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It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it o

by Bolwin 2mo ago

It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it or briefly invests in their product again to make it good enough and since they have a long tail of users and the network effect, they win by default while still keeping their product mediocre

RicoElectrico 2mo ago
One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.
shevy-java 2mo ago
I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange. I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.
- conradfr 2mo ago
  Nothing is worst because of the www stack, which is better than it has ever been. The world consume things through mobile apps nowadays.
  - skywhopper 2mo ago
    And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.
    - rightbyte 2mo ago
      UX is all power structures, not tech. There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
      - pirates 2mo ago
        Apollo on iOS
    - Gud 2mo ago
      There are many great apps? Come on, let’s not pretend it all sucks. As a counter example, Fairtiq.
toomuchtodo 2mo ago
The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices). In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park. A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 > We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 (Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)
- righthand 2mo ago
  Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build. Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.
palata 2mo ago
The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations.
- ethbr1 2mo ago
  And laws. The US Congress could pass updates to the Sherman or Clayton acts any time they want to. As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace. It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue. If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
  - alex1138 2mo ago
    In fairness to Google they do actually provide data portability something that cannot be said for FB
tshaddox 2mo ago
Competitors have the option of not selling to big tech (and not taking money from VCs who will then pressure you to sell to big tech).
rightbyte 2mo ago
> golden opportunity for competitors The invisible hand of the market is a make believe. There is too much moat in moat.
inigyou 2mo ago
Do it anyway? Worst case you get rich but you didn't make the world better.
jsnell 2mo ago
There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle. There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities. Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.
- roryirvine 2mo ago
  In the twentieth century, government regulation was used to encourage corporations to provide these sort of quasi-public services alongside their more profitable lines of business, and to maintain them even when times where hard. In the late 2000s, it seemed that the new wave of tech giants had a deliberate strategy of voluntarily providing similar services in order to demonstrate that they could be responsible stewards without being forced to do so. A stroke of genius, people said, which meant that they could avoid sclerosing regulation, allowing them to remain nimble in the long run. But that has completely broken down over the past decade. Google left non-core services to rot. Twitter trashed the digital town square. Facebook set people against each other to maximise engagement. We should remember this for the next time an industry claims to be able to self-regulate. They can't - at least, not for long, not if there's a chance to make $100bn rather than just $99bn.

by Bolwin 2mo ago

RicoElectrico 2mo ago

One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.

shevy-java 2mo ago

I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange. I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.

conradfr 2mo ago
Nothing is worst because of the www stack, which is better than it has ever been. The world consume things through mobile apps nowadays.
- skywhopper 2mo ago
  And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.
  - rightbyte 2mo ago
    UX is all power structures, not tech. There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
    - pirates 2mo ago
      Apollo on iOS
  - Gud 2mo ago
    There are many great apps? Come on, let’s not pretend it all sucks. As a counter example, Fairtiq.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago

The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices). In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park. A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 > We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 (Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)

righthand 2mo ago
Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build. Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.

palata 2mo ago

The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations.

ethbr1 2mo ago
And laws. The US Congress could pass updates to the Sherman or Clayton acts any time they want to. As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace. It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue. If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  In fairness to Google they do actually provide data portability something that cannot be said for FB

tshaddox 2mo ago

Competitors have the option of not selling to big tech (and not taking money from VCs who will then pressure you to sell to big tech).

rightbyte 2mo ago

> golden opportunity for competitors The invisible hand of the market is a make believe. There is too much moat in moat.

inigyou 2mo ago

Do it anyway? Worst case you get rich but you didn't make the world better.

jsnell 2mo ago

There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle. There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities. Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.

roryirvine 2mo ago
In the twentieth century, government regulation was used to encourage corporations to provide these sort of quasi-public services alongside their more profitable lines of business, and to maintain them even when times where hard. In the late 2000s, it seemed that the new wave of tech giants had a deliberate strategy of voluntarily providing similar services in order to demonstrate that they could be responsible stewards without being forced to do so. A stroke of genius, people said, which meant that they could avoid sclerosing regulation, allowing them to remain nimble in the long run. But that has completely broken down over the past decade. Google left non-core services to rot. Twitter trashed the digital town square. Facebook set people against each other to maximise engagement. We should remember this for the next time an industry claims to be able to self-regulate. They can't - at least, not for long, not if there's a chance to make $100bn rather than just $99bn.