Comment by nostrademons
1 day ago
I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
I divide up the world into the pre-iPad world and the post-iPad world.
Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.