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It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-ow

It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. But the fact that it comes at the cost of hiring the world's top minds to figure out how to generate more ad clicks at any cost (mind control, teen suicide, etc.) is just unacceptable. Whatever way out we might choose, I hope that it doesn't impact indie hackers and people who want to try new things. We have to make sure that the root of the problem, advertising, is properly captured in the letter of the law, and that any legislation doesn't get disemboweled by corporate interests on the way out the door.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. I mean, would you need half of that scaling if not for the demands of surveillance capitalism? How much of Google's tech stack is built around, for example, delivering email, and how much of Google's tech stack is built around harvesting user data for Adsense? I'm sure gmail runs on something that would be as far from a standard email server as anything I could imagine, but I feel like there's a natural ceiling in terms of the sheer amount of compute you could reasonably bring to bear to accomplish the task of mail transfer, whereas I could easily see the demands of running intensive, page-by-page analytics on a variety of websites and apps all at the same time easily demanding an absolutely stressful amount of server traffic and compute, let alone the delivery of the ads after that work is finished. And, that also presumes that gmail as a service is made better by being run on the infrastructure of a hyper-scaler. Running it across datacenters worldwide. Is it? Is the experience meaningfully better for the end user in the bargain, or is it everything around that service that requires such vast resources? Like, genuinely, how much electricity could we save if we just turned off user data collection tomorrow?
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. I don't see any reason to suspect this. Even a blurrier incentive is still incentive. Secondly a lot of that innovation has been bad. Consider the disappearance of a chronological timeline, or ads themselves. There's nothing inherently positive about the concept of innovation but profit motivates every type (as it stands). It just tends to happen faster with private enterprise and without any say from the users.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  You're right, I just mean more on the UX and tech side of things. Government software UX is typically atrocious. Some of it is well-founded and just outdated, though. But, there are some nice efforts taking place within the government to modernize and standardize tech and UX. digital. Digital.gov is killing it lately. https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Government software UX is typically atrocious. I mean, UX is atrocious across the board really, at least in my experience. I can't remember the last time I used a tech product and didn't have at least one moment of bafflement as to how anyone thought this was how this should be designed.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. I mean, would you need half of that scaling if not for the demands of surveillance capitalism? How much of Google's tech stack is built around, for example, delivering email, and how much of Google's tech stack is built around harvesting user data for Adsense? I'm sure gmail runs on something that would be as far from a standard email server as anything I could imagine, but I feel like there's a natural ceiling in terms of the sheer amount of compute you could reasonably bring to bear to accomplish the task of mail transfer, whereas I could easily see the demands of running intensive, page-by-page analytics on a variety of websites and apps all at the same time easily demanding an absolutely stressful amount of server traffic and compute, let alone the delivery of the ads after that work is finished. And, that also presumes that gmail as a service is made better by being run on the infrastructure of a hyper-scaler. Running it across datacenters worldwide. Is it? Is the experience meaningfully better for the end user in the bargain, or is it everything around that service that requires such vast resources? Like, genuinely, how much electricity could we save if we just turned off user data collection tomorrow?

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. I don't see any reason to suspect this. Even a blurrier incentive is still incentive. Secondly a lot of that innovation has been bad. Consider the disappearance of a chronological timeline, or ads themselves. There's nothing inherently positive about the concept of innovation but profit motivates every type (as it stands). It just tends to happen faster with private enterprise and without any say from the users.

soulofmischief 2y ago
You're right, I just mean more on the UX and tech side of things. Government software UX is typically atrocious. Some of it is well-founded and just outdated, though. But, there are some nice efforts taking place within the government to modernize and standardize tech and UX. digital. Digital.gov is killing it lately. https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Government software UX is typically atrocious. I mean, UX is atrocious across the board really, at least in my experience. I can't remember the last time I used a tech product and didn't have at least one moment of bafflement as to how anyone thought this was how this should be designed.