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Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still ne
by weland 13y ago
Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fuck is almost outrageous.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
- username223 13y agoIt has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
- weland 13y agoMy browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care about them, let alone use them. As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
- username223 13y agoIn the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it. As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
- weland 13y agoI'm gonna make an Internet of my own. With hookers and blackjack and threaded newsreaders :-).
- Silhouette 13y agoWe are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
- teisman 13y agoTrue. And the people objecting against the whole G+ / YouTube integration are probably the early adopters that could lead the herd.
- weland 13y ago> I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.