There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities.
Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.
In the late 2000s, it seemed that the new wave of tech giants had a deliberate strategy of voluntarily providing similar services in order to demonstrate that they could be responsible stewards without being forced to do so. A stroke of genius, people said, which meant that they could avoid sclerosing regulation, allowing them to remain nimble in the long run.
But that has completely broken down over the past decade. Google left non-core services to rot. Twitter trashed the digital town square. Facebook set people against each other to maximise engagement.
We should remember this for the next time an industry claims to be able to self-regulate. They can't - at least, not for long, not if there's a chance to make $100bn rather than just $99bn.
As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace.
It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue.
If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
The invisible hand of the market is a make believe. There is too much moat in moat.
I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.
The world consume things through mobile apps nowadays.
There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
As a counter example, Fairtiq.
In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park.
A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228
(Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)
The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.
Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.
Your reply only acknowledges the last line and doesn’t explain any of the other poster’s thoughts either. What did they mean by any of the following where they discuss “building” and what does that have to do with using Firefox:
> the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
> If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode.
Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.
I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.
For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.
But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.
Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.
This is a decent brain storming along those lines for social media in particular, but it could also apply more broadly, like you say: