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Who is going to replace Google for us?

michaeldehaan.substack.com

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Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#111

Post by jmyeet »

cudgy wrote: post #41
jmyeet wrote: post #28

The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be domina…

So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.

Wealth inequality is a separate issue to the dominance of Google.

I agree there should be universal health care and a social safety net. I think shelter in the form of housing should be considered a human right. A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This is to keep you a compliant worker.

But Americans aren't ready to have that conversation so my perspective is you're wasting your breath by having it. Half the country will die on the hill of stopping Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in taxes.

The only solution to this is labor organization. The government won't help you. Republicans are psychotic. Democrats are just the less terrible, feckless alternative who aren't actually interested in doing anything. Remember when Obama had a Senate supermajority and could've codified Roe v. Wade?

But I'm just not holding my breath that anything will materially change anytime soon and it's our fault.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#112

Post by guerrilla »

Zak wrote: post #101
guerrilla wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.

What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.

I think I agree with that but also I think it needs something like groups like Facebook has. I only want to see gardening stuff today, for example. I do like the whole mood though... it's not the battlefield that Twitter is.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#113

Post by oceanplexian »

cudgy wrote: post #41
jmyeet wrote: post #28

The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be domina…

So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.

Wealth isn’t sucked out of anything. If I build a product and sell if for $20, but it creates $100 in value (Let’s say some software that saves a person 4 hours a day of manual labor) I created $80 worth of value, for When people who have benefitted from those productivity benefits then turn around and whine about how they aren’t getting “their share” of the <$20, or complain how it is somehow wrong that the wealthy can spend or transfer wealth however they like, I can’t help but cringe. The real societal problem is the modern education system is failing to educate people in basic economics.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#114

Post by sofixa »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #58
jmyeet wrote: post #28

The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be domina…

The damage to democracy can last for generations, though. In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism. What they had was a filter-bubble where the people were constantly told that the cause of their problems was some particular scapegoat and the solution was more state control. Social media produces these filter-bubbles in a far more powerful fashion. Worse, it's setting up condition…

> In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism

You have a few misconceptions there. 19th century Germany wasn't a democracy, it was a constitutional monarchy with a very strong monarch. It was never socialist, it was social democrat (SPD). The actual socialist and communist uprisings were defeated, by the SPD collaborating with everyone, including the far-right Freikorps.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#115

Post by tyrfing »

massysett wrote: post #27

Google News is worthless because most of the worthwhile news on the Internet has been paywalled. The equivalent to the old Google News is Apple News, which has a pay tier. The issue with Google is that people expect too much out of it. The author of this page, like many others, expects that there are many people out there putting great information on the Internet and doing it for free, and all Google needs to do is f…

Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15 years) have been around monetizing content and distribution formats.

For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets. What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons, so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality) or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons.

Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small forums.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#116

Post by encryptluks2 »

bob1029 wrote: post #44

Can we even describe a compelling vision for what the replacement google would look like? Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.

Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice interface, etc.

Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#117

Post by clairity »

Zak wrote: post #93
freyr wrote: post #75

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…

Much of that still exists. It's just harder to find than it used to be because the corporate stuff is so loud. There are a lot of little things that could make the non-corporate internet more appealing to the average person. Why, for example can't I have a shared identity across several independent forums? OpenID came out long ago.

> "...he corporate stuff is so loud."

yah, money shouts, it doesn't merely talk. that's a consequence of (implicitly) deciding that money should have a voice in the first place. we explicitly sanction this via a gigantic industry, advertising, in which google has a prominent position. until we collectively decide to deemphasize this whole industry, at least in part by cultivating the small and interesting, the web and the internet at large will be dominated by money shouting.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#118

Post by cmrdporcupine »

clairity wrote: post #110
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think leadership at Google back then truly did like it. And they continued to "mostly" like it up to about 7-10 years ago. During the time I was there (10 years from 2012 until end of 2021) I feel like I saw the transition happen, slowly. It got really contradictory and messy. In fact, Google Plus (2011-2013ish) was justified (in part) as an attempt to "rescue" the web from the enclosing grasp of the walled garden…

consider that your perspective might be biased by your temporal affiliation. for anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the direction google was headed was plainly evident by 2004 (when it went public and gmail launched). google clearly saw the web as both a threat and an opportunity (much like microsoft before it), and deigned to control it, not cultivate it as a public good. google never "pushed the web forward…

I would never deny a bias. But an organization like google doesn't have a singular mind or objective. it's full of a bunch of contradictory tendencies and opinions and motivations. And market forces aside, I think the bulk of the pre-Ruth/pre-Sundar leadership had a very pro "open web" opinion at least. And I'd say that even post-IPO they were able to mostly keep their mission statement (“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) compatible with their advertising revenue stream and market forces as a whole.

I just think that became untenable with the rise of Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not maintain the growth rate and long term security that investors demanded of them and at the same time do what they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".

I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw "peak Google" a few years ago.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#119

Post by missedthecue »

capdiz wrote: post #90
freyr wrote: post #75

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…

Supposing it's just a youthful phase. Like the fashion industry for example. Where skinny jeans were popular in the 80's then baggy jeans in the 90's. Then skinny jeans are back in sync now. Don't you think personal blogs and forums will come in sync at some point in the future?

Big news old man: skinny jeans died a few years ago and now the mom jeans of the '90s are back in

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#120

Post by oceanplexian »

cardosof wrote: post #89
croes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't one specific wealthy family, it's that wealth is always concentrated on few people. Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.

Wealth will always be very unequal, see the Mathew principle - just like a few songs have the most listeners and a few books the most readers. And it's hard to stay at the top too, so the elites are always changing. The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.

The fact that the wealthy can invest into assets at will doesn’t seem problematic to me.

Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?

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