I suspect the cause is a little more subtle (and terrifying).

The majority of people don't give a shit. Correct spelling and obscure searches are not even on their radar, it's not a part of their reality. Don't let the comments here fool you -- it is a very specific, picky, technical crowd that frequents HN.

The voice of "those who care" has always been a minority, although it used to matter more, simply because people who care and worry and try to do a good job tend to have more power and money (conscientiousness is a great predictor of success), and so businesses cater to them more. Now that everything seems to be turning more uniform, more global, more binary, more equal, that voice is marginalized (good thing? bad thing?) -- you're seeing the effect of a hoi polloi stampede.

So it's not the fault of "incompetent programmers" -- it may be a trickle down effect of our social incentives and economic trade-offs.

Yes, this the real reason. It's a variation on the Tyranny of the Majority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

> The voice of "those who care" has always been a minority

To add to this, people who cares most powerfully had probably switched to alternative, open source, software solutions. This leaves the remaining group with less "care" on average so fewer would complain. Kinda like evaporative cooling.

> 4 years ago was a very different time. Software quality in general continues to drop. I’m not sure if that’s due to increasing incompetence in the software engineering workforce (unlikely, but possible), malice (more unlikely), or apathy (most likely).

I think another dimension is how deployability has changed.

Before... When you wrote and shipped software, getting your software out was a big problem, a big deal. This also meant that if you shipped a bug, shipping an update would be equally expensive (for you and your customers), and the amount of goodwill you lost would be quite tremendous.

Now everyone has a appstore, always up to date apps, and whatever else is usually "in the cloud" somewhere. The time of people installing applications in a normal desktop-context, with installers and having IT-administrators handle updates once every second year is surely long gone.

With that kind of change, and an increased focus on delivering early, doing proper QA is no longer something which is rewarded in the market.

Who cares if you made a bug-free, awesome service, when you did it 6 months after someone else shipped a similar, but buggy service which everyone is already using? They have established a user-base and as such already has social momentum and lock-in.

What do you have to offer which is not only fantastic enough to make some bother migrating, but also so amazing that these people will also go convert their friends and families? "Less bugs" alone is not going to cut it.

Basically, taking the time to deliver quality software these days is increasingly something you get punished for in the market-place.

The result? We get shit like this and we can only blame ourselves.

This will only get fixed when software starts to get liability and refunds.

If enough people start suing or asking back for their money, companies will surely improve their QA.

I find it more reasonable to assume that you can only improve a very specific function so much before your "improvements" turn to "pointless sidegrades".