Corollary: "Businesses that base their growth on A/B testing only, turn into gambling or pornography".

Relevant xkcd: "Video Content" https://xkcd.com/1804/

A/B and telemetry-worship reminds me of something I posted on Fedi earlier. Pasting it below:

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"Guys, I have an idea. Let's make a browser optimized for the kind of people who don't opt out of telemetry, and market it to privacy-conscious people." -- Top minds at Mozilla Corp

If you market to privacy-conscious people and you base all your decisions on data from telemetry, you're gonna get a very skewed perspective. You'll see disproportionate representation from fans (people who want to enable telemetry because they love Mozilla and want to help, and will rationalize any decision Mozilla makes) and very non-technical users who don't know what telemetry is and how opt-in/out works. Technical users who disable stuff like telemetry, analytics, etc. are going to look like a rounding error.

This explains a lot of Firefox's changes.

This is enlightening and depressing. It's sad to see the Fox let itself go.

I sometimes wonder if something like this has happened with money.