Old man yells at cloud

No, you don't. :) As Wikipedia says on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album :

> Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album; [...]

What you are enjoy is some weird newfangled thing where they put the whole 'album' on a single disc. Kids these days! What will they invent next?

More context:

> With the advent of 78 rpm records in the early 1900s, the typical 10-inch disc could only hold about three minutes of sound per side, so almost all popular recordings were limited to around three minutes in length.[10] Classical-music and spoken-word items generally were released on the longer 12-inch 78s, playing around 4–5 minutes per side. For example, in 1924, George Gershwin recorded a drastically shortened version of his new seventeen-minute composition Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The recording was issued on both sides of a single record, Victor 55225 and ran for 8m 59s.[11] By 1910, though some European record companies had issued albums of complete operas and other works, the practice of issuing albums was not widely taken up by American record companies until the 1920s.

> By about 1910, bound collections of empty sleeves with a paperboard or leather cover, similar to a photograph album, were sold as record albums that customers could use to store their records (the term "record album" was printed on some covers). These albums came in both 10-inch and 12-inch sizes. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums, typically with artwork on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover. Most albums included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight compositions per album.[7]

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuoFW2yAD7g for how people used to listen to a whole album of records in one go via automatic record changers.

1. "You're just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses!"

2. "Modern technology is amazing, these are just whiny nitpicks!"

I don't think these comments are really wrong, but I do think they are missing the forest for the trees. A lot of optimism around technology as a force for good in, say, the mid 90s, has disappeared, even among the technologists that build the stuff. I'd argue that there is something behind this, and I think the author's list touches on a bunch of valid points.

Case in point, social networks. When Facebook first came out, I remember being so excited by it - I reconnected with friends I hadn't talked to in years, and in a good way. I remember thinking how much of a useful tool it was for "casually" keeping in touch with friends. That is, I wasn't going to email everyone I knew when I got a new job, but it was nice when I posted about my job on Facebook that people commented, and I enjoyed hearing about the new things in my friend's lives.

Obviously reams has been written about the downfall of Facebook, so I won't rehash that, only just to add that for me the utility of it has finally fallen so low that it wasn't hard to deactivate my account. That is, for years I was like "Man, Facebook is so shitty, but I worry about cancelling my account because every now and then I get a post from a friend that helps me connect with them." That's no longer true, and not just because of me, but because the vast majority of my friends must also be getting exhausted by Facebook because they rarely post stuff that I care to read.

The irony is that I still have a strong desire to have the Facebook from the mid-late 00s in my life. I don't find that there are any social networks today that actually help you keep in touch with friends. They've all gotten addicted to the likes, infinite scroll, bullshit drama, and "tiktok-ization" of mindless content that they foisted on the rest of us so much that they now actually suck for keeping in touch with people you care about.

That is what I think the author is getting at - technology has somehow forgotten what the ends are that it was supposed to be the means for.

Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.

When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?