> Like google has strip mines the internet and left a toxic pit behind
Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.
If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.
Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.
> if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:
- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product
- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?
- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit
I'm not GP and I personally think the strip-mining analogy is bad. But attempting to steelman GP's position based on other things I've read that I've pieced together:
I think an example is LLMs like ChatGPT. Basically consider a website that has good info on it. The LLM scrapes the site and regurgitates it's content to their user, and the original site never get a visit or recognition. The end result is the death of the site (much like strip mining results in).
I don't know if "killed" is the good word, but simply block google.com in your /etc/host and you will see how broken surfing on the web now is. Google is now technically owning the internet and is clearly using this position to its advantage, not to the advantage of its users.
Google didn’t break the internet. They failed to execute on social and rewarded shitty players with traffic.
Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought to exert control over their audience. Things like Compuserv were early entrants, followed by Prodigy and eventually AOL and Microsoft’s entry - MSN.
Google made the network aspect of the internet better and ended up being a sort of gatekeeper. Facebook reinvented AOL, and a thousand copycats did variants of the same… Discord, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit.
Social wounded the internet. If anything “killed the internet”, it was Reddit and Twitter, cancer-like services both of which metastasized to destroy small-time internet properties, only to consolidate them into poorly managed, unprofitable companies.
Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.
If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.
Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.
> if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:
- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product
- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?
- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit