I know I go on about this, but was thinking about Twitter and how we’ve replaced RSS with Twitter — which is far worse. Proprietary, difficult to search, nearly impossible to parse and character-limited. Twitter is inferior in every way one cares to name to a blog.

We seem to be doing this everywhere. For instance instead of an actually-useful OS, we’ve now gotten random spy-tiles flying around the screen with eye-shattering fonts, unusable UIs and more padding than a undergrad’s English paper.

I call it sometimes “The Triumph of the Morons” but “moron” is a nebulous term that I use in the same sense that Republicans use the word “terrorist” — it just means something that they and I do not like. Because really many of the people promulgating and supporting these bad and harmful ideas in user interface design are high-IQ people who do believe in their mission.

Are they right that democratizing something requires that you completely abandon a large portion of your users as the product becomes so simple a two-year-old could use it (and alas, no one else)? Or is that just an artifact of ravening capitalism as currently practiced?

My contention is that it is even deeper than that.

I’ve strayed far from the topic and it’s admittedly not well-developed even in my own mind, but what I’m arguing is that the reasons cited for poor and non-customizable user interfaces are spurious, not justified by the usually-cited pseudo-capitalist reasoning of lack of resources or money. These justifications fail because in most cases, it requires more resources — both developer time and company money — to jerk out features and to suppress discussion of this decision than it does just to leave them in.

Second, as features are removed in most cases the project declines or is rejected (see Windows 8 and Mozilla Firefox for recent examples). So the “reasons” for making user-harmful changes are transparent and phony even by the transgressors’ own standards of evidence.

So just capitalism and the desire for profit cannot explain it. One must look deeper. And that’s what I’m attempting to do.

If there is not a sociology of failure, I intend to start one.