Back in my day
BlueSky Post. [https://bsky.app/profile/kevinhearne.bsky.social/post/3kjnofkjvyf2j] ::: spoiler Transcript. If you tell someone to “Google it” at this point you’re telling them to look up five ads and some AI-generated bs instead of the actual thing they want to know. old guy takes long hit on the bong “Back in my day, search engines used to find things besides the wreckage of late-stage capitalism.” :::
“if you can believe it, at one point there were no search engines, and if you wanted to know what was out there you had to get a big book that listed all the websites.”
*gasp!
There is a blast from the past. I forgot about that, thanks for the reminder.
Some images: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=internet+yellow+pages&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd0mojqvbku741.jpg
Wow classic
Google was a “disrupter”
Which means they burnt investor money for years to deliver a great product while not making any profit.
Once they gain market share and are the default, enshitification begins and people eventually wonder why they’re still using it.
Butterfly meme:
Literally everything bad vaguely related to tech
Lemmy users: “Is this enshittification?”
Enshittification isn’t when companies make their products worse on purpose, for the sake of making it worse. The goal isn’t to get worse, the goal is to maintain competitive force and increase profit margins by way of strategically “optimizing” previously good products to squeeze ever more profit.
The mere fact that AI and SEO are ruining these search engines is a product of the profit-motive and markets functioning “properly.”
Enshittification isn’t when companies make their products worse on purpose, for the sake of making it worse. The goal isn’t to get worse, the goal is to maintain competitive force and increase profit margins by way of strategically “optimizing” previously good products to squeeze ever more profit.
Exactly. Google isn’t intentionally delivering shitty search results to maintain a competitive force or increase profit margins, but because they’re fighting a constant battle against people trying (and succeeding) to outsmart their algorithms.
The comment I replied to was specifically talking how Google was attempting to deliver a good product while they were small and is now leveraging it’s market position to deliver worse search reults.
And that’s just wrong, it has nothing to do with Google burning through venture capital back in the days or being the most popular search engine nowadays. Sure, the ads are annoying, they take all your data and all that could be reasonably called enshittification, but the crappy search results aren’t intentional.
But that’s still not what they said in their original comment. They were directly linking Google’s search becoming worse to Google’s monopoly, while the same is happening to all other providers as well, no matter how niche they are.
Sure we can tranform this into some handwavy “capitalism bad” statement (and I agree), but that’s not what they said and has basically no substance.
If you are in to hosting things yourself on an old computer. Immich is pretty much a drop in google photos
Organic Maps is a huge step in the right direction using Openstreetmaps. It is about at the level if a dedicated GPS in my opinion, just doesn’t have traffic data to route around like the big 3.
If you are in to hosting things yourself on an old computer
well I’m all about that :) but will it’s image recognition capabilities work on a raspberry pi or a 12-year-old laptop?
I’ll check. both of them. thanks!
Except that I wouldn’t use Google Search as an example of enshittification.
It isn’t like Google tried to break search to increase profits. Instead, the industry around Google changed to adapt to Google’s search algorithms.
I feel like they did break search to profit, though possibly through inaction. It doesn’t feel like they’re even trying to deliver good content over seo garbage anymore.
Hard to distinguish malice from incompetence with Google, though.
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
PageRank was a huge deal, and drastically increased the quality of the results over previous approaches. They absolutely disrupted search.
Google was founded in 1998. AdWords came out in 2000 and the company had its first profitable quarter in 2001. Three years isn’t bad to build a tech company that can turn a profit.
They are an ad company first and foremost. Search, Android, Chromebooks, browsers and Cloud hosting all just feed their machine.
Back in my day, we had to hit Borders, Barnes & Noble, or Books-A-Million to find tech books to help us figure out what to do. Dot-com cubicle shelves always had a mini library.
O’Reilly made so much money.
King
mrcleanup
Jo Miran
guyrocket
RoquetteQueen
Cowbee [he/they]
Unforeseen
JustEnoughDucks
Liz
badbrainstorm 
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