Brianna DeWert

Administrations that run tech for school Chromebooks, downloaded apps, and streaming services are all susceptible to being negatively impacted by feedback.

The people in charge of our websites, social media and apps have a variety of responsibilities to address. They make sure the overall performance of the service works as well as adding or taking away functions from users. While praise and positive feedback mainly lead towards a good reputation, hate and disappointment often lead to numerous consequences that can affect the usage and success of a service. Why is it though, that the authorities that run a majority of our tech are inexperienced with appealing to their target audience?

Schools have had a history with blocking features on school Chromebooks. While disabling video games and social media is understandable, there are news websites and other sources that remain blocked, which makes researching for classes or finding evidence for a paper difficult. Additionally, with the ability to screenshot being previously taken last year, students had difficulty finding images to put on their presentations. Downloading an image isn’t as simple, because many of the websites these images are found on are blocked too, so screenshotting was one of the only options to obtain an image. These functions are important for students because they are really the only way students can complete homework well on their school account. While one could argue that using a personal account can avoid all the trouble for these situations, that perspective shows that these students, highschoolers, should be able to have access to these resources, so that they aren’t prevented from finding information they need for classes.

Aside from administrations for technology in school, there are occasions where apps too are run in a questionable way. While some features are more insignificant than others, like switching the places of the Instagram reels button and the Instagram chat button for no reason, other changes fail to make sense. 

A very infamous example would be the recent change circulating massive attention on the internet involving Roblox, which recently removed the chat function for users. To get it back, a player would need to send in a video of their face into Roblox, where an AI verification system would try to guess the player’s age and sort them into an age group. This new system implemented by David Baszucki, the CEO, has numerous flaws. 

First, players would be concerned about sending their information into a third party app that uses AI verification. Additionally, this system can be easily manipulated, like if a child uses a picture of someone older to get into the older age group and vice versa. Finally, separating players based on assumed age is a horrible idea because someone could naturally look younger or older than they actually are. Especially with bad actors on the app, they could simply pick and choose their age category and only have the option to chat with that specific age group. Because of this, many players are refusing to enable chat, which is causing the app to receive massive amounts of hate, fewer players and another reason to question those in charge of technology. David Baszucki is 63 years old; how could he know what’s best for a gaming app made for kids? This creates a disadvantage for his corporation because he doesn’t understand how technology works with his younger target audience, which causes his decisions to be illogical and unreasonable. 

Not only are these administrators unwise in how to run technology, they also take advantage of consumers. Streaming services now start their subscription plans with ads included, to which consumers would need to pay extra to be ad-free. For example, a standard Disney+ subscription is $7 a month, with Hulu is $13, both without ads would be $20, adding an additional service like ESPN’s unlimited bundle with ads would be $36, and all of these bundles with no ads escalate the price to a total of $45 a month. These companies know streaming services are bought primarily to avoid ads, which is why they try to charge more for ad-free. This indicates that their power is used for the purpose of profit, which is a complete misrepresentation of technology’s true purpose.

This doesn’t just apply to the entertainment industry, but educational services too. Duolingo is a language learning app, and its purpose is to provide free language education for the world. Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo and he is 47 years old. He isn’t just responsible for Duolingo’s ridiculous prices for “upgraded” memberships ($30 a month for AI perks on Duolingo Max). His controversial decision on branding Duolingo an “AI first” company last year did not help their reputation. Users were dissatisfied with how Duolingo replaced 10% of their lesson writing contractors with AI generated content. This is definitely not helpful for learning a language, which is something that the older generations don’t understand. It’s common that older generations tend to believe and trust AI seen on their devices. Therefore, their misunderstanding of AI in technology led Duolingo from being on top of pop culture trends to receiving a massive downfall for associating with technology that people hate.

The people have the ultimate control over a service’s success, and companies who understand that and address their consumers properly will always prevail above any other approach intended to strengthen a company’s critical acclaim. Corporations may have immense power, but that power becomes meaningless when their users leave because of how unaware and uneducated these services are on how technology works now.