https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/02/googles-plan-to-drm-the-web-goes-against-everything-google-once-stood-for/
The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse t…
Surprised pikachu face An ad company is gonna do what an ad company nets more profit.
I feel like at this point it should be obvious but because they have their fingers in so many pies a lot of people don't notice.
Google is an ad company and basically everything they do at this point serves that. They should have changed their name to doubleclick.
When you need to please shareholders, this is what happens.
I think the Don't Be Evil motto was true up until they decided to go public. That was the start of the end, basically.
TIL a new word "enshittification"
_enshittification entails these steps:
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves._
Cory Doctorow is usually pretty interesting. Here is the essay where he talks about enshittification. Not some huge revelation, but truth nonetheless.
Ngl i didnt read the article but this headline is already dumb. Ever since Google got any sort of popularity, it has been an obvious danger to the internet, net neutrality and any free projects that want to exist without being involved with google. If you have to state as your company motto that you arent evil then maybe you are already evil...
I hate, hate, hate that you're making me defend Google here, but they're the only smartphone, desktop/laptop oem that open source their os. They open source the browser, arguably their most important software. They continue to release their code under open licenses. Now compare this to how Microsoft was (and still is) in the 90s when Google started coming into prominence.
"Don't be evil" was a direct response to companies like them.
Too often people comment as if the last five years of their experience with a company is all they need to know when remarking about something that was coined over twenty years ago. Context matters.
I agree not everything is black and white with this stuff, but good deeds do not absolve you from your bad ones. As we are currently seeing, Chromium being open source doesnt prevent Chrome from being changed in ways that is not in the interest of the users.
Also while they do release many things as open source, the software that people end up using in the end (Chrome, Maps, etc) are not open source at all, which just further solidifies their market dominance because people cant accept even giving up one little feature in favor of a different app, service, website.
Also comparing two big tech companies for their supposed upsides and downsides is pointless. They both suck and we should reduce our dependence on all of them.
Comparing Google to Microsoft in the early 2000s is not pointless at all. Back then it was Microsoft who had the monopoly on all technology, they controlled IE, the most used browser in the world, and they controlled the main operating system that people used.
When Google started Chrome they worked with other large companies to work on building web standards, many of the super important technology behind the scenes that make the modern internet work were developed at least partially by Google in collaboration with other major industry interests.
Android also had a huge impact here. These days people accessing the internet on phones is common practice, but once again Google pioneered many of the standards now used to allow build applications that run decently well on phones and can interface with the web.
And those are just two major projects you've likely heard of. Google created a lot of tech that is used behind the scenes:
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to use Google products less, but this case you're ignoring just how much Google helped save us from Microsoft's monopoly. And regardless how much control Google has now, it's far less then the control Microsoft had, and a large part of that is because Google has been more open with their technology and more willing to work to better the entire industry (yes they were likely aware that making the whole tech space better would also help them, but i have a hard time feeling that's malicious)
I really like your answer, it points to many things that have a hand from Google that I had no idea. Not wanting to defend them, but they had a very important role in most new deep learning tools as well, e.g. transformers, natural language processing, computer vision, etc. they had a huge impact in a lot of things
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. It's absolutely true, time and time again it keeps being proven true.
In what should be surprising to Noone, Google was just paying lip service about what it stood for from the beginning. When their motto was 'do no evil' it was a lie, they just stopped pretending.
Ever used email before GMail?
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services... before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don't discredit Google because you weren't around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of... and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn't done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there's a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it's compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I've come to have to accept that I'll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I'll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default... and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Making quality stuff for free does not mean they were not doing shady things in the background.
I have no plan to boycott Google or anything, but they were nwver benevolent and usage has always been a tradeoff of data tracking for convenience.
Hard disagree. Back in its early days, Google was genuinely decent. They competed by building better stuff than everyone else, and that's it.
There was no decent free email and no free maps before Google. You used to have to pay hundreds for decent mapping software.
The good old Web 2.0 days, when companies were falling over themselves to provide free APIs and see what people could do with them.
Google started going to shit when they brought out Android and everybody started trying to build walled gardens, and went full evil when that moral vacuum Pichai took over.
Google was collecting your data without informing you from the very beginning. Just because they wrote good software and offered free stuff doesn't mean they weren't doing shady stuff in the background.
I still use Google services, but only because the free part of the trade is currently working in my favor since I block all their ads.
all their services are shit
Many of their services are quite good. Their management and business operations have been turned to utter shit (for consumers). They've been told they need to make more money every quarter and they've run out of easy things to make money on, so they're now looking at their entire catalog with the sole focus of revenue generation and profit growth rather than merely being an impactful internet resource which is sustainably profitable.
I have the opinion here that stocks should be harder to trade. If you bought stocks and had to hold them for a 5 year period, and instead got paid a dividend, then the push for quarterly results would not force companies to be quite as rapidly self-sabotaging. Corporate bonds instead of trying to beat the bell. IPOs and that market are the root cause to a lot of shit.
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."