True.
“Things changed in 2008, during the financial crisis, kicking off Decade 2, what I’ll call "the slide." Lasting from 2008 to 2018, it was a time of UX teams seeing diminished influence in the organization. There were many factors at play, but a major one was the exodus of financialization experts from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Suddenly the "get rich quick" mentality that had caused the 2008 crash was being adopted by senior leadership at Big Tech firms. Now it was data and algorithms, not UX, that mattered most.”
A major shift post-iPhone was a mobile-first computer world which meant that people were stuck somewhere (there’s only one “window” there and we can’t escape what they’re sniffing) while the backend was gathering all kinds of data about how we behave.
Another big shift here was Farmville. It spun the gambling/addictive treats in UX that we now see everywhere. Farmville’s business model expanded way beyond games.
There used to be some kind of respect for the consumer. We are now simply vessels of money that they all try to convert to infinite streams of revenue. Seems healthy!