Ask HN: Have we reached the point that anti-monopoly people were warning of? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have we reached the point that anti-monopoly people were warning of?

14 pointsmoose_man12 comments

With the loss of APIs from major companies, are we in the endgame that we were warned about for a decade? Is tech now so powerful that we are totally captured? The whole argument that it wasn't hurting consumers is that they gave away so many services for free, what is the justification now?

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Only on HN would two companies that are losing millions be considered a “monopoly”.

Neither Reddit or Twitter are in any form shape or fashion a “monopoly”.

The thing about tech monopolies are they operate at huge losses until they wipe out the competition and then they start jacking up costs way higher than the market normally would allow because they've laid waste to the competitive landscape by operating for so long at such scale at huge losses. That was what the argument against allowing tech platforms to consolidate was. Think about all the platforms that were bought or went under during the 2010s. By being able to operate at losses for so long while buying their competitors / putting them out of business, they've salted the ground in terms of competition for their categories.

Yes, I’m sure that Twitter and Reddit are going to take the world by storm any day now.

But, if you really want to look at the biggest companies in tech:

1. Apple was founded in 1977 and never racked up huge losses

2. Microsoft was profitable before it went public in 1980 and only took investor funding later on because BG wanted advice

3. Google never lost huge amounts of money

4. Facebook was profitable before going public and only went public because they had so many shareholders that they had the same reporting requirements as a public company.

5. Amazon (disclaimer my employer) is the only one that took huge losses early on.

So which “monopoly” do you believe operated at huge losses that is now successful?

Regarding point #3, doesn't YouTube lose Google millions a year? The amount of server space needed to transcode and store all of that video data must be immense, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a loss leader so that Google can have much more dominance over the personal video space (see DailyMotion, Vimeo(?) and others which tried and failed to be YouTube competitors)

From the best I can find, YouTube is barely break even.

And if you really want to be pedantic (not saying you are), Apple lost billions between 1995-1999. But not trying to capture market share. No one wanted their products.

Companies and people aren't going to be so quick to give away the data they control. AI companies have shown that they need tons of data to create their products but they aren't too quick to share the results and they are bound to make billions.

Twitter and Reddit are just looking to get a share of the AI profits. Is it a monopolistic move? Maybe, I don't see where else the AI companies will be a able to get good structure data. The move is pointed towards the AI companies, specially new companies, not users. Since limiting user input will destroy the business model that sells data for AI companies. Going forward structured quality data will always have a price.

I expect for AI companies to buy twitter and/or reddit in the future so they aren't kept away from the data they need.

The alternate move is for AI companies to create their own products that they can use as a data pipe similar to twitter and reddit.

They were never giving away service for free. Though they weren't charging end users cash, they were collecting their data, preferences, contributions, and numerous other details. They were correlating that data with other datasets to de-anonymize people. You might have never seen a single dime charged to your credit card, the costs to you were adding up over time.

Okay fair, but they're still doing that. It's not like consumers have gained by the change in model, they've just found a new source of blood to drain from users. We have no control over our privacy plus fees!

That's true. It's been noted that, "The things that make TikTok or Twitter worth reading are generated by users who feel like they’re creating things."[1]. So the platforms and their defenders may try to portray users as getting something for free, the reality is that the users themselves are the ones that create the "something" that has real value. Almost anyone on HN will tell you they can effortlessly create a Twitter/reddit/IG clone, but they're wrong: They're only creating a mechanism. The real value lies in the content.

1 https://tedium.co/2023/06/21/reddit-api-free-rider-problem/

Sure you do - don’t use Twitter or Reddit. Problem solved.

If you have Twitter and Reddit in mind then the first thing is to understand that both are largely irrelevant. At least Twitter has become the de facto platform for instant, short "press releases" but that's about it.

So what happens to them or their APIs is not important and they are not powerful in any real sense.

In comparison, Standard Oil was a real, powerful monopoly that controlled a key resource.

In the "tech world", I'd say Google is the one that matters because it has become the gatekeeper of the Web and Google ranking is critically important.

> Google ranking is critically important.

I wonder how long this will be true. Already today Googles search result are mostly SEO-optimized garbage and I can't fathom that this will get better now that "content creators" have access to plutonium grade bullshit generators.

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