How to resist short-term gains that come at your users’ expense.
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash
Tech companies increasingly put profits before their customers, making decisions that benefit the business but hurt the user experience. Whether it’s forcing users to agree to restrictive terms or share information that is irrelevant to product functionality, or charging extra for features customers already paid for, they treat building product in an extractivist way. In the long run, it’s not a good look — regulators crack down, lawsuits pile up, and users walk away.
Your assumptions are your windows on the world
Building product is opinionated: you have to have an assumption from where to start in order to reach your objectives.
Have a point of view on what you think the customer will say that will lead them to be really excited about your product.¹
To me, that means taking educated guesses (assumptions) at what we think the desired outcome is (vision), balancing that with communicated business goals (growth), and trying to set the best sequence of implementation (tactics) — one that maximizes net value at every stage to both customers and business (strategy).
At its core, whether you’re an individual contributor in a large enterprise or part of a small startup team, working in product management comes down to how well you can understand and contextualize the needs of your stakeholders. This context is shaped by exposure to different people, perspectives, and realities. It’s not just about the information they share, but about recognizing the broader stories, emotions, and experiences that shape their beliefs and behaviors. As Maria Papadouris reminds us,
Facts alone rarely carry weight enough to change the minds of entire groups. Emotions and lived experiences are what really influence our perceptions of the world.²
With exposure, we expand the scope of things we consider similar, analogous or even possible, drastically changing our baseline: we learn about different problems and approaches to solving them, and enhance our problem-solving vocabulary. That forms the basis of strategy, which in turn greatly enhances the breadth and scope of our assumptions.
If you don’t have access to other times and other places and other things that have happened, it is very hard to think strategically about the situation you are in. Because there isn’t a science of strategy. It is not like physics. It is not like engineering, where you can figure out the equations of stress on a beam and say how thick the beam has to be. It’s not like that! A lot of it is based on analogy to previous human experience.³
As I’ve said before, objectives are qualitative by definition. No product can be created or changed without a qualitative decision. Ours is the job of identifying what jobs the customers want to do, drawing a subjective line in the sand and defining what vision we think best serves our users, and working with the product team to decide the best-suited tactics and strategy to achieve that vision while promoting growth in the process.
But what happens when business objectives become narrowly focused on growth at any cost? Product teams become alienated from the customers. Decision on what to build is taken from the team and over time companies become narrowly focused on business goals (usually revenue). In such cases, user needs can be — and often are — disregarded at best, trampled at worst, leading to user-hostile decisions that create friction, frustration, and eventually, churn.
Heads, I Win; Tails, You Lose
Earlier this year, Roku updated it’s terms of service (ToS). The updated version asks users to enter a pre-arbitration process meant to make it harder for them to sue the company. Like other digital and electronic products these days, the agreement prevents the user from making use of the product until they consent to the terms of service. That means the user may have hundreds of dollars locked in an object they can’t use. As Charlie Warzel wrote,
On one hand, this isn’t so unusual — apps frequently force users to accept terms-of-service updates before proceeding. But on the other, it feels galling to be locked out of using your television altogether over a legal agreement: “Until I press ‘Agree’ my tv is essentially being held hostage and rendered useless,” one Roku customer posted on Reddit. “I can’t even change the HDMI input.⁴
Roku’s strategy is rooted in the fact that its true product is not the physical device but the streaming platform it offers. This is evident from the company’s blog, which emphasizes the service more than the hardware itself. Notably, Roku has even drwn plans to use the same HDMI port to monitor video signals and inject advertisements during pauses.⁵
This is user hostility, and it is part of the enshittification process: after locking in customers and deteriorating the product, some companies resort to being hostile to any customer behavior in an attempt to prevent any deviation from the course. Roku is not the first company to do so, and certainly won’t be the last. To name a few recent examples:
Facebook forced users to adopt Messenger by separating it from the main app, giving millions of users a my-way-or-the-highway “choice”: comply or lose key communication features and access to your connections. It pushed users to adopt new terms and functionality that primarily serve the company’s data strategy rather than user needs.Amazon has been accused of using data from third-party sellers to create and promote its own competing products at lower prices. This practice exploits sellers who trust the platform, treating them as sources of market intelligence rather than partners. Over time, this behavior reduces competition, as smaller sellers are pushed out, limiting customer choice and fostering distrust.Tesla sells certain software features, like battery range and full self-drive, as expensive pay-to-unlock options even though the hardware already supports them. They have even disabled features that were already paid for when the car was resold. This user-hostile approach, which creates artificial scarcity, can erode customer trust and loyalty.
This pattern of creating artificial demand to lock users into a new system has become a disturbing norm in tech. Den Delimarsky lists over ten simple yet recurring instances of unnecessary requirements in tech products whose only purpose is to maximize gains for the company at all costs: from providing data to the company (which it can later sell or rent for other companies to build products upon) via ‘a BIOS update that requires giving an app access to devices in your local network in order to be installed’ to preventing the user from interfering with its so called “intellectual property” — ‘greatly reducing functionality in a website because the user accessed it through a browser instead of the app’.⁶
Building product based on harassing and inconveniencing users is a short term game. Such extractivist mentality — treating users and customers as sources of gain or data to be extracted, as opposed to persons whose lives you want to improve — is a sure way to reduce friction between your product and the competition, and your customer will churn as soon as they can. In order to prevent that from happening, companies attempt to monopolize the market.⁷
As individuals, we must acknowledge what kind of business we are helping to build. And as difficult as it may be, we must also face our own share of the responsibility for building these products. A company is not a faceless entity: it is made of people who take decisions in its name.⁸
The power to do good is also the power to do harm
When companies adopt user-hostile actions, they are ultimately abdicating from their social role. They lose sight of the broader role they can play in society: fostering community, promoting transparency, and contributing to user empowerment. Instead, in this spiraling digital landscape, several companies have faced significant backlash for adopting user-hostile approaches that prioritize profits over user experience:
Facebook suffered a massive hit to its reputation after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, leading to a £500,000 fine in the UK.⁹Uber faced public outcry after its secretive Greyball software was exposed, ultimately contributing to the resignation of its CEO.¹⁰EA was forced to remove the pay-to-win loot box system from Star Wars Battlefront II after regulatory scrutiny and outcry from players.¹¹Microsoft angered users by automatically installing web apps without user consent, disrupting their systems and raising concerns about user autonomy.¹²LinkedIn faced a class-action lawsuit over sending unwanted email invitations to user contacts, resulting in a $13 million settlement.¹³T-Mobile’s Binge On program throttled video streaming without clear user consent, raising net neutrality concerns.¹⁴
Each of these cases highlights risks of user-hostile business decisions: regulatory action, lawsuits, and loss of consumer trust. Even if one can argue that currently long-term consequences do not outweigh short-term gains, the growing cynicism among younger generations of users and consumers may become a hefty price for the overall market. The impact will be felt at a generational scale.
The argument is quite clear: this isn’t just bad business — it’s unethical. Consumers should not be manipulated into sacrificing their data, control, or autonomy in order to use a product they already paid for. Constantly backtracking on what the customer gives in exchange for the product without clear justification is a sure way to make users view your company as untrustworthy.
In the long run, this extractive approach is bad for business. A company built on short-term gains will lose out to competitors that genuinely care about user needs and trust. Ethical business practices, on the other hand, see users as partners in innovation and stakeholders in growth, not as resources to be mined. And users are happy to be part of that process.
Instead of focusing on controlling user behavior, businesses should shift to a model of transparency and user empowerment. Companies like Buffer, Mozilla, Basecamp, and Linear demonstrate how avoiding user hostility is not only possible but also good for business. They thrive by prioritizing transparency, privacy, and respect for their users, which in turn fosters deep loyalty and long-term success. By treating users as partners in their journey rather than as resources to exploit, these businesses prove that ethical practices can align with profitability. In a market where trust is increasingly valuable, their approach sets a strong example for how companies can grow sustainably while maintaining user respect.
Notes
¹ Jag Duggal @ Lenny’s Podcast, Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better, May 16, 2024.
² Maria Papadouris @ JSTOR, The humanities as a compass: Navigating a post-truth era, Sep 24, 2024.
³ Richard Rumelt @ Lenny’s Podcast, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Jan 21, 2024.
⁴ Charlie Warzel @ The Atlantic, Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility, Apr 11, 2024.
⁵ Janko Roettgers @ lowpass, Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads, Apr 04, 2024.
⁶ Den Delimarsky, The Rise Of User-Hostile Software, Aug 23, 2021.
⁷ Look no further than current antitrust trials Google and others are facing:
Jan Wolfe @ Wall Street Journal, Big Tech Braces for Wave of Antitrust Rulings in 2024, Jan 01, 2024.
Zena Assaad @ The Conversation, Why are Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta facing antitrust lawsuits and huge fines? And will it protect consumers?, Jan 23, 2024.
Edith Hancock and Josh Sisco @ Politico, With dueling approaches, the US and EU hit the tech giants hard, May 04, 2024.
⁸ Victor Tangermann @ Futurism, OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman, Sep 26, 2024.
Krystal Hu and Kenrick Cai @ Reuters, Exclusive: OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity, Sep 26, 2024.
⁹ Alex Hern and David Pegg @ The Guardian, Facebook fined for data breaches in Cambridge Analytica scandal, Jul 11, 2018.
¹⁰ Timothy B. Lee @ Vox, The secret Uber program that prompted a federal criminal investigation, explained, May 5, 2017.
¹¹ Paul Tassi @ Forbes, EA Now Seems Legitimately Terrified Of Loot Boxes After ‘Battlefront 2’, Apr 17, 2018.
¹² Sean Hollister @ The Verge, Microsoft just force restarted my Windows PC again to install more unwanted apps, Oct 17, 2020.
¹³ Denver Nicks @ Time, LinkedIn to Pay $13 Million in Spam Settlement, Oct 6, 2015.
¹⁴ Jeremy Gillula @ Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF Confirms: T-Mobile’s Binge On Optimization is Just Throttling, Applies Indiscriminately to All Video, Jan 4, 2016.
Build trust, not hostility was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
