Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.
Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world.
Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".
I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race.
Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.
Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably.
It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.
Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.
Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world.
Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".
I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race.
Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.
Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably.
It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.