Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…
One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising. Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut. The rise of advertising everywhere, and the los…
> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.