61–70 of 141 posts
Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)
In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests. It's a jarring contrast to what Google is today. "[...] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that i…
What else could they write, even if they were already Satan incarnated?
"We could not care less about search relevance as long as we make big bucks, and if we can sacrifice it in the future, we will"?
I doubt it would have helped with Google's adoption.
Whatever they wrote is just marketing. At best, they believed their own marketing, but they still made a for profit company.
People who don't do it for profit, don't go to build a for profit behemoth. Even in 1999, everybody could tell where Brin/Page stand relative to someone like Linus or Jonas Salk, for example.
In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
I believe altervista would be terrible today. The same with early google. The web has changed. If you look at page rank, it is basically a random walk of the internet and most visited locations get the highest rank. Today you simply cannot trust websites to link to content just for the love of sharing good content. You can’t even trust webpages to be relevant to the keywords they write in their content. You can’t eve…
It's almost like there need to be clearly defined and agreed upon rules for everyone to operate under, with clear consequences for failing to follow those rules. Sort of like some kind of, well, legislation.
Trust and social norms setting expectation is fine when it works. But it will eventually stop working.
So what's the answer after that? How do we fix it without making it worse via legislation or regulation?
Do not use software that you cannot self host.
I found this rule more practical (and I hold to it): Do not rely on software you cannot self host or holds your data hostage in a proprietary format. Data export must be a supported feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
Not a monopoly. They are dominant. Start using duckduckgo and other similar sevices. The internet is still a free market. If you continue to use their products you are just whining. Become the change you wish to see in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
I find it highly ironic that in a thread about subjective evil one talks about granting more power to governments... The only institution on the planet that has granted itself the right to legally steal, plunder, and murder you... I am no fan of Google, but as much as I despise what google has become, I am do not have a rose colored view of the evil that is government to the point here I think that government could b…
Even if I believe the police is corrupt, if I get mugged on the street, you can bet I'm going to the police for help. That is not mutually exclusive to my belief that the police, as an organization, abuses power.
Government granted these tech giants the necessary permits to operate (to say the least), and can penalize them based on the law. It just makes sense that the power to regulate rests on this government too. Now how government should reign in these companies is another topic and that's the part where moral vigilance comes into play.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
well, people could have been more willing to pay for email. Google's search engine was top notch for sure. But when we gave them the right to scan our emails we really handed over the keys to the kingdom.
The move to multi-device from the late 00s onwards also changed the email landscape. It was no longer acceptable to simply download your email onto a single desktop computer via pop3 and remove from the server, you wanted access to it from everywhere on any device, your home desktop, your laptop, your work desktop, and eventually your phone, which meant storing mail on the server.
Personally yes, I use DDG, OSM or apple maps, pay for an email provider hanging off my own domain which comes with a decent enough webmail client as well as imap integration for phones, but that's not normal. In the 00s I used Pine and fetchmail and squirrelmail on linux, with latex and StarOffice and Phoenix/Firebird (and konqueror at one point) rather than Microsoft and IE and hotmail and office, but that wasn't normal, and it's not really a defence against a claim of a monopoly.
Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)
Stop your sentence there and I'd agree with you
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a monopoly. They are dominant. Start using duckduckgo and other similar sevices. The internet is still a free market. If you continue to use their products you are just whining. Become the change you wish to see in the world.
How do you avoid google classroom when the school demands you use google classroom? This is the same principles as the Microsoft monopoly of the 90s and 00s, and that at least gives me hope