Google Is Not God of the Web
bilge.world
Google Is Not God of the Web
1–10 of 306 posts
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#2> There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind.
Hadn't really considered this - because minimalist page size is often such a given - but, for instance, many amateurs often don't know yet how to crush their pngs and such.
Cool - thanks for this!
(As an aside, it's great to see a continuation of topics like this - which is commenting on last week's article from Parimal Satyal. It makes this place seem more like a forum.)
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#3Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance.
Is this a bad thing?
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#4This is the best place I know of to have thoughtful discussions and talk about what most consider taboo.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
There are times where it gets heated, but those are quickly shut down by the very excellent community moderation.
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#5Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants).
With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web?
Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google.
All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#6Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
My biggest problem with Google is that in the 2010s they began flagging sites that had too many links as "link farms" - this discouraged bloggers from posting blogrolls and killed many directories. This really damaged the Open Web that the author is talking about. You saw a widespread abandonment of blogs during 2011-2015. (People stopped seeing traffic to their blogs and just assumed blogs had died due to lack of interest.)
In a way, yeah, they made the Web safer. And cleared it out almost completely in the process.
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#7Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants). With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web? Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed…
Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free.
The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#8Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
What did Google ever do for us?
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#9Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
Yes
Because of the market dominance
Re: Google Is Not God of the Web
#10It's funny that Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole.