I'd actually argue otherwise - UX has gotten tremendously better in the last decade. Online products have been moulded perfectly towards improving the use case for their customers.
The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore.
Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers.
If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
>Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
I'm sorry, are we talking about the same Patreon? Because patreon.com has a bunch of seemingly pointless clicks for posting content.
Here's the step-by-step for posting a video from the creator page:
1. Click on Posts in the sidebar. An animation creates a dropdown - this frequently stutters even on a reasonable desktop and creates a small delay.
2. Click on New. This loads a new page where you can select a post type.
3. Click on Video. This loads another new page where I can select Vimeo or Add URL.
4. Click on Add URL. This immediately creates a textbox under the button that I can paste a URL into. I can set a title, tags, additional content and post it.
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Compare this to uploading a video to Youtube:
1. Click on Create. This immediately opens a dropdown.
2. Click on Upload video. This opens an upload video box that you can click on to open a file upload dialog or you can drag a file onto it. If you're on the Youtube frontpage then there's a page load in this step, but if you're on the Creator Page, then there's no page load.
3. While the file is uploading you can fill in the title etc and even press Publish immediately (while it's still uploading).
I understand that the two cases aren't equivalent, but the experience of posting content feels better on Youtube. I think in terms of UX something like imgur or streamable are great examples.
Edit: I was overly harsh at first. It's just a part of UX that has consistently annoyed me with Patreon. Overall it's decent, but these small things make it feel worse than it is.
If we are following what OP was inferring, arguably the customer in Patreons sense are the ones forking over money, in which case the UI is pretty damn easy.
The creators are an important part of the platform, but arguably will put up with more because they are getting paid.
As Closi mentions in the sibling comment, the customers are the ones paying the money.
What you've described is exactly what I'm talking about - the UX is optimized for whoever is paying. Your example is a perfect showing of this. A creator's experience is secondary for Patreon - a patron's experience comes first (hell, it's even in their name). Patreon improved the UX of funding creatives.
Pateron? What? Pateron has the worst UX of any platform I regularly use.
Sign up to be a pateron of some artist to download their works. Your only way to do this is to scroll through the list of all their posts one at a time in an endless scroll. And to add insult to injury the page will crash and you have to start over from the top of the scroll, there is no way to start 50 or 100 posts in.
For artists offering media via pateron a good UX might be something like Mega.
1. It is slow.
2. It is buggy.
3. They often introduce new features (instead of fixing old ones), call me on phone, and convince me to use them, only for them to not work right.
4. The UI seemly tries it hard to obscure useful stuff and make easy to waste money, sometimes it is blatant, for example when I was getting a ton of click fraud coming from mobile apps, I found a hidden option to disable ads on mobile apps, 2 weeks later they removed the option entirely, restoring the fraud, when I went to research how to fix that, the answer was that I had to either let the fraud happen, or stop advertising on mobile (even in sites) entirely. I took the second option (and the SEO and ad-ranking hit, since google hates when you ignore mobile)
Indeed; consumer-oriented software previously focused on user productivity as its primary concern, and at present this class of software is focused on user engagement as its primary concern.
The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore.
Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers.
If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.