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0 pointsdageshi1y ago0 comments

There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan.

Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents.

Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet circa 2002ish and the solution to all problems with the modern internet is to make the internet go back to 2002.

0 comments

_factor1y ago

The problem isn’t the necessary fluff that must be added, it’s how easy it becomes to keep on adding it after the necessity subsides.

Google was a more honorable company when the ads were on the right hand side only instead of tricking you in the main results. This is the enshitification people talk about. Decision with no reason other than pure profit at user expense. They were horrendously profitable when they made this dark pattern switch.

Profits today can’t be distinguished accurately between users who know it’s an ad and those who were tricked into thinking it was organic.

Not all enshitification is equal.

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