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FaryGagan t1_j5qqfe8 wrote

Not to mention the quality of their search engine has tanked recently because... why care about the user when you make so much money off of advertising to the world?

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Flatline2962 t1_j5qtixm wrote

Cory Doctorow just the other day posted an article he wrote recently on why social media companies (and you can include Alphabet in this) progressively get worse. He frames it really well. You're "profiting" from using those services and there's a surplus of satisfaction if the product is good. By making it harder to quit the service or through more aggressive advertising, the provider creates an environment where they can reclaim that satisfaction, objectifying and monetizing you more and more, making you more and more miserable using the product. As long as they don't push you over the threshold of "fuck this I'm leaving" then any of your "surplus" satisfaction the leave on the table is money they're leaving out of their pocket.

The product needs to be good while it's growing and establishing a market and a userbase. That pivots, immediately, to making things *just* shitty and monetized enough that while you aren't enjoying the product any more, but quitting the product would be a worse prospective.

https://craphound.com/news/2023/01/22/social-quitting/

It's a great read. It goes both ways, both the users who are miserable with the service or product and the advertisers who are miserable with the terms because Alphabet is the only game in town.

Edit: the link goes to an mp3 from his podcast. I thought I had seen it in an email from his newsletter but I guess not. Still worth a listen.

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