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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 25, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why discontinue an actively working service?

I ask this and I know the answer, but it still frustrates me.

Amazon just sent me a message that their "palm" services will stop working in June. It is just a palm scan print. Why is this hard to maintain?

Facebook portal used to be a go to easy video chat service and have other things that easily tied in like Spotify. They've discontinued it and Spotify is no longer a supported app. I dont even know how much longer the video chat portion will even work.

I'm looking for video replacement options if anyone knows of any good ones. The stuff I see on search is ass. Some of the senior service crap is more than the price of a cheap laptop for basically a webcam service.

It may be cheap on the scale of Amazon/Facebook, but it's usually not how it works. It's on somebody's budget, that somebody is a middle manager, and he should show how much money his work is bringing to the company, to earn bonus and promotion. Telling his boss "Shut down this service and save $X/month" is one way to do it. And any service that is not championed by somebody important and not producing cash is always under the sword of Damocles. Google is doing that all the time, shutting down very popular services, just because.

It's even worse, both managers and ICs are given bonuses and promotions for doing something important; "kept the lights on in a mildly unpopular service with no growth potential" is not a career-boosting result. This means everyone flees the team maintaining this service like rats flee a sinking ship. It's a vicious cycle, and even if at some point the service ends up with a stable skeleton team that is happy to just keep it working, from a mile-high perspective it still looks like "a mildly unpopular service with no growth potential managed by a team of C's", which translates to "nuke the service, dissolve the team and put everyone involved on PIPs".