Yeah, it’s one that I remember having a real specific moment of clarity about the first time I watched it happen from end to end, and it’s coloured my views on a lot of things since. I’ve been...
Yeah, it’s one that I remember having a real specific moment of clarity about the first time I watched it happen from end to end, and it’s coloured my views on a lot of things since.
I’ve been deeply interested in tech my whole life, and the amount I complained about Microsoft when I was 13 probably made me sound like a disgruntled 35 year old sysadmin. Google was my saviour: “sure, they’re a big company too, but what they do works! Look how much faster Chrome is, and it supports all the new standards. A gig of email storage? Now we’re talking! And yeah, why would anyone pay $300 for Office when it’s in the browser for free? They’re even open sourcing the whole Android operating system, that’s what being the good guys looks like”.
Fast forward a decade or two and they’ve embrace-extend-extinguished pretty much the entire concept of web standards, wholesale strip mined everyone’s privacy, screwed over creators and users on YouTube at every turn, conflated “Android ecosystem” with “Play Services ecosystem”, and left so many dead products in their wake that it’s a meme now.
They weren’t the saviour, they were just another company doing the same thing 20 years later, so I first knew them on the upswing of their curve while I’d only ever seen MS in the trough at the end. They still provide value, I still use products from both companies on a daily basis, but as someone memorably said to me on here, they’re incentivised to provide just 1% more value than the amount they’re screwing you over.
Yes, Google is a business and has not done well at launching new products. There was a time when they were unironically considered the "good guys" and that's certainly changed. But I think you're...
Yes, Google is a business and has not done well at launching new products. There was a time when they were unironically considered the "good guys" and that's certainly changed. But I think you're simply jaded about some of the older stuff and take it for granted.
New versions of Chrome tend not to have anything that users care that much about, but it's still getting better rather than worse. Web standards are more complicated, but they're still improving, in the sense that as a developer, you can do more with the common subset that works in all browsers than you ever could before. (And I think that's what really matters; governance should be judged by results, even if you don't like the politics of how decisions are made.)
Email: hasn't changed much and people have largely moved on to other forms of communication, but still: more storage, still free. (Or you can pay for more.)
YouTube hosts my accordion videos for free. They play back reliably and at very high resolution in most of the world, so that's a benefit as a creator. And from a user point of view, there was no collection of videos like YouTube before. I'm listening to obscure music from all over the world.
The abundance of free music (etc.) makes it challenging to do business as a creator (not something I'm trying to do), but it was always hard and it's a side effect of the consumer benefit. It's a similar effect to radio or broadcast TV, except that it's on-demand and you can pay to turn off the ads.
I will add video chat as a newer service that's already taken for granted. Lots of competition and Google's product strategy has been very weird, but I found their video chat very useful during the pandemic.
I think being the "good guys" in a sustainable way may be too much to expect from any business. It's still vital communications infrastructure that requires competent professionals to maintain, and we would miss it if it were gone. Also, most businesses and most institutions don't last, so stability is actually a win.
That's all totally fair, even if I might have a couple of minor quibbles on the details, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm forcefully against them or anything. "They" being either...
That's all totally fair, even if I might have a couple of minor quibbles on the details, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm forcefully against them or anything. "They" being either Google or Microsoft, to be honest - I literally pay money to them both on a regular basis and do so willingly, even if I am trying to find alternatives where I reasonably can.
I think being the "good guys" in a sustainable way may be too much to expect from any business.
If anything sums up what I'd hoped to get across, it's this! It's not that Google are terrible now, far from it, just that I was wrong to think that their early days could last forever, and equally wrong to dismiss their competitors as deeply and fundamentally worse when they were just playing a later stage of the same game.
I meant that more in terms of reputation. Familiarity breeds contempt. And it’s also true of most other organizations too, including governments. Good guys remain the good guys forever only in...
I meant that more in terms of reputation. Familiarity breeds contempt. And it’s also true of most other organizations too, including governments.
Good guys remain the good guys forever only in legend, because they’re gone now.
It's a decent look at a real common business dynamic online and some problems of TikTok in particular, but I think it's jumping the gun to say TikTok is already dying from this or should be killed...
It's a decent look at a real common business dynamic online and some problems of TikTok in particular, but I think it's jumping the gun to say TikTok is already dying from this or should be killed (by legal measures?) because of it. This type of talk makes me think of people who don't keep up with gen z culture looking for an excuse for their failure to do so and telling kids to get off their internet. It's weird being a frequent mostly happy user of TikTok and then seeing non-users talk about it like it's obviously a degenerate place of no value that should be destroyed for the greater good. Also the grandstanding about cryptocurrency in the middle was both misleading and totally unrelated (the idea that a major part of crypto liquidity is ransomware is laughable, and equating web3 to paywalls reveals such an ignorance of it as that was done so little; paywalls are what newspaper sites, Medium, Substack, and Patreon do).
I like the focus at the end on "freedom to exit" data export ideas, but it feels so half-hearted after he just dismissed protocol ideas like Bluesky which seem like the logical extension of that. The article has a disappointing lack of ideas on how things could be done differently and instead just has an insistence that absolutely everyone is doing it terribly wrong. I miss the Cory Doctorow who wrote stuff like Little Brother which was overflowing with enthusiasm and ideas on how to create computers and communication systems where the users were in control.
The thing that frustrates me most is that the general “young people bad, older generation good” grumbling from people my age and older drowns out the very legitimate criticism of TikTok. It’s an...
It's weird being a frequent mostly happy user of TikTok and then seeing non-users talk about it like it's obviously a degenerate place of no value that should be destroyed for the greater good.
The thing that frustrates me most is that the general “young people bad, older generation good” grumbling from people my age and older drowns out the very legitimate criticism of TikTok. It’s an important and valuable part of gen Z culture. It’s also spyware with an engagement algorithm direct controlled by an authoritarian government who have time and again proven themselves willing and adept at using the media to push false narratives. People need to be discussing that, but so many comments I see are just dismissive and mocking about the content and culture instead.
Have you read Walkaway? It very much fits this bill, released in 2017. That's hardly ancient history, especially for novels. And he's published more since, I just haven't had a chance to catch up.
I miss the Cory Doctorow who wrote stuff like Little Brother which was overflowing with enthusiasm and ideas on how to create computers and communication systems where the users were in control.
Have you read Walkaway? It very much fits this bill, released in 2017.
That's hardly ancient history, especially for novels. And he's published more since, I just haven't had a chance to catch up.
The Netheads story is clearly put forward as how things aught to work. Otherwise it may be short in this regard.
The article has a disappointing lack of ideas on how things could be done differently and instead just has an insistence that absolutely everyone is doing it terribly wrong.
The Netheads story is clearly put forward as how things aught to work. Otherwise it may be short in this regard.
I read through that entire rant and through all of these comments without realizing that this was Cory Doctorow. I only found out when someone linked to it on a different topic. I'm honestly...
I read through that entire rant and through all of these comments without realizing that this was Cory Doctorow. I only found out when someone linked to it on a different topic.
I'm honestly really surprised because this is not the kind of writing I remember reading from him years ago. The way this is written is really off-putting; it seems like it was written by some libertarian techbro who spends entirely too much of his time online. While I did find myself agreeing with his arguments, the wording was so hostile and bitter that I found myself instinctively wanting to pull away from it.
Amazons AWS is legendary for it's profitability and growth, but the sneaky thing is Amazon Advertising. It's grown 50-70% yoy, and while operating margins overall aren't outside of AWS, you have...
Amazons AWS is legendary for it's profitability and growth, but the sneaky thing is Amazon Advertising. It's grown 50-70% yoy, and while operating margins overall aren't outside of AWS, you have to think that the margins on advertising have to be fantastic. From what I can tell, vendors pay amazon to bump their product up in the search results.
Also, third party seller services now makes up a third of all Amazons sales by revenue, so I imagine a lot of the advertising is from third party sellers wanting top position. Manufacturing is a very lean business, so if the third party sellers are paying for positioning, either they are selling more expensive goods, or they are cutting costs elsewhere.
Often times I wonder why Amazon continues to allow clearly inferior fake products to be commingled with genuine products. They must be aware of the problem, but are ignoring it either due to a need for tight operational efficiencies (not commingling would cost too much and eat into operating profits) or the fake products are driving revenue growth (you can afford to pay more in advertising if you are selling cheap knock offs at similar prices to genuine quality brands.)
I definitely misremembered how to spell "escheat" and thought this article was suggesting the government was somehow in the process of holding ownership over Tiktok because no one could be found...
I definitely misremembered how to spell "escheat" and thought this article was suggesting the government was somehow in the process of holding ownership over Tiktok because no one could be found to claim it. It makes more sense that it's a complaint about Tiktok and how it treats its users.
I'm very happy to know this concept of enshittification, It just explains so much of my problems i have with non open systems on- and offline
Yeah, it’s one that I remember having a real specific moment of clarity about the first time I watched it happen from end to end, and it’s coloured my views on a lot of things since.
I’ve been deeply interested in tech my whole life, and the amount I complained about Microsoft when I was 13 probably made me sound like a disgruntled 35 year old sysadmin. Google was my saviour: “sure, they’re a big company too, but what they do works! Look how much faster Chrome is, and it supports all the new standards. A gig of email storage? Now we’re talking! And yeah, why would anyone pay $300 for Office when it’s in the browser for free? They’re even open sourcing the whole Android operating system, that’s what being the good guys looks like”.
Fast forward a decade or two and they’ve embrace-extend-extinguished pretty much the entire concept of web standards, wholesale strip mined everyone’s privacy, screwed over creators and users on YouTube at every turn, conflated “Android ecosystem” with “Play Services ecosystem”, and left so many dead products in their wake that it’s a meme now.
They weren’t the saviour, they were just another company doing the same thing 20 years later, so I first knew them on the upswing of their curve while I’d only ever seen MS in the trough at the end. They still provide value, I still use products from both companies on a daily basis, but as someone memorably said to me on here, they’re incentivised to provide just 1% more value than the amount they’re screwing you over.
Yes, Google is a business and has not done well at launching new products. There was a time when they were unironically considered the "good guys" and that's certainly changed. But I think you're simply jaded about some of the older stuff and take it for granted.
New versions of Chrome tend not to have anything that users care that much about, but it's still getting better rather than worse. Web standards are more complicated, but they're still improving, in the sense that as a developer, you can do more with the common subset that works in all browsers than you ever could before. (And I think that's what really matters; governance should be judged by results, even if you don't like the politics of how decisions are made.)
Email: hasn't changed much and people have largely moved on to other forms of communication, but still: more storage, still free. (Or you can pay for more.)
YouTube hosts my accordion videos for free. They play back reliably and at very high resolution in most of the world, so that's a benefit as a creator. And from a user point of view, there was no collection of videos like YouTube before. I'm listening to obscure music from all over the world.
The abundance of free music (etc.) makes it challenging to do business as a creator (not something I'm trying to do), but it was always hard and it's a side effect of the consumer benefit. It's a similar effect to radio or broadcast TV, except that it's on-demand and you can pay to turn off the ads.
I will add video chat as a newer service that's already taken for granted. Lots of competition and Google's product strategy has been very weird, but I found their video chat very useful during the pandemic.
I think being the "good guys" in a sustainable way may be too much to expect from any business. It's still vital communications infrastructure that requires competent professionals to maintain, and we would miss it if it were gone. Also, most businesses and most institutions don't last, so stability is actually a win.
That's all totally fair, even if I might have a couple of minor quibbles on the details, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm forcefully against them or anything. "They" being either Google or Microsoft, to be honest - I literally pay money to them both on a regular basis and do so willingly, even if I am trying to find alternatives where I reasonably can.
If anything sums up what I'd hoped to get across, it's this! It's not that Google are terrible now, far from it, just that I was wrong to think that their early days could last forever, and equally wrong to dismiss their competitors as deeply and fundamentally worse when they were just playing a later stage of the same game.
This is a lovely anticapitalist thesis statement.
I meant that more in terms of reputation. Familiarity breeds contempt. And it’s also true of most other organizations too, including governments.
Good guys remain the good guys forever only in legend, because they’re gone now.
It's a decent look at a real common business dynamic online and some problems of TikTok in particular, but I think it's jumping the gun to say TikTok is already dying from this or should be killed (by legal measures?) because of it. This type of talk makes me think of people who don't keep up with gen z culture looking for an excuse for their failure to do so and telling kids to get off their internet. It's weird being a frequent mostly happy user of TikTok and then seeing non-users talk about it like it's obviously a degenerate place of no value that should be destroyed for the greater good. Also the grandstanding about cryptocurrency in the middle was both misleading and totally unrelated (the idea that a major part of crypto liquidity is ransomware is laughable, and equating web3 to paywalls reveals such an ignorance of it as that was done so little; paywalls are what newspaper sites, Medium, Substack, and Patreon do).
I like the focus at the end on "freedom to exit" data export ideas, but it feels so half-hearted after he just dismissed protocol ideas like Bluesky which seem like the logical extension of that. The article has a disappointing lack of ideas on how things could be done differently and instead just has an insistence that absolutely everyone is doing it terribly wrong. I miss the Cory Doctorow who wrote stuff like Little Brother which was overflowing with enthusiasm and ideas on how to create computers and communication systems where the users were in control.
The thing that frustrates me most is that the general “young people bad, older generation good” grumbling from people my age and older drowns out the very legitimate criticism of TikTok. It’s an important and valuable part of gen Z culture. It’s also spyware with an engagement algorithm direct controlled by an authoritarian government who have time and again proven themselves willing and adept at using the media to push false narratives. People need to be discussing that, but so many comments I see are just dismissive and mocking about the content and culture instead.
Have you read
Walkaway? It very much fits this bill, released in 2017.That's hardly ancient history, especially for novels. And he's published more since, I just haven't had a chance to catch up.
The Netheads story is clearly put forward as how things aught to work. Otherwise it may be short in this regard.
Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Cory Doctorow too, so I don't read him much anymore.
I read through that entire rant and through all of these comments without realizing that this was Cory Doctorow. I only found out when someone linked to it on a different topic.
I'm honestly really surprised because this is not the kind of writing I remember reading from him years ago. The way this is written is really off-putting; it seems like it was written by some libertarian techbro who spends entirely too much of his time online. While I did find myself agreeing with his arguments, the wording was so hostile and bitter that I found myself instinctively wanting to pull away from it.
Amazons AWS is legendary for it's profitability and growth, but the sneaky thing is Amazon Advertising. It's grown 50-70% yoy, and while operating margins overall aren't outside of AWS, you have to think that the margins on advertising have to be fantastic. From what I can tell, vendors pay amazon to bump their product up in the search results.
Also, third party seller services now makes up a third of all Amazons sales by revenue, so I imagine a lot of the advertising is from third party sellers wanting top position. Manufacturing is a very lean business, so if the third party sellers are paying for positioning, either they are selling more expensive goods, or they are cutting costs elsewhere.
Often times I wonder why Amazon continues to allow clearly inferior fake products to be commingled with genuine products. They must be aware of the problem, but are ignoring it either due to a need for tight operational efficiencies (not commingling would cost too much and eat into operating profits) or the fake products are driving revenue growth (you can afford to pay more in advertising if you are selling cheap knock offs at similar prices to genuine quality brands.)
I definitely misremembered how to spell "escheat" and thought this article was suggesting the government was somehow in the process of holding ownership over Tiktok because no one could be found to claim it. It makes more sense that it's a complaint about Tiktok and how it treats its users.