Transcript.
If you tell someone to “Google it” at this point you’re telling them to look up five ads and some AI-generated bs instead of the actual thing they want to know.
old guy takes long hit on the bong
“Back in my day, search engines used to find things besides the wreckage of late-stage capitalism.”
This. Google is losing the fight against SEO (and now AI), they’re not intentionally giving you bad search results. Bing, DDG, etc. are all facing the same struggles.
Enshittification isn’t when companies make their products worse on purpose, for the sake of making it worse. The goal isn’t to get worse, the goal is to maintain competitive force and increase profit margins by way of strategically “optimizing” previously good products to squeeze ever more profit.
The mere fact that AI and SEO are ruining these search engines is a product of the profit-motive and markets functioning “properly.”
Exactly. Google isn’t intentionally delivering shitty search results to maintain a competitive force or increase profit margins, but because they’re fighting a constant battle against people trying (and succeeding) to outsmart their algorithms.
The comment I replied to was specifically talking how Google was attempting to deliver a good product while they were small and is now leveraging it’s market position to deliver worse search reults.
And that’s just wrong, it has nothing to do with Google burning through venture capital back in the days or being the most popular search engine nowadays. Sure, the ads are annoying, they take all your data and all that could be reasonably called enshittification, but the crappy search results aren’t intentional.
It’s still enshittification, because that’s a consequence of Capitalism in general. Capitalism isn’t bad because Capitalists are big scary evil people, but because it structurally stands against itself and prioritizes profit over results.
But that’s still not what they said in their original comment. They were directly linking Google’s search becoming worse to Google’s monopoly, while the same is happening to all other providers as well, no matter how niche they are.
Sure we can tranform this into some handwavy “capitalism bad” statement (and I agree), but that’s not what they said and has basically no substance.
You spoke about enshittification and claimed it is overused, then gave an example that fits enshittification to a tee. Kinda hard to argue with that.
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No. Enshittification imho requires intent. When Google makes you watch twelve ads before a YT video, that’s enshittification. If SEO ruins search engines as a whole, that’s not enshittification.
Enshittification does not require intent to do anything other than maintain competitive advantages. SEO ruining search engines is a factor of enshittification, as it’s a direct flaw of Capitalism and the Profit Motive that led to its existence.