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There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by go

by jsnell 2mo ago

There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle. There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities. Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.

roryirvine 2mo ago
In the twentieth century, government regulation was used to encourage corporations to provide these sort of quasi-public services alongside their more profitable lines of business, and to maintain them even when times where hard. In the late 2000s, it seemed that the new wave of tech giants had a deliberate strategy of voluntarily providing similar services in order to demonstrate that they could be responsible stewards without being forced to do so. A stroke of genius, people said, which meant that they could avoid sclerosing regulation, allowing them to remain nimble in the long run. But that has completely broken down over the past decade. Google left non-core services to rot. Twitter trashed the digital town square. Facebook set people against each other to maximise engagement. We should remember this for the next time an industry claims to be able to self-regulate. They can't - at least, not for long, not if there's a chance to make $100bn rather than just $99bn.

by jsnell 2mo ago

roryirvine 2mo ago

In the twentieth century, government regulation was used to encourage corporations to provide these sort of quasi-public services alongside their more profitable lines of business, and to maintain them even when times where hard. In the late 2000s, it seemed that the new wave of tech giants had a deliberate strategy of voluntarily providing similar services in order to demonstrate that they could be responsible stewards without being forced to do so. A stroke of genius, people said, which meant that they could avoid sclerosing regulation, allowing them to remain nimble in the long run. But that has completely broken down over the past decade. Google left non-core services to rot. Twitter trashed the digital town square. Facebook set people against each other to maximise engagement. We should remember this for the next time an industry claims to be able to self-regulate. They can't - at least, not for long, not if there's a chance to make $100bn rather than just $99bn.