It’s time for Alphabet to be broken up into separate letters.
Surprised pikachu face An ad company is gonna do what an ad company nets more profit.
I feel like at this point it should be obvious but because they have their fingers in so many pies a lot of people don’t notice.
Google is an ad company and basically everything they do at this point serves that. They should have changed their name to doubleclick.
In what should be surprising to Noone, Google was just paying lip service about what it stood for from the beginning. When their motto was ‘do no evil’ it was a lie, they just stopped pretending.
Ever used email before GMail?
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services… before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don’t discredit Google because you weren’t around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of… and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn’t done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there’s a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it’s compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I’ve come to have to accept that I’ll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I’ll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default… and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
Making quality stuff for free does not mean they were not doing shady things in the background.
I have no plan to boycott Google or anything, but they were nwver benevolent and usage has always been a tradeoff of data tracking for convenience.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. It’s absolutely true, time and time again it keeps being proven true.
Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.
TIL a new word “enshittification”
_enshittification entails these steps:
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves._
Ngl i didnt read the article but this headline is already dumb. Ever since Google got any sort of popularity, it has been an obvious danger to the internet, net neutrality and any free projects that want to exist without being involved with google. If you have to state as your company motto that you arent evil then maybe you are already evil…
I hate, hate, hate that you’re making me defend Google here, but they’re the only smartphone, desktop/laptop oem that open source their os. They open source the browser, arguably their most important software. They continue to release their code under open licenses. Now compare this to how Microsoft was (and still is) in the 90s when Google started coming into prominence.
“Don’t be evil” was a direct response to companies like them.
Too often people comment as if the last five years of their experience with a company is all they need to know when remarking about something that was coined over twenty years ago. Context matters.
Once claimed to stand for
