And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint… but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.
MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
Phew. That felt good.
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.
But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.
Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.
That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.
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.
For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.
In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.
As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.
And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.