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Who Broke the Internet? (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 1 month ago by julian@community.nodebb.org to c/general-discussion@community.nodebb.org

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Today I'm listening to Who Broke the Internet?, a four-part series by pluralistic@mamot.fr on CBC's Understood podcast.

> Google Search was the gold standard — a product born in a dorm room during the internet’s early, idealistic era. But when internal emails surfaced they revealed a deeper conflict inside the company: was Google making Search worse, on purpose, to boost ad revenue? Google says its changes are all about benefiting users. Critics say it’s all part of a bigger pattern — one that host Cory Doctorow calls enshittification: the slow, deliberate decay of platforms in the name of profit.

Have you noticed internet search has become next to useless? It's like the arms-race between search and spam is ramping up, and not in a good way. Cory lays out the foundation that it isn't that simple, and that the degradation of search was brought on internally.

Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts!

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[–] scott@loves.tech 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I remember when Google Ads limited websites to three ads per page. That was tolerable for most users, and did not distract from the content. But then they made a huge change, and their default mode (which they wanted you to use) would automatically place dozens of ads or more throughout your content. And if your website had infinite scroll, there were infinite ads.

This change, plus the realization that Google was tracking you and building a profile, lead to the the popularity of ad blockers.

The popularity of ad blockers reduced revenue to websites, including news outlets. Content websites started putting up paywalls and selling premium content instead of giving it away for free.

Google is basically killing the very thing that makes them money and it is affecting the entire internet. A perfect example of greed killing the golden goose.

[–] omega@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

scott@loves.tech There was a great substack piece on this google VP Prabhakar and the consequences of his tenure, and had never heard of him, but he was was appointed in 2018 to Adsense.

Does that chime with your own personal observations and experiences on the enshitification curve timeline?

This is not the original article but posting as a reference note

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272786/google-search-prabhakar-raghavan-nick-fox

Here is another substack I found while trying to find the original substack outline the activities of the aforementioned VP, Prabhakar :sweat:

https://tapen.substack.com/p/enshittification-of-google

[–] scott@loves.tech 2 points 1 month ago

This is one of the many reasons why I think decentralized social media, nomadic identity, and federated single sign on are the answer.

One of the causes of enshitification is that the platforms are between two competing interests, and are themselves a third competing interest. Typically, business, consumers, and the owners of the social media network.

Decentralized social media solves this by allowing consumers and businesses to be on their own websites, or a provider of their choice. No one in the middle controlling everything, and providers have to compete with each other.

Another cause of enshitification is monopolies and lock in. They can treat you like crap because they know that you need them. And even if you can download your data, you can't transfer it anywhere.

Decentralized social media, nomadic identity, and federated single sign on solve this by giving people a choice of where their account is. They can self-host or choose a provider, and then move if they don't like how they are being treated.

I know a lot of people loath the idea of commercial entities coming to decentralized social media, but it would prevent entification, and give users the choice to follow or block commercial websites. The power would be transferred back to the people (users, consumers, members, etc.), which is where it should be.