I really can't get over the way almost every piece of consumer technology/software has gotten worse in the last half decade. These companies are killing every goose they can get their hands on because they are so convinced there is some golden goose out there that will be worth more than all those regular geese combined.
It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it or briefly invests in their product again to make it good enough and since they have a long tail of users and the network effect, they win by default while still keeping their product mediocre
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.
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.
And laws. The US Congress could pass updates to the Sherman or Clayton acts any time they want to.
As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace.
It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue.
If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.
I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange.
I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.
And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.
There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices).
In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park.
A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical).
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
(Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)
I totally agree with this but it doesn't have to be a non-profit.
Perfectly fine if you you build a for-profit company on top of open public standards.
Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG
The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.
Oh I’m supposed to get sovereign by building my own web browser and running my own standards committee or what? How does my sovereignty attract like minded people when half dont care and half dont understand?
Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.
Not a robot, but I feel my thoughts fall on deaf ears in your case. Godspeed (he wrote from Firefox, which is not perfect, but not a Big Tech product imho).
If you feel your thoughts fall on deaf ears then why did you reply in the first place? I feel your comments do not clarify anything you’re trying to say. I feel your comment doesn’t even address what I was talking about. I asked nicely that you clarify and your response is to tell me I’m ignoring you. Godspeed to you too if you have nothing to say.
It seems like he's saying to use open source software, and firefox is one of those options. Since it's open source, you "own" it soup to nuts, thus sovereign.
Except Firefox doesn’t qualify there because, as I’ve already expressed, it’s captured by Google (he wrote from Librewolf which is nearly perfect and gets the job done as better example than the other poster gave).
Your reply only acknowledges the last line and doesn’t explain any of the other poster’s thoughts either. What did they mean by any of the following where they discuss “building” and what does that have to do with using Firefox:
> the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
> If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode.
I think there’s a (fixable, if difficult) reason the FOSS world contributes such a small percentage of heavily-used end-user facing tools to our software landscape. We’ve got the commercial provided spanked on a lot of things, like web servers. Competitors almost stopped trying.
Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.
I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.
For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.
But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.
Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.
edit: replaced the link to point to the actual slides, it's worth checking the actual source, there is some hilarious details there! (spoiler: "The true source of value. Golden egg factory inside the goose")
I’ve put together many investor presentations throughout my time and seeing the stuff that SoftBank gets away with is honestly insane. My bonus would’ve been at jeopardy if I would’ve presented slides like that to my senior bankers.
Unfortunately, today's MBAs can barely see beyond the current quarter. Everything is a P&L to them, everything is a cell in a spreadsheet. This MBA culture is slowly strangling American companies and squeezing the life out of them.
Talking in past tense implies that it has ended and that now is a big turning point. From what I see, this will likely continue for the foreseeable future. It's easier to imagine the consequences of this leading us to a large-scale breakdown than it ending.
It has ended because it has completed, not because it has been overturned. The economy has been destroyed. Society has been destroyed. We are living in the post-destruction society right now, but most of everything hasn't caught up with the fact it's been destroyed yet.
We're like a radiation accident victim whose DNA has been completely shredded, but still feels fine for a few days as his cells still have all the proteins they need right now, but can't make new ones to replace the ones that wear out. His fate was sealed the moment he got the radiation dose but the rest of him hasn't caught up.
It's weirdly kinda true...at least in games, my kids and I noticed that there were a bonkers number of great games in 2016 in particular, but also kind of around that period (2018 had some greats as well). Sure, there are some standouts in recent years here and there, but it seems like the overall trend is downward.
Was kind of excited to see Crate Entertainment release a new DLC for Grim Dawn this past week, given that's a game from 2016. Love the approach of adding more content to something known to be good.
The current trend is saturation. The current rate is over 4000 new games a month on Steam. The problem isn’t that great new games aren’t being released, it’s finding them.
Next month (September 2026) looks pretty good: Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Dawn of War IV, Wolverine, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Orbitals, Silent Hill: Townfall, Control Resonant, Trails in the Sky 2nd, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Valheim, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, ...
August-October has a huge bounty of games that presumably are trying to avoid the GTA6 release window.
The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.
In my opinion Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia. Wikipedia played a big part in suppressing what the Web might have been and started out becoming before it changed direction.
I was watching in real time as Gopher, Wais, and the Web were all equally in play, and as the Web won. I had a personal website at the beginning, and I still have it. It seemed to be the next revolution in the dissemination of ideas after Gutenberg. Individuals could make their creations available to the entire world at almost no cost. Individual sites, individual voices, in all their eccentric glory, arose in profusion. Then it all became swamped by anonymous, unaccountable corporate voices. Wikipedia is a salient example of a collective, bland, plagiarising substitute for individual expertise that can not be held responsible for its words and that is accorded a false authority. it is part of the tragedy of the Web that could have been.
I remember the time before smartphones. They make many tasks faster, easier, many tasks possible at all and replace specialised devices. You are wrong.
Arguably a little longer, its just compounded, Windows peaked at 8 and 10 was downhill spiral, 11 is just all the bad stuff that 10 had available out of the box.
Everyone hated Vista, 7 was okay, but 8.1 was way better. It was super polished, Windows 10 has been the worst version I have ever used. Windows 8.1 was one of the last versions to run faster on lesser hardware btw.
Can confirm. It was the first OS I ever pirated (technically it was the Data Center edition, I bought off of some dude on a forum via a money order I sent him[1], because my internet was so slow 28.8k). I was trying to get a system that wouldn’t BSOD and had heard how reliable NT 4 was before it so I downloaded it… and the kid with the coolest[2] Dragon Ball Z website was using ASP to serve it.
I ran the DC edition and eventually just Pro for years. It wasn’t until well past SP4 I stopped using it and switched to XP, which I only did because it was running the NT kernel.
If it wasn’t for Win2k and ISS I probably wouldn’t have ever become a software engineer. Truly appreciate Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts being completely ineffective at the time.
[1] I was worried about sending some random guy my $20 as a 14 year old. But I really should’ve been worried about my mom checking the mail and then asking me WTF I got in the mail. She was pissed but still let me use it.
[2] I forget the name but I just remember I liked it better than PlanetNamek. It was also really cool to me that some kid had a Dad who could do that sort of thing. I had a lot of trouble even hosting a site somewhere besides Geocities because my parents wouldn’t use their credit card online (which is how I discovered the usefulness of money orders).
Yes, this is my opinion as well. I did my MCSE certification on win2k and their stuff was good back then, even on that old hardware. You had to beg it to BSOD.
And it's the result of large-scale centrally planned aspects of our economy. The whole system is set up to not incentivize creating value but rather incentive extraction.
