteracy and globalization.
This is a bingo. You justify your existence and advance your career by solving problems. If there are no problems to solve, you invent them. I see that shit every day.
No Product Manager ever wormed their way into an executive management position by saying of their product "it works pretty good and customers love it, so let's just leave it at that and just fix issues as they arise"
If they treat it like a hobby project there may be a "coolness" factor at play
If they're hiring programmers maybe the programmers want to justify their salaries
Downside of a small company is it's possible to be "done" with the single product that company produces with no ambition to do anything else. If you're the owner and making money that's great because you can "sit on the beach"; if you're an employee it's not.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned their stated reasoning: They can't easily focus on bugfixes and improvements when there are two codepaths in production simultaneously. They want all sites on a unified style and code, regardless of what that style is.
There's so many beneficial changes they could make to the actual way it works.
Like add a "conversation" sort mode that is +1 for upvotes and -0.5 for downvotes and make it the default. Boom, you've instantly improved the quality of debate a hundredfold.
People that only want to hear an echo chamber can turn it back. But instead we get profile pictures... on an semi-anonymous forum.
Progressive culture pushing change for change sake definitely sets the stage for constant updates but I think the answer is far more mundane.
Corporations are filled to the brim with useless people. People with inflated job titles and salaries to match it. They have to do SOMETHING to feel important and UI changes are an outlet for that. Someone who finally gets bored of surfing tiktok all day looks for something to do. Or the overseer of project managers of user experience wants to pad their resume for a career upgrade but can't really do anything calls a meeting and demands that we HAVE to modernize the interface to be more inclusive.
I haven't been tracking it closely but I assume that as time goes on, UIs are moving away from words to keep to with illiteracy and globalization.
This is a bingo. You justify your existence and advance your career by solving problems. If there are no problems to solve, you invent them. I see that shit every day.
Pretty much this.
No Product Manager ever wormed their way into an executive management position by saying of their product "it works pretty good and customers love it, so let's just leave it at that and just fix issues as they arise"
But...that's exactly what the consumer wants. Stability coupled with a good experience is how you grow your brand.
But that isn't how a PM grows their career. Principle-Agent problem.
A PM that sabotages a product intentionally is one that should be incapable of having a career. This utterly retarded.
Possible reasons:
If they treat it like a hobby project there may be a "coolness" factor at play
If they're hiring programmers maybe the programmers want to justify their salaries
Downside of a small company is it's possible to be "done" with the single product that company produces with no ambition to do anything else. If you're the owner and making money that's great because you can "sit on the beach"; if you're an employee it's not.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned their stated reasoning: They can't easily focus on bugfixes and improvements when there are two codepaths in production simultaneously. They want all sites on a unified style and code, regardless of what that style is.
There's so many beneficial changes they could make to the actual way it works.
Like add a "conversation" sort mode that is +1 for upvotes and -0.5 for downvotes and make it the default. Boom, you've instantly improved the quality of debate a hundredfold.
People that only want to hear an echo chamber can turn it back. But instead we get profile pictures... on an semi-anonymous forum.