Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bluestein | Hacker News Reader

(Google is killing search results, downright).-

It's hard to blame them, most of the well monetized expansive web content is deep web, pay walled, brittle, mixed media, copyrighted, and not enabled for something like microtransactions, subject to GDPR, and doesn't make them a dime.

Exactly — capitalisms goal isn't to create a good service, it is to extract money, hence a good CEO will take a perfectly fine service and maximize revenue by extracting value even if it means the service gets worse.

Now ideally that would mean the service then dies or gets surpassed by competitors, but that mechanism only works if we are not talking about monopolists, that e.g. have the power to make themselves the default on browsers and operating systems.

But ... "merit", you know, the (in theory) mechanism by which quality (ie. "non-worse") products gain market share, ergo increasing revenue? (Seriously wondering).-

That is why I pointed out the non-level playing field, this has to do with defaults and what information is given to people.

If you are e.g. a small browser manufacturer and microsoft pushes Edge, google pushes Chrome and both try theie best to actively prevent/scare people from installing everything else, that playing field is effectively not level for you. There is no market if your competitor is preinstalled on nearly all phones.

Sure you can now try to grab tech conscious people, but because they are few you will have to follow changes tour bigger competitors are making etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com