Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he’s shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it’s hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it’s much easier to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he’s paid to do.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it’s legal.

Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they’ll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

(My guess is that there isn’t because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

The biggest theft in history, even.

Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it’s okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let’s imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

Not on the outside, at least.

That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.

One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

it always got marginally better at best, and then it got worse again

But why? I think it’s because Russians just don’t exhibit a lot of civic engagement. When you see the kinds of things Putin did to get into power, do you think any of those actions would slide in any other well-functioning liberal democracies? Just look at how Ukraine responded during Euromaidan. You just don’t see that kind of engagement happening in Russian society.

So why does it keep getting worse again? Unfortunately, it’s because they let it.

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How is it that you’re so well-versed in all of Stallman’s negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?

On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.

The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]

I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.

And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.

I don’t doubt you at all - I’ve seen quite a few stories of Google exhibiting retribution against employees attempting to unionize.

The point I was trying to make (admittedly quite badly) is that Google employees should have unionized a long time ago, when they had the upper hand. At this point, it’s a much steeper uphill climb. But it is still a very worthy fight.

You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.

If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, “why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don’t need to unionize!” And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don’t buy insurance for the same reason.

I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.

(I’m not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)

All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it’s greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it’s high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.

we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.

That’s not completely true though! One thing that a lot of people forget about Google is that they didn’t have to become a publicly traded for-profit company. A lot of people around 2002-2004-ish saw Google’s meteoric rise and wondered what path they were going to take. Some speculated/hoped that they would go the Wikipedia route and become a service that existed for the public good instead of a for-profit venture.

We all know what happened after. The pursuit of profit inevitably leads all companies to becoming sociopathic and evil. They didn’t have to be this way. And this is true for lots of tech startups. I wish we had seen more of them become wikipedias instead of googles.

It’s also worth pointing out that the original founders did want to make a company that was good and not evil. They tried to succeed by creating legitimately good products, and not screwing over their users. They did make mistakes along the way, but their intentions were at least good. The major problems started (as they usually do), when the second CEO took charge of the company, and it was evident that he had not clue whatsoever how to create a product. All Sundar Pichai knows how to do is suck as much blood as he can out of a stone. But Google’s founders are not blameless here: they were the ones that set the corporate structure up this way, and they were the ones that got bored and decided to fuck off. And they cheated on their taxes the way all corporations do, so no matter how good their intentions were, they were still pretty awful people.

Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.

I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.

Yes, I agree, and I think it’s a reflection of society’s values over the past 50 years.

We are living in a world with more of a “make money and fuck all else” mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.

We’re seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends…

(And for what it’s worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)