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Comment by nerddadnear40 | Hacker News Reader

Welp, time to short Google in the long run.

For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums.

The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.

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> Welp, time to short Google in the long run.

That's probably not a great idea for two reasons:

1. Google has their fingers in a lot of pies. You want to short Google search, but a short on Google is also shorting all their other businesses, as well as shorting future ventures and shorting the possibility that their management will pivot business strategy away from search.

2. Shorting in general leans toward being a short-term strategy, because most forms of shorts are costly to maintain because you're paying interest on loans, option premiums, etc. Futures are probably the cheapest way, but then you're susceptible to short-term fluctuations: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

EDIT: alangibson also makes a good point.

If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price.

With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.

It takes a long time though. Meta is a great example. People pointed to stock price as proof that whatever they were doing works.

But after a while, they realized that Facebook is screwed and pivoted away from the branding of Facebook. The Meta announcement was merely confirmation that they had indeed gone to crap, and that's what made shares plummet.

It's also why I'm not a major supporter of data-driven decisionmaking because the data used to make decisions can come in too late. A common mistake is to annoy users with things that make money, and then observe that money is coming in. But at some point, users leave en masse because they're just sick of how things are. By the time you get the data, the cash cow is terminally ill.

Google is a better search engine of Reddit than Reddit. Especially the app search which is a bloody mess.

Someone should tell Reddit if they fixed their search they might supplant Google search... they could become the front page of the internet or something.

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