This week's newsletter: Tech has looted the internet, making every platform actively hostile to the user, turning Facebook, Google Search, Instagram into products that no longer provide a service while making them hundreds of billions of dollars.
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Together, Instagram, Facebook and Google make ~$300bn in revenue a year, but have abdicated any duty to their users, offering not a 'service' but as many ways as possible to interrupt the user to push them into doing things that make the company money.
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Underpinning these ultra-profitable torture-machines is an online ads industry built off the back of screwing advertisers and users alike. Every single platform now floods users with spammy, scammy content, making billions off of conning customers.
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While we criticize the sorry state of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (both making tens of billions of profit a year) are just as bad, flooded with porno bots, scam accounts, and AI spam that Facebook's algorithm loves to send millions of impressions.
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Yet the rest of the internet is decaying - most mobile sites are terrible, full of scammy and spammy ads which take up three quarters of your screen. And even 'respectable' sites like NBC and CNN feature low-quality 'chum box' ads full of misinformation.
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Everything feels like it's falling apart because Google/Meta have turned destroying the internet into a trillion-dollar industry. They're INCENTIVIZED to make their services harder to use, as providing a service is antithetical to showing a user more ads.
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Every single tech platform feels like a hostage negotiation with a website, where we barter to access the things we want with mechanisms built to interrupt us. We don't 'use' Instagram or Google anymore - we trick them into seeing the things we want.
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Execs like Sundar Pichai and Google Search lead Prabhakar Raghavan, as well as Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are craven villains that have destroyed global communications platforms as a means of making shareholders rich.
wheresyoured.at/the-great-loot…