How the Internet turned into $hit. People did it! ( from Cory Doctorow )

[usonian]

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Ed Zitron went through the trove of emails unearthed in the Google antitrust proceedings and found the moment at which the giant "enshittification lever" was pulled and locked in position.

Details here:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

...


In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

[tanyev]

1. There's always someone who thinks it's a triumph to break things.

[Cerridwen]

2. So, who's the "algorithm" that keeps getting the blame? :(

[usonian]

4. The algo changed by executive decision

that garbage would be a larger factor than before.

Still a secret. So is Coke's.

They just rot different parts of your body.

[Earth-shine]

5. Perhaps Google will learn a lesson from the "New Coke" debacle of the 1980s.

That stuff was awful, and they expected us to drink it. Customers revolted. Pepsi market share went up.

They don't learn. They won't learn. Enshittification is now a basic part of any successful product's lifecycle.

[usonian]

6. When everything stinks, there's opportunity for something sweet.

Working on it!

[Earth-shine]

7. Yes, and so I discovered Winn-Dixie's house brand of diet cola.

It was cheaper and better than Coke and Pepsi.

I've was drinking the W-D soda for years thinking I had beaten the system.

So what happened?

About two years ago, W-D enshittified the soda while raising the price. They took the fizz out of the bottles, and the sweet out of the cans.

And so I discovered Publix brand diet cola. It was good enough! I managed to get a few weeks in before they enshittified that one! It became completely undrinkable.

And so I went back to W-D. I got a few good bottles, until I then bought some bad ones.

The only solution is for me to give up this stuff. It also happens to be bad for one's health.

[Tree Lady]

12. Haven't drank sodas in years

Took me awhile but I mostly drink water except tea n the morning. At first I would put a few tablespoons of juice or a bit of lemon or lime in water but eventually learned to like it plain. And I started in my 20's with honey in my tea and decreased that until I only like plain.

Now you are thinking I am a health nut, I wish! Hopelessly addicted to sweets and can't control portion size.

But I got a hold on drinks at least...

[Cerridwen]

11. Excellent points!

Sorry it took so long to reply. Busy day.
Broom needed a tune-up. Sometimes time just flies.

[usonian]

13. The timer is off!

Some of us rant about technology being misused.

That's because we're technologists!

I always aimed to do good things (or at least fun things)
I never went home from work feeling like I did something nasty.

Science and technology have been put to good and horrendous ends. Too many on the horrendous side.

Kevin Kelley wrote some time ago in "What Technology Wants" these "affordances" that technology can provide, and in a way seems to "want" when people choose wisely.

So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?

Possibilities

To increase diversity 

To maximize freedom/choices

To expand the space of the possible

Efficiencies 

To increase specialization/uniqueness

To increase power density 

To increase density of meaning

To engage all matter and energy 

To reach ubiquity and free-ness 

To become beautiful

Complexity

To increase complexity 
To increase social co-dependency 
To increase self-referential nature 
To align with nature

Evolvability 

To accelerate evolvability 

To play the infinite game

But what many have made of it are all the things that steal time, echo ideas rather than expand their space, destroy meaning, increase reliance on a few foci (like one), and play finite games. where one wins, and the other loses [1] rather than win-win situations. Technology like casino math, dictates that one side always comes out ahead. Not by the nature of technology, but by its application.

[1] See the fabulous book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse
A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

There's actually a copy at the Internet Archive.
https://ia801905.us.archive.org/18/items/james-p-carse-finite-and-infinite-games/James%20P%20carse%20Finite%20and%20Infinite%20Games.pdf

Both those links should work.

[aocommunalpunch]

3. TL/DR Google decided to do evil. n/t

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

8. Not that it matters to this case, but the enshittification started before Google

Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., only made it worse. Anyone who dipped so much as a pinky into usenet in the early 1990s probably knows this. And based on that experience, "social media" probably should never have been permitted to exist as it presently does; but people got caught up in "the new economy," forgetting that capitalists' behavior is predictable. Personally, I think it was a bad idea to allow the internet into the wild in the first place. But capitalists always win, and they won "bigly" with the internet. Limited-subject or limited-interests social media sites ('ya know, like D.U.) are be fine as long as there's a paid moderator (or an active community) to limit and/or expel bad actors, but how much death and destruction has been caused by Facebook, for one example, since its inception? The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, terrorism in many places and communal violence in others, Islamic State recruitment, etc., etc.

Capitalists' ONLY concern is profit (they want that one thing: MORE), not people or society or the environment, which is why unregulated industries are a really bad idea (see our airline industry, for example). Also, the purpose of technology is to replace human labor, knowledge and skill with a machine. Machines don't want breaks or days off, they don't get married or have babies, they don't get sick, they don't form unions. Yet (who knows with AI). They just keep running (with occasional servicing). In the case of the internet, the "machine" has no physical form (it's code), but it's still a machine.

[tinrobot]

9. Here's a list of non-Google search engines

https://kinsta.com/blog/alternative-search-engines/

[NanaCat]

10. Gee, Cory, thanks for that world-altering insight

Did he think some membrane from Alpha Centauri suddenly opened and let in a malignant alien race to wreak havoc on the Internet?

I mean, really, despite the long history of humans bollixing anything not nailed down (and even some that is!) for millennia, it never occurred to anyone to blame humans when a spanner showed up in the Internet works. Until now!