From: rich@example.invalid

Charlie Gibbs  wrote:
> On 2025-12-23, John Ames  wrote:
>
>> Obviously, having trouble with a misbehaving website is a smaller thing
>> than burning to death in a badly-renovated apartment building.* But
>> even in the little things - every pointless extra step, unneccessary
>> delay due to lazy, inefficient implementation, thing that has to be re-
>> done thanks to a buggy form, or irritating search for a feature buried
>> under baroque UI or incompatible CSS is seconds - minutes? hours? - off
>> of *someone's* life, maybe multiple someones', maybe *many people's.*
>
> You make this sound like a bad thing.  But it's merely the latest
> manifestation of something that's been around much longer than the
> Internet.  Consider the arrangement of products in a supermarket.
> Sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.  I remember
> when the local Safeway had spaghetti noodles in one aisle, and
> spaghetti sauce in another.  This kind of thing is often deliberate -
> it keeps you wandering the aisles longer, making you more likely to
> make impulse purchases, which translates to more sales, i.e. profits.
>
> Cory Doctorow recently did a series of podcasts on "the enshittification
> of the Internet".  One example he mentioned was that Google has started
> making their searches less useful and more cumbersome, requiring you to
> make more mouse clicks to find what you're looking for.  Since their
> revenue is based on mouse clicks, it's in their best interests to keep
> you pointing and clicking for as long as possible before yielding up
> the answer to your inquiry.
>
> Whenever I start feeling too paranoid, I remind myself of Hanlon's
> Razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately be
> explained by stupidity."  But then a little voice in the back of
> my head says, "But Google isn't stupid!"

Also, don't forget that "Google" is not Google anymore either.  The old
"Do no evil" Google of yore has been long killed and buried by the
Doubleclick crew that took over old Google after old Google bought out
Doubleclick.  We may as well refer to them as Doubleclick now, because
that is essentially what they are today.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)