Comment by echelon
17 hours ago
Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
> Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
Facebook and Google are probably two of the biggest players when it comes to how online advertising has been shaped.
> I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet
Nothing wrong with honest advertising per se..... back in the day we bought computer magazines mainly for the adverts.
Rather, the problem is the SV AdTech industry which seeks to track me, invade my privacy at every opportunity and is busy sniffing my knickers trying to work out if I'm pregnant so they can sell me more shite.
One observes the FUD those employed by AdTEch are spreading on here about the GDPR; a bunch of people whose very salaries are dependent on abusing our privacy.
That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.
I had to 'vouch' this comment. It was [dead]. Why? Who sits here lurking this site flagging every single thing they disagree with?
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There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
They'll start server side rendering sites onto a canvas. I suspect that's what Stadia will be reborn as.
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And YouTube encouraged people not to use their real name.
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
We stopped having APIs because of Cambridge Analytica.
They were already heavily limited and essentially useless by then, definitely not enough access to sync your profile to another network.
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I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.