A piece of software is what sits between yourself and your future at a lot of times everyday, unless you are a pen and paper person.
All softwares have become a part of our everyday life because they do a very productive and useful job. Otherwise they won’t be around. However, on top of that, there are two kinds of softwares: those that do nothing more and those that do a little bit more. Consider Linkedin. It allows you to connect with people and read their blog posts. But it also shows you a random post on it’s infinite feed. A piece of information you didn’t ask for, somebody’s great achievement that ‘turns you off’ and makes your day a little less efficient. It makes your day a little worse. You know what else takes something away from you instantly and causes you to engage more with it and reclaim some lost thing back? For me it is stock market trading and gambling. (I mean I have experienced day trading so I know how it feels. Not that I’m an active addict.)
Therefore, this second kind of software is not just a tool that can become part of your productivity, like a cron job or a calculator. It will also tell you how you are supposed to do things, tell you about places where you should be, put you in a comparison rabbit hole, and try to control how your behaviour.
Instagram posts constantly try to test and explore your lifestyle preferences, sexual preferences and tries to update/modify them. Twitter does the same for your political opinions. In fact this is a little more than just modifying. What would you call it if people from your neighbourhood could randomly show up in front of you during the whole day and squirt a water gun at your face? It’s kind of bullying isn’t it? And out of Stockholm syndrome you may start expecting it more and more every day. Looking out for them every few minutes or so, maybe. Occasionally, you will have an achievement to brag about and you’ll get a big gun yourself and you’ll be the shooter that day, just for revenge purposes. But the idea of taking revenge from your social network will modify your thoughts permanently and make you a little more scared all the time.
If we therefore have to make something better than Linkedin, it will simply be a tool that removes the infinite feed and lets you connect, and text people. By removing some features, we can end up making a better app.