17 ms·

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum extent. There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google or similar companies resist the profit urge, make enough money to cover costs and sock away plenty for moonshots and continued development. Focused on optimizing products for users, rather than for revenue, they could have become the Everything platform. But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

cout 3y ago
Did you mean to say customer-friendly or user-friendly?
o10449366 3y ago
Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.
- georgyo 3y ago
  If you have Google Fi, it's surprising how good support it. Create a request and a real person calls you within 5 minutes to help out. They are actually helpful as well. The best part is you don't go through 15 minutes of robo voice assistance debugging hell.
  - mynameisash 3y ago
    I have Google Fi, and I like the support, but I also want to call out that being better than the other telcos is a very low bar.
    - elbigbad 3y ago
      I was a user of Fi for years and I think you’re misstating the premise here. It’s good customer service, not just good in comparison to telcos.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    I have Google Fi and I believe your information is out of date. When it turned from Project Fi to Google Fi there were other changes made, and support turned to absolute crap. Not only that but buying phones from Google Fi is super risky now, as the phones keep getting stolen in transit and then Google refuses to do anything. Even more of an issue is that they've outsourced their phone insurance to another company that denies all claims. Google Fi is a perfect example of how horrible Google is at customer service. They start new projects with reasonable CS but they simply can not scale it as the service takes on more users- or they drop it on purpose to improve their margins.
- DamnInteresting 3y ago
  "Seemed" is the operative word here. Past tense, and indefinite.
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  Yeah, isn't this the company that is notorious for screwing account holders with AI automoderation? Like the Terraria dev that was reportedly locked out of his email while working on a Stadia port.
- dingosity 3y ago
  Except maybe eBay. I wanted to call eBay and ask how I purchase a support contract so I could report a bug in their returns system, but there's no way to contact them for that. But yeah... they're at the same level.
  - freeqaz 3y ago
    I almost lost ~$10k when selling some NVIDIA GPUs on eBay but the buyer claimed they had "fallen out" of the box. I had insurance on the box but the buyer wouldn't return the box to Fedex for inspection. (Because it was fraud) Getting this fixed was excruciating and ended up having to DM people on LinkedIn and guess their internal e-mail addresses to get this resolved. Absolutely horrible!
- tortoise_in 3y ago
  Atleast Google gives you help to unlock the bootloaders. Not like crap apple walled garden
- xnx 3y ago
  Just had an excellent experience getting a warranty exchange on my Pixel Watch that stopped taking a charge. Talked to a real person within 2 minutes and the whole call was complete in 18 minutes.
Spivak 3y ago
> tying executive compensation to short-term share price We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google.
- gruez 3y ago
  >We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google. And after they go private why do you think they won't care about growth/money?
  - Spivak 3y ago
    If you're public you must grow, if you're private you can choose when and how to grow based on what makes sense for the business. The only thing really pushing you is competitors and inflation. There are no shareholders/investors breathing down your neck for returns. When you're private you can actually say, "you know what, I'm content where we are being filthy rich."
    - vasco 3y ago
      But why do you think "investors/shareholders" are bad and private owners, good? Private owners are just 100% owning shareholders, whatever notions you have about one group you should have about the other. You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process.
      - consp 3y ago
        > You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process. Sure, but as a private company at least you control who who wants to do that and are not bound by the "the price must go up" behavior of the shareholders since you only care about the dividends (this is a oversimplification).
madmads 3y ago
Are we still getting surprised by this? I feel like I've read a version of your comment on posts like this for the past couple of years.
- prox 3y ago
  And still we have sooo many devs who praise and glory their Google overlords. Chrome can do No Wrong. Android is Fantastic. Etc. It’s quite amazing actually.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    I saw this a lot in like 2014, but it's been a while since I've run into anyone that fanboys Google or Android like they were in the past. People would fawn over Google.
    - tyingq 3y ago
      Searching my old rants about AMP, they seem to swing from low/negative votes to higher vote counts around 2018.
ben7799 3y ago
I think it's kind of interesting to think that Google has been doing this for a long time but they've been doing it at an uneven pace for different properties. Search actually seems like it got this treatment first, and in a creeping slow way, and it wasn't even necessarily 100% Google's fault. It seems like it probably got pushed a long at first by SEO types.. and then at some point Google realized it was profitable to actually play along with the whole game.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Am I naive to think that when you make $226 million in a year like Pichai that money should stop being your major driving force and that your reputation is more important? Like what else could he buy? But his reputation is taking severe hits. Maybe I just don't understand ultra rich people though. Maybe money is everything.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  Yeah, I think compensation is a kind of score that the ruling class competes on. It's not about whether they are happier, are making the world better, or have enough. It's only about having more at all costs.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  When you get that high up in a corp., your North Star is “shareholder value”, and you’re probably right to do that. I wouldn’t want to and won’t if I was ever lucky enough to have the opportunity. But what are the alternatives?
  - esafak 3y ago
    Crashing your company does not create shareholder value.
  - ProjectArcturis 3y ago
    The alternative I was envisioning was similar to what Costco does on the retail side. Nearly every other retailer aims to maximize profits from their customers. Costco tries to offer the lowest prices it possibly can. This has huge implications for how the company is structured and where it uses its energy. Imagine a tech company that focused entirely on making the user experience as good as it possibly could, rather than one trying to extract as much money as they can this quarter.
- dorkwood 3y ago
  Wouldn’t half of that go to tax, though?
ksec 3y ago
>the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose Not entirely true. They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. As Apple continue to increase their user base, the higher the total cost for Google to remain default. All while Apple, in the name of privacy and fundamental human right, started a crusade against online ads, mainly targeting Facebook but tactically taking Google along with it. In order for Google and Facebook to keep the same profit margin with declining CPM, they have to place more ads to compensate for it. Which is the whole starting point of enshittification. This may also have some negative side effect on Google image and Android, and more people switching to Apple. >There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google There was never any long term plan or strategy from Google. Moonshots were like a fun project to work on with zero business planning. Google never had a product mindset. They could have done what you wrote, they could have battled Microsoft for OS dominance, they could have done shit loads of things. But they didn't. I have been watching Google before they even IPO. For vast majority of its life they have always been in a more money ( or capital ) than they know what to do with it.
- lancesells 3y ago
  > They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. I don't know if I would call that squeezed. They aren't required to be the default search engine. They run the bigger global platform (Android) and I would guess they get to be the default there for free?
- AJ007 3y ago
  Put this in to perspective. Alphabet had $282 BILLION in revenue in 2022. I don't know exactly what they will pay in 2023, but in previous years it was somewhere around $10 billion a year. Google incentivizes it's employees in a certain way. Those employees have a very high expectation of not only income but wealth. Management has demonstrated an ability to waste an enormous amount of that money (Alphabet/Google is certainly not alone in that regards.) Because they own a monopoly they can get away with it. Because the monopoly is in advertising they don't have to be that exceptional in terms of delivering new and improved products. Because of the stock ownership structure and because they've had tremendous revenue growth for so long they really haven't had to answer to their investors about their failure and waste. In some regards a lot of those investors are asleep and don't really understand what is going on. However, the managers need to crank the monetization dial to hit whatever incentives are set for them to become wealthy or grow whatever wealth they already have. This is a bag of tricks (the monetization dial) that has worked well for over a decade. When it runs out, Google's revenue growth will end and employees will no longer get to become wealthy by being employees. Maybe they will suddenly get a lot of capital discipline and experience a second wind like Microsoft appears to have. Maybe they will start looking more like Yahoo. To be determined.
agumonkey 3y ago
I agree. It's been quite a while that every decision they made was on the worse side of things. It surprises me how regular it is. Especially since they have access to history of big wealthy corps, and big pockets.. but apparently not what it takes to correct course.
skippyboxedhero 3y ago
Their financial model is similar to a TV or newspaper. Imagine you create a newspaper, you start out showing no ads, lots of people buy it, it is all good. Then you raise money from investors to grow, and they start asking for more revenue. So you add one advertisement. Then the investors want out, so you have to IPO...more ads. Then you have to keep the share price up because execs want options, and your HR consultant tells you that the "top" execs need to see a rising share price (as if you need a "top" exec to add more ads to a webpage)...more ads. The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. So it looks like very clean growth, very strong economics. This is basically how Google and Facebook work. Their revenue growth looks puzzling because they seem to achieve very consistent, very predictable revenue growth with no extra resources. The reason why is that they can add more ads to a page very easily, and can control their level of revenue growth so they can keep employees/investors happy (in that order). It is true that they have also achieved some pricing growth but that advantage has been capped (and is largely a function of their monopolistic position, i.e. Doubleclick allows Google to play both sides). Most of their growth has been increasing ads per page. There is no way for them to function as public companies in this environment (again, I would say the situation with employees is actually taken more seriously than investors) without making their product worse. They won't stop before the product collapses.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. You are also limited by potentially causing users to stop buying the newspaper. Google will be matching the metrics to see if users actually use the app less when adding more ads. It's possibile there will be no statistically significant difference and consumers are okay with the new ad level. If they start leaving Google can revert the change.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    As I said, there is almost no chance that they reverse before the product is killed because they are optimizing for revenue, not user growth (and when you take this at the margin, increasing ads per page is the only way). I have never seen a company stop before this point either. The institutional imperative to continue gaming the numbers is overwhelming.
choppaface 3y ago
Most of the people at Google now got in on their third try. That means Ads/Search/Brain etc rejected them for not meeting the bar, but they kept on going because they wanted the brand-name job. Lots of employees who are open to serving the brand versus evolving it.
rekoil 3y ago
> But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers. Already moved to Proton personally, I was OK with Google G-Suite or whatever the hell it's called these days when it was free, because I was trading my data for a pretty good service, but then they wanted to slap a price tag on it simply because they could, and to me that was a clear signal it was time to get out. I'm not paying for Google to monetise my data. Protons spam filter isn't as good, the keyboard shortcuts are taking some getting used to (really wish they would implement a "Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts" option), and message search could be improved (I'm sure it will), but besides those I don't miss a thing, and knowing that my privacy is respected is by itself worth the price tag.
- zucked 3y ago
  I wanted to like Proton, even paid for it, but their apps are _bad_. I switched over to Fastmail after a year.
  - rekoil 3y ago
    They are kicking things up a notch recently in my opinion!
wnevets 3y ago
> Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum extent. I'm surprised it this has taken this long to be honest. I expected everything to turn to shit with in a years of going public.
OneLeggedCat 3y ago
With only iOS and Android as realistic choices, we genuinely need a more viable (real) Linux phone soon. I have zero faith that Google will let something like GrapheneOS stay in the somewhat usable state that it is in now.
- atraac 3y ago
  Ah yes, the phone where I will have to install some obscure drivers via some console command found on ubuntu forums from a 3 year old thread made by AssBlaster123 just to get microphone to work properly and then end up not having fingerprint scanner working because this particular phone uses Goodix or whatnot. We don't need "real linux" phone, we already have mobile OS based on linux, it's called Android. You can decouple it from Google, companies already do that, it works. Whether an Android phone without Google services is a viable product is another discussion - and IMO the one we should focus on.
valianteffort 3y ago
I was shocked the last time I used Google without an adblocker. The first 4-5 search results were ads. I had to scroll to get to the first actual result. There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links. I wonder which genius adsense manager thought "hey we could double our revenue if we show 4 ads instead of 2, user experience be damned".
- bombcar 3y ago
  I find it darkly amusing that the first five ad results are usually the same as the first five “natural” results. Which I click on depends on if if I hate them more than google.
  - ProjectArcturis 3y ago
    Lol yup! "Should I make this company pay 25 cents to Google?"
- otikik 3y ago
  > There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links That is a good thing, isn't it?
  - otikik 3y ago
    I misunderstood. Obviously the “effort” is in the opposite direction

cout 3y ago

Did you mean to say customer-friendly or user-friendly?

o10449366 3y ago

Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.

georgyo 3y ago
If you have Google Fi, it's surprising how good support it. Create a request and a real person calls you within 5 minutes to help out. They are actually helpful as well. The best part is you don't go through 15 minutes of robo voice assistance debugging hell.
- mynameisash 3y ago
  I have Google Fi, and I like the support, but I also want to call out that being better than the other telcos is a very low bar.
  - elbigbad 3y ago
    I was a user of Fi for years and I think you’re misstating the premise here. It’s good customer service, not just good in comparison to telcos.
- tedivm 3y ago
  I have Google Fi and I believe your information is out of date. When it turned from Project Fi to Google Fi there were other changes made, and support turned to absolute crap. Not only that but buying phones from Google Fi is super risky now, as the phones keep getting stolen in transit and then Google refuses to do anything. Even more of an issue is that they've outsourced their phone insurance to another company that denies all claims. Google Fi is a perfect example of how horrible Google is at customer service. They start new projects with reasonable CS but they simply can not scale it as the service takes on more users- or they drop it on purpose to improve their margins.
DamnInteresting 3y ago
"Seemed" is the operative word here. Past tense, and indefinite.
evantbyrne 3y ago
Yeah, isn't this the company that is notorious for screwing account holders with AI automoderation? Like the Terraria dev that was reportedly locked out of his email while working on a Stadia port.
dingosity 3y ago
Except maybe eBay. I wanted to call eBay and ask how I purchase a support contract so I could report a bug in their returns system, but there's no way to contact them for that. But yeah... they're at the same level.
- freeqaz 3y ago
  I almost lost ~$10k when selling some NVIDIA GPUs on eBay but the buyer claimed they had "fallen out" of the box. I had insurance on the box but the buyer wouldn't return the box to Fedex for inspection. (Because it was fraud) Getting this fixed was excruciating and ended up having to DM people on LinkedIn and guess their internal e-mail addresses to get this resolved. Absolutely horrible!
tortoise_in 3y ago
Atleast Google gives you help to unlock the bootloaders. Not like crap apple walled garden
xnx 3y ago
Just had an excellent experience getting a warranty exchange on my Pixel Watch that stopped taking a charge. Talked to a real person within 2 minutes and the whole call was complete in 18 minutes.

Spivak 3y ago

> tying executive compensation to short-term share price We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google.

gruez 3y ago
>We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google. And after they go private why do you think they won't care about growth/money?
- Spivak 3y ago
  If you're public you must grow, if you're private you can choose when and how to grow based on what makes sense for the business. The only thing really pushing you is competitors and inflation. There are no shareholders/investors breathing down your neck for returns. When you're private you can actually say, "you know what, I'm content where we are being filthy rich."
  - vasco 3y ago
    But why do you think "investors/shareholders" are bad and private owners, good? Private owners are just 100% owning shareholders, whatever notions you have about one group you should have about the other. You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process.
    - consp 3y ago
      > You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process. Sure, but as a private company at least you control who who wants to do that and are not bound by the "the price must go up" behavior of the shareholders since you only care about the dividends (this is a oversimplification).

madmads 3y ago

Are we still getting surprised by this? I feel like I've read a version of your comment on posts like this for the past couple of years.

prox 3y ago
And still we have sooo many devs who praise and glory their Google overlords. Chrome can do No Wrong. Android is Fantastic. Etc. It’s quite amazing actually.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  I saw this a lot in like 2014, but it's been a while since I've run into anyone that fanboys Google or Android like they were in the past. People would fawn over Google.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    Searching my old rants about AMP, they seem to swing from low/negative votes to higher vote counts around 2018.

ben7799 3y ago

I think it's kind of interesting to think that Google has been doing this for a long time but they've been doing it at an uneven pace for different properties. Search actually seems like it got this treatment first, and in a creeping slow way, and it wasn't even necessarily 100% Google's fault. It seems like it probably got pushed a long at first by SEO types.. and then at some point Google realized it was profitable to actually play along with the whole game.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Am I naive to think that when you make $226 million in a year like Pichai that money should stop being your major driving force and that your reputation is more important? Like what else could he buy? But his reputation is taking severe hits. Maybe I just don't understand ultra rich people though. Maybe money is everything.

spicyusername 3y ago
Yeah, I think compensation is a kind of score that the ruling class competes on. It's not about whether they are happier, are making the world better, or have enough. It's only about having more at all costs.
refulgentis 3y ago
When you get that high up in a corp., your North Star is “shareholder value”, and you’re probably right to do that. I wouldn’t want to and won’t if I was ever lucky enough to have the opportunity. But what are the alternatives?
- esafak 3y ago
  Crashing your company does not create shareholder value.
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  The alternative I was envisioning was similar to what Costco does on the retail side. Nearly every other retailer aims to maximize profits from their customers. Costco tries to offer the lowest prices it possibly can. This has huge implications for how the company is structured and where it uses its energy. Imagine a tech company that focused entirely on making the user experience as good as it possibly could, rather than one trying to extract as much money as they can this quarter.
dorkwood 3y ago
Wouldn’t half of that go to tax, though?

ksec 3y ago

>the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose Not entirely true. They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. As Apple continue to increase their user base, the higher the total cost for Google to remain default. All while Apple, in the name of privacy and fundamental human right, started a crusade against online ads, mainly targeting Facebook but tactically taking Google along with it. In order for Google and Facebook to keep the same profit margin with declining CPM, they have to place more ads to compensate for it. Which is the whole starting point of enshittification. This may also have some negative side effect on Google image and Android, and more people switching to Apple. >There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google There was never any long term plan or strategy from Google. Moonshots were like a fun project to work on with zero business planning. Google never had a product mindset. They could have done what you wrote, they could have battled Microsoft for OS dominance, they could have done shit loads of things. But they didn't. I have been watching Google before they even IPO. For vast majority of its life they have always been in a more money ( or capital ) than they know what to do with it.

lancesells 3y ago
> They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. I don't know if I would call that squeezed. They aren't required to be the default search engine. They run the bigger global platform (Android) and I would guess they get to be the default there for free?
AJ007 3y ago
Put this in to perspective. Alphabet had $282 BILLION in revenue in 2022. I don't know exactly what they will pay in 2023, but in previous years it was somewhere around $10 billion a year. Google incentivizes it's employees in a certain way. Those employees have a very high expectation of not only income but wealth. Management has demonstrated an ability to waste an enormous amount of that money (Alphabet/Google is certainly not alone in that regards.) Because they own a monopoly they can get away with it. Because the monopoly is in advertising they don't have to be that exceptional in terms of delivering new and improved products. Because of the stock ownership structure and because they've had tremendous revenue growth for so long they really haven't had to answer to their investors about their failure and waste. In some regards a lot of those investors are asleep and don't really understand what is going on. However, the managers need to crank the monetization dial to hit whatever incentives are set for them to become wealthy or grow whatever wealth they already have. This is a bag of tricks (the monetization dial) that has worked well for over a decade. When it runs out, Google's revenue growth will end and employees will no longer get to become wealthy by being employees. Maybe they will suddenly get a lot of capital discipline and experience a second wind like Microsoft appears to have. Maybe they will start looking more like Yahoo. To be determined.

agumonkey 3y ago

I agree. It's been quite a while that every decision they made was on the worse side of things. It surprises me how regular it is. Especially since they have access to history of big wealthy corps, and big pockets.. but apparently not what it takes to correct course.

skippyboxedhero 3y ago

Their financial model is similar to a TV or newspaper. Imagine you create a newspaper, you start out showing no ads, lots of people buy it, it is all good. Then you raise money from investors to grow, and they start asking for more revenue. So you add one advertisement. Then the investors want out, so you have to IPO...more ads. Then you have to keep the share price up because execs want options, and your HR consultant tells you that the "top" execs need to see a rising share price (as if you need a "top" exec to add more ads to a webpage)...more ads. The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. So it looks like very clean growth, very strong economics. This is basically how Google and Facebook work. Their revenue growth looks puzzling because they seem to achieve very consistent, very predictable revenue growth with no extra resources. The reason why is that they can add more ads to a page very easily, and can control their level of revenue growth so they can keep employees/investors happy (in that order). It is true that they have also achieved some pricing growth but that advantage has been capped (and is largely a function of their monopolistic position, i.e. Doubleclick allows Google to play both sides). Most of their growth has been increasing ads per page. There is no way for them to function as public companies in this environment (again, I would say the situation with employees is actually taken more seriously than investors) without making their product worse. They won't stop before the product collapses.

charcircuit 3y ago
>The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. You are also limited by potentially causing users to stop buying the newspaper. Google will be matching the metrics to see if users actually use the app less when adding more ads. It's possibile there will be no statistically significant difference and consumers are okay with the new ad level. If they start leaving Google can revert the change.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  As I said, there is almost no chance that they reverse before the product is killed because they are optimizing for revenue, not user growth (and when you take this at the margin, increasing ads per page is the only way). I have never seen a company stop before this point either. The institutional imperative to continue gaming the numbers is overwhelming.

choppaface 3y ago

Most of the people at Google now got in on their third try. That means Ads/Search/Brain etc rejected them for not meeting the bar, but they kept on going because they wanted the brand-name job. Lots of employees who are open to serving the brand versus evolving it.

rekoil 3y ago

> But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers. Already moved to Proton personally, I was OK with Google G-Suite or whatever the hell it's called these days when it was free, because I was trading my data for a pretty good service, but then they wanted to slap a price tag on it simply because they could, and to me that was a clear signal it was time to get out. I'm not paying for Google to monetise my data. Protons spam filter isn't as good, the keyboard shortcuts are taking some getting used to (really wish they would implement a "Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts" option), and message search could be improved (I'm sure it will), but besides those I don't miss a thing, and knowing that my privacy is respected is by itself worth the price tag.

zucked 3y ago
I wanted to like Proton, even paid for it, but their apps are _bad_. I switched over to Fastmail after a year.
- rekoil 3y ago
  They are kicking things up a notch recently in my opinion!

wnevets 3y ago

> Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum extent. I'm surprised it this has taken this long to be honest. I expected everything to turn to shit with in a years of going public.

OneLeggedCat 3y ago

With only iOS and Android as realistic choices, we genuinely need a more viable (real) Linux phone soon. I have zero faith that Google will let something like GrapheneOS stay in the somewhat usable state that it is in now.

atraac 3y ago
Ah yes, the phone where I will have to install some obscure drivers via some console command found on ubuntu forums from a 3 year old thread made by AssBlaster123 just to get microphone to work properly and then end up not having fingerprint scanner working because this particular phone uses Goodix or whatnot. We don't need "real linux" phone, we already have mobile OS based on linux, it's called Android. You can decouple it from Google, companies already do that, it works. Whether an Android phone without Google services is a viable product is another discussion - and IMO the one we should focus on.

valianteffort 3y ago

I was shocked the last time I used Google without an adblocker. The first 4-5 search results were ads. I had to scroll to get to the first actual result. There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links. I wonder which genius adsense manager thought "hey we could double our revenue if we show 4 ads instead of 2, user experience be damned".

bombcar 3y ago
I find it darkly amusing that the first five ad results are usually the same as the first five “natural” results. Which I click on depends on if if I hate them more than google.
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  Lol yup! "Should I make this company pay 25 cents to Google?"
otikik 3y ago
> There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links That is a good thing, isn't it?
- otikik 3y ago
  I misunderstood. Obviously the “effort” is in the opposite direction