alt Hacker NewsGoogle and Facebook fucked up the internet.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
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That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
And YouTube encouraged people not to use their real name.
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
> Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.