https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Also discussed on HN earlier
They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.
"Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of things.
Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.
And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.
I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.
Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.
Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.
Personally, I believe that Google's issues are just a general issue of tech debt and creeping complexity that is common in all organizations.
That said, Amazon was a victim of a strategy similar to your conspiracy theory
In 2019, the WSJ [0] exposed how Walmart, Oracle and Simon Property Group were funding and astroturfing anti-Amazon groups.
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-to-take-d...
The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also that what the ads show must be the main part in the game, not just some irrelevant side quest.
Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?
Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space means that everyone sets their sight on the same target. Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered, reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".
The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms Google uses to determine search rankings must always be a moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated and constantly curated by people. Any attempt to fully automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by automating the production of content that hits just the right buttons while still being royally useless to actual visitors.
And if they do, you'll get maybe a decade out of them before they succumb to the same problems as Google have.
This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect / harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air fryers, mattresses, etc.