[Croak]

I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s.

Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.

I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.

[balamatom]

One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.

[sousastep]

Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.

[chipsrafferty]

Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.

[Gormo]

Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...

[mastax]

"Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.

[balamatom]

>Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates

They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?