Comment by Retric
17 hours ago
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
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I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.
Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bill.
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What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.
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