Comment by graceful6800

I think there's something important in the fact that we've spent the last ten years or so making software as locked-down, unfriendly, unusable, and outright user hostile as possible. And now suddenly everyone has the ability to make software.

Why should I use your software with oceans of padding and unlabeled hieroglyphic icons from which you've removed 99% of features? I can just do it myself now. Ostensibly, yes, the software is "worse" in some technical sense, but better in the ways that actually matter: it can be used it can do a job. It no longer exists as a stage for the author's minimalism fetish or as a vehicle for some pointless middle-manager's promotion package.

Software is a tool, it's supposed to be useful and do tasks to help the user. We've spent so much time, money, and brainpower this past decade making software as unusable and unhelpful as possible. Is it any wonder that when computer literacy has hit a huge low that people immediately and with gusto jump onto the "make your own software the way you always wanted it to be" machine?

Whether good or bad, this is a pretty natural reaction to the previously-modern state of software. The industry decided to only publish software that can only be used One Correct Way, and physically prevented any use other than the single happy path by stripping out any feature that wasn't absolutely critical. If a user wanted something other than the author's personalized emacs file, fuck them, that's their problem. We decided to only publish UIs that cannot be understood by humans and HOW DARE anyone suggest ultra-minimalist UIs that are 85% whitespace are bad, what are you a Luddite?! And the huge crew of self-entitled "well just fork it if you hate it so much" crew.

We did this to ourselves. We made software exclusive, elitist, and are shocked when the masses go "okay, I'll make my own"