Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.

Probably belongs in the “local observations” thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO – it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it’s just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It’s all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.

All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.

The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.

But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.

I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won’t go to Apple’s closed ecosystem, and I don’t care what teenagers think.

You ain’t kiddin’ man, I went there and I couldn’t believe the amount of chiseling you all have to put up with. And I’m American!

Thanks. Never heard of that one but it made my goddanged day!

Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.

PS I’m happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.