Time was, when some site back in the day started sucking, you'd just switch to an alternative. This brand loyalty bullshit is a disease. If no alternative exists, make one.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago. It’s been fine.
Google used to be fantastic and is now a trash heap, and a trash heap which is using/wasting a ton of energy (AI) that hastens climate change, while invading my privacy. No thank you.
You know how difficult it was to find a simple video on how to properly wrap a present? 5 years ago I found dozens that covered boxes of different sizes.
Most people choose within the first 3 pages, And when it's repeated it must be good, truth or solid. But the real danger comes when you CAN'T find it. Then it's automatically a LIE!
I feel like most C-suites in most companies should be forcibly introduced to Davy Jones’s Locker. Everything is terrible so why not spend some time down there to rethink their life choices.
Did (or do) you get any blowback from the G teams on your opinions? To be clear, fully support the name-and-shame of enshitification operatives. Just curious if it appears on their radars
This is highly dependent on the motivations of the engineer moving into management.
Mine was due to a vacuum of leadership I stepped into and then dedicated myself to doing the opposite of managers I worked under previously. This was around 2012 after 14 years as an engineer.
I was using Google for references of a Westinghouse style vacuum brake connector, for coupling brake pipes between trains. Y'know, preserved trains, the things people LOVE to photograph.
After THREE AND A HALF HOURS of getting nowhere, I tried DuckDuckGo in desperation.
This has been my observation of the tech center. The actual designers and engineers have been pushed out by toadies working for executives and investment firms, and now tech companies are suffering the same dysfunction as the companies they once displaced.
It’s the Capitalism Circle of Life:
- Create Company
- Focus on Value to Customer
- Become Successful
- Vulture Accountants buy/move in
- Focus on Greed to Themselves
- Wring Out Every Last Dollar by Destroying Value
- Trap Customers by Enforcing Monopoly/Walls
- Leave Smoking Ruin
- Company Dies
I remember encountering Google search as a brand new thing for a job I had. I talked in a fairly complex request and I hit the feeling lucky button and I got what was clearly the best page on the Internet for what I was searching for I never looked back on any other method of searching for my needs
The reason this works in EVERY industry is the amount of regulatory capture allowed. Healthcare, banks, cellular , airlines. The biggest players create a corrupt oligopoly that new players can’t enter and them create nickle dime gates everywhere.
Off topic: I used uBlock to get rid of the AI Reply chunk at the top of Google; I don't want to become reliant, I don't want to waste the carbon, I don't want to takeaway from websites.
Do a Google search so you have an AI box to work with, then use uBlock's Element Picker (The eyedropper icon) to select the AI boxes, then click "Create."
I used to have to sell at (not to, bc they didn’t care) PR agencies and CorpComms type and I was framing SEO, even in the late ‘00s, as “Google doesn’t want to get you to the destination. That’s not profitable. They need you to keep clicking so they can place ads. That’s why you add links, etc…
Comments
Google used to be fantastic and is now a trash heap, and a trash heap which is using/wasting a ton of energy (AI) that hastens climate change, while invading my privacy. No thank you.
Tonight it was impossible
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lc6lz6yoec2r
Every one of these tech companies should be required to have an anthropologist on staff with full veto power
I guess when your livelihood depends on a blog dependent on outrage-subscriptions from doomscrollers, you generate outrage-clicks
Ed would absolutely shine as a management consultant. He knows his audience
overjoyed to know your tone does not change in person
needs more national coverage
Disagree with him however much you want, but he was never a "management consultant". His entire career has been in engineering.
Whether engineers do good in management roles is a bigger conversation.
Mine was due to a vacuum of leadership I stepped into and then dedicated myself to doing the opposite of managers I worked under previously. This was around 2012 after 14 years as an engineer.
Still doing it today.
After THREE AND A HALF HOURS of getting nowhere, I tried DuckDuckGo in desperation.
It was the third result.
- Create Company
- Focus on Value to Customer
- Become Successful
- Vulture Accountants buy/move in
- Focus on Greed to Themselves
- Wring Out Every Last Dollar by Destroying Value
- Trap Customers by Enforcing Monopoly/Walls
- Leave Smoking Ruin
- Company Dies
Sometimes a little more footwork is worth it.
That'll create a new blocking rule in uBlock!
Here's a video. 👇
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7IqOHa3RA