Every service that removes a difficulty can also remove the information that the difficulty used to carry. This is rarely considered when such services are designed, and it explains a set of problems that otherwise look unrelated.
Consider the ordinary act of paying for something. When payment required notes and coins, the money in a person's pocket was a limit that could be seen. Spending produced an immediate physical signal: the pocket got lighter. Electronic payment removes the friction, which is the stated purpose, and it works. It also removes the signal. Studies of household spending have found that people often spend more when payment is easier, and that they are poor at estimating how much more. The convenience is real. The cost is that a person now needs a deliberate system to know something they previously knew by accident.
The same structure appears elsewhere. A map application removes the difficulty of finding a route, and with it the slow building of a mental picture of a city. People who follow instructions for several years report a real loss of their sense of direction, and studies of drivers support the complaint. A recommendation engine removes the effort of choosing what to watch, and with it the experience of choosing badly, which is how most people discover the limits of their own taste.
None of these examples is an argument for refusing the technology. The argument is narrower: the removed effort was doing a second job that nobody had written down, and because nobody had written it down, nothing was ever designed to replace it.
The pattern is worth stating directly. Friction in a system produces two things at once. It produces cost, which is visible and can be measured, and therefore becomes the target of improvement. It also produces information, which is hidden, uncounted and delivered as a side effect. When the cost is removed, that information may disappear with it, and its absence is noticed months or years later in a form that is hard to connect back to the original change.
This has a practical consequence for anyone building or adopting such a system. The useful question is not whether the new arrangement is easier, which it almost always is, but what the old difficulty was telling the person who experienced it. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and the friction was simply waste. Often the answer is a number, a limit or a warning that now has to be supplied on purpose, through a budget, a record or a rule.
Organizations that do this well tend to add a small amount of deliberate friction back, in a chosen place. A company that moved its approval process online found that approvals rose sharply and quality fell, and solved it not by returning to paper but by requiring a written reason in a box that could not be left empty. The effort is tiny. Its function is to restore the moment of attention that the old process had provided by accident.
The general lesson is unwelcome because it cuts against the direction in which products are pushed. Making a thing easier is a complete and satisfying goal, and it produces a measurable result. Asking what the difficulty was doing is slower, harder to justify in a meeting, and the one reliable way to avoid solving a problem while quietly creating a worse one somewhere out of sight.