Anyone involved in these type of attacks (at internet-infrastructure scale or targeting specific companies) brave/crazy enough to create a throwaway account and tell hn about the motivations?
We also had some actual attacks so we made a system that detect anomalies (like more than 50rps per IP) and raises alert.
...which was thwarted by frontend developers again, as they loaded few hundred tiny icons at once that triggered that alert routinely, and only thru http2 multiplexing their idiotic design patents haven't bitten them before.
Performance metrics were taking a dive and triggered automated alerts - average response time jumped from 200ms to 2000, 8000, and eventually began approaching 15000, at which point requests were timing out all over the place. At first I was wondering if my recently-deployed MR was responsible, but upon further investigation, it was from one developer on another team doing two very dumb things with their application prototype:
- Constantly retrying the same query with no filtering and setting the maximum allowed page size
- Sending massive quantities of small queries for specific individuals (50-100 per second) which quickly hit the rate limit, and immediately resuming after the rate limit expired
Some developer outreach was required...
This kind of attack is nothing like the actual DDoS attacks, but it's a lot more common in my experience, but also relatively easy to mitigate with something like Cloudflare or Akamai (which is what I'd recommend to my customers).
You might not remember this, but before Google, paid search placement was par for the course. One of Google's innovations, one of the things that really endeared it to users was clearly labeling their ads.
So, yes - it was inevitable. And, in fact, Google probably staved it off at least a decade; maybe more.
My bet is on the latter. Enshitification is a direct product of greed. No crafts person or creator I know of goes into something they enjoy creating with the intent to make it this monstrosity of money extraction. Most creators have a drive for their creation to be shared and experienced by many.
Yes, you may want to get a reward in the process and for some creators, their motives may change over time if they see an opportunity to turn their creation into a wealth machine for themselves so they can do whatever after.
Enshitification I believe is a secondary effect of something that becomes successful for the owners of something and either they or others change motives towards value. Optimization is no longer about the creation, sharing, experience, humanitarian, whatever motive and shifts to money. The second that becomes the goal, enshitication is just part of the optimization journey. In my line of thinking, it's the same reason monopolies or near monopolies tend to form, these are merely further states along optimization strategies in the monetary/wealth extraction goal.
Part of that process is that when something starts to succeed, it attracts people with these goals so the goal of something shifts pretty rapidly.
The drive to create the thing comes from sincere enthusiasm + excitement that simply don’t leave me alone.
Shifting the thing’s purpose from the original one that filled me with enthusiasm to the purpose of simply extracting money, corrupts its original purpose.
I call this corruption.
it is my observation that one kind of people create, and another kind of people corrupt.
Unfortunately the economic system we have accepted as normal, leans toward corruption and extraction.
It's not surprising Google search is now crap, it's what happened to all the old search engines. It's only surprising that it took 15-20 years (depending on perspective), and in the mean time, they've developed a big ecosystem of other stuff.