The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse t…
    • tempest@lemmy.caEnglish
      42·
      1 year ago

      I feel like at this point it should be obvious but because they have their fingers in so many pies a lot of people don’t notice.

      Google is an ad company and basically everything they do at this point serves that. They should have changed their name to doubleclick.

    • HidingCat@kbin.social
      20·
      1 year ago

      When you need to please shareholders, this is what happens.

      I think the Don’t Be Evil motto was true up until they decided to go public. That was the start of the end, basically.

  • Potato_in_my_anus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    241·
    1 year ago

    TIL a new word “enshittification”

    _enshittification entails these steps:

    first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves._

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    176·
    1 year ago

    Ngl i didnt read the article but this headline is already dumb. Ever since Google got any sort of popularity, it has been an obvious danger to the internet, net neutrality and any free projects that want to exist without being involved with google. If you have to state as your company motto that you arent evil then maybe you are already evil…

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        53·
        1 year ago

        I agree not everything is black and white with this stuff, but good deeds do not absolve you from your bad ones. As we are currently seeing, Chromium being open source doesnt prevent Chrome from being changed in ways that is not in the interest of the users.

        Also while they do release many things as open source, the software that people end up using in the end (Chrome, Maps, etc) are not open source at all, which just further solidifies their market dominance because people cant accept even giving up one little feature in favor of a different app, service, website.

        Also comparing two big tech companies for their supposed upsides and downsides is pointless. They both suck and we should reduce our dependence on all of them.

        • joshhsoj1902@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Comparing Google to Microsoft in the early 2000s is not pointless at all. Back then it was Microsoft who had the monopoly on all technology, they controlled IE, the most used browser in the world, and they controlled the main operating system that people used.

          When Google started Chrome they worked with other large companies to work on building web standards, many of the super important technology behind the scenes that make the modern internet work were developed at least partially by Google in collaboration with other major industry interests.

          Android also had a huge impact here. These days people accessing the internet on phones is common practice, but once again Google pioneered many of the standards now used to allow build applications that run decently well on phones and can interface with the web.

          And those are just two major projects you’ve likely heard of. Google created a lot of tech that is used behind the scenes:

          • Kubernetes was created by Google and they have transfered ownership away from themselves.
          • Golang is a wildly popular development language that they developed and open source.
          • Related to android, but google is also a major contributor back to the Linux kernel.
          • Google is also a major player in online security proactively finding security flaws in critical web services and applications and working with relevant parties to resolve them.
          • Google essentially developed http2.
          • Google was heavily involved in developing HTML5 (which really was essential for our modern websites)
          • Google’s open source V8 JavaScript engine is used in node.js (another super popular web development language). I think it still uses V8, but I haven’t used nodejs in years.

          I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to use Google products less, but this case you’re ignoring just how much Google helped save us from Microsoft’s monopoly. And regardless how much control Google has now, it’s far less then the control Microsoft had, and a large part of that is because Google has been more open with their technology and more willing to work to better the entire industry (yes they were likely aware that making the whole tech space better would also help them, but i have a hard time feeling that’s malicious)

          • ZEEEPh@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I really like your answer, it points to many things that have a hand from Google that I had no idea. Not wanting to defend them, but they had a very important role in most new deep learning tools as well, e.g. transformers, natural language processing, computer vision, etc. they had a huge impact in a lot of things

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. It’s absolutely true, time and time again it keeps being proven true.

  • snooggums@kbin.social
    51·
    1 year ago

    In what should be surprising to Noone, Google was just paying lip service about what it stood for from the beginning. When their motto was ‘do no evil’ it was a lie, they just stopped pretending.

    • owf@feddit.deEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Hard disagree. Back in its early days, Google was genuinely decent. They competed by building better stuff than everyone else, and that’s it.

      There was no decent free email and no free maps before Google. You used to have to pay hundreds for decent mapping software.

      The good old Web 2.0 days, when companies were falling over themselves to provide free APIs and see what people could do with them.

      Google started going to shit when they brought out Android and everybody started trying to build walled gardens, and went full evil when that moral vacuum Pichai took over.

      • snooggums@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Google was collecting your data without informing you from the very beginning. Just because they wrote good software and offered free stuff doesn’t mean they weren’t doing shady stuff in the background.

        I still use Google services, but only because the free part of the trade is currently working in my favor since I block all their ads.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

    • Overzeetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      all their services are shit

      Many of their services are quite good. Their management and business operations have been turned to utter shit (for consumers). They’ve been told they need to make more money every quarter and they’ve run out of easy things to make money on, so they’re now looking at their entire catalog with the sole focus of revenue generation and profit growth rather than merely being an impactful internet resource which is sustainably profitable.

      • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I have the opinion here that stocks should be harder to trade. If you bought stocks and had to hold them for a 5 year period, and instead got paid a dividend, then the push for quarterly results would not force companies to be quite as rapidly self-sabotaging. Corporate bonds instead of trying to beat the bell. IPOs and that market are the root cause to a lot of shit.