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Comment by zhobbs | Hacker News Reader

It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull.

If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).

The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.

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This all comes down to one phrase I’ve grown to hate. “It must be measurable”.

Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.

Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.

So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.

Google search has totally craptastic'd out.

Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.

They don’t have to care ? That is the problem of monopolies.

There is no incentive to improve the product , there is every incentive to degrade quality because what are you going to do not shop at Amazon or not search with google ?

Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart?

[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/

Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on.

I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources.

I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.

I'm not sure if "search engine that was good and is now sometimes crappy and full of ads" is worse than "AI-powered plagiarism factory"[0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2024/06/11/why-perp...

> it's now just sponsored spam

Is it? I get a lot of product recommendations from Amazon that aren't sponsored. For example, we bought a countertop dishwasher a few years ago, and then for two months afterwards Amazon kept showing us other countertop dishwashers that we might want to add to our collection.

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