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Web by Google (TM)

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Re: Web by Google (TM)

#421

Post by JadeNB »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #411
JadeNB wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered. For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this i…

Well please propose a solution. I see all kind of complaints, but never any solutions proposed other than nonsense like "we can form anarchy enclaves!" Enjoy your 2 or 3 years of existence before a much bigger despotic army rolls in and takes you over, good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio. We need to work in the system we have, we need protests and activistic populace who act to the b…

> Well please propose a solution.

Personally I'd like to live under a much more European model of governance, but that, too, isn't perfect. (And, of course, one way to do that is to move to Europe. But this thread started not from a debate about the best place to live, but from my response to a post whose wording, "we figured it out ~250 years ago", could be read as suggesting that the US had found the right solution to government.)

But it is meaningful to disagree with "we figured it out ~250 years ago" (a quote from the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24178311 to which I was originally responding), which says that we already know the answer, even if I don't know the answer (and even if, as I suspect, there isn't just one answer—if there is even one).

> good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio.

Polio is gone. Ebola, to the extent that it is gone, is because of a massive worldwide effort, not because of any one government—it literally, scientifically, could not have been eradicated by one government. It's not clear to me that the US's record on dealing with COVID is such that it can afford to sneer at anyone else's ability to deal with it, "anarchy enclave" or otherwise.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#422

Post by fencepost »

Relevant here is a discussion of Google's big shift from sending you to sites into keeping you on Google controlled sites. Worth a listen: https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2020/08/what-went-w... (transcript available on the same page, but auto-generated and not great)

And from the same journalist, words to not use if you work at Google and are talking about your employer or its offerings. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#423

Post by joshuamorton »

doublerabbit wrote: post #419
joshuamorton wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a threat?

Because it makes way for Google to dictate how the internet operates.

This doesn't follow. How does an open standard that, essentially, allows for CDNs to be more secure, let Google dictate how the internet operates?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#424

Post by neckardt »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #408
why_only_15 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the tech companies people advocate breaking up Google is by far the most reasonable.

Yeah I'm not even sure how you would break up facebook, other than facebook/instagram . It would make you extremely unpopular if they forced FB to break up it's userbase into thirds or something as they'd all just flock to one third and it would just be the same thing again within a few months

I think a more effective solution than a breakup would be requiring Facebook to interoperate with other social networks. We could force them to implement APIs which would let users from other platforms chat with and send posts to Facebook users. Imagine a tweet or a snap showing up in your Facebook feed, and vice versa. ActivityPub[0] is already a protocol which tries to solve this, but Facebook would never freely implement it because it would breach their walled garden. We might be able to regulate them into doing it.

[0]: https://activitypub.rocks/

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#425

Post by doublerabbit »

joshuamorton wrote: post #423
doublerabbit wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it makes way for Google to dictate how the internet operates.

This doesn't follow. How does an open standard that, essentially, allows for CDNs to be more secure, let Google dictate how the internet operates?

Alright, an open-standard that allows Google to create a walled garden. But when has google ever been for an "open" internet? Never because an open internet doesn't make money, but then again that has never been Google's philosophy.

AMP does dictate the internet in a way that forces the user to see and do how Google wants you to see and do.

If Google was for open standards, I should have the ability to turn off google amp. No?

If Google was for open standards, they wouldn't force features upon users without the ability to turn them off?

If I host my own email server on my own IP range with in my colocation and send to GMAIL, I am instantly put in spam. Is that not dictating that my email to my mother is spam?

And yes, I'll admit that I am hypocrite. I use google search because it's the only search engine that yields the results I require. I try to use DDG when I can but that fails. Bing is a pile of puke. I don't want to, but I am forced to which fine, I understand the conditions that they give me. However to boast that Google is for opens standards. That's what's laughable.

Amp dictates the web and will as they see fit. But you work for google, so your bias anyway and that makes this whole discussion moot.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#426

Post by networkimprov »

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

> people prefer Discord to IRC ... prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber

"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.

Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#427

Post by tannhaeuser »

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

I think you undervalue what you as a content provider can do with your choices. Sure if you're aiming for millions of clicks (which doesn't bring that much money these days), you can plaster your site with trackers and hostile script. But if you want to reach out to "hackers", that'll only turn away your audience. An alternate scenario to yours could be that Google's web is racing to the bottom and loosing readers (of the kind you care about at least).

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#428

Post by AshamedCaptain »

dmje wrote: post #303

Asking a rhetorical and irritating question - but one which web nerds need to be much better at answering: why, exactly does it matter? Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they wan…

We've HAD a browser monopoly in the past, and the results are _still_ visible. Entire countries are hooked in technology that is absurdly obsolete (even by the monopolist itself) and almost an entire decade passed by without much innovation.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#429

Post by api »

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

I think easier to monetize explains most of it.

Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#430

Post by hu3 »

pilinia wrote: post #69

I hate Safari, but Apple here have really good opportunity to step up. With opening Safari for PC and Android and at the same time improving Safari along, they could cut quite a share from Chrome and stop this nonsence. But they seemed to dithched focus on web platform as it is still such mess for both users and developers, so meh. Chrome for me is done, using it only for PWA.

Some of the market share that Safari would gain would be taken from Firefox.

That could be the last blow to any meaningful Firefox market share.

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