TechTakes

It's a narrative whose connection with reality is hard to discern

If only there were email communications that all but prove the allegations.

One could instead say enshittification is an emergent and often unstoppable force, carried out by whoever happens to be in place at the time.

Yeah sure, and you can keep pissing into the ocean while you're at it while real people try to fix the problems they perceive.

All roads tend to lead to the same place.

Hopefully that's a place where no one has to read bizarrely dismissive drive-by comments made by people who have No Fucking Clue about what they're talking about and lack any kind of intellectual spine.

where without the evil villain Raghavan messing things up,

ah yes, a detailed reading of the post does indeed reveal a narrative element best described as being on par with a story one would tell a child! certainly it has no bearing on the commonly-observed issue seen in many industries of late. oh no, massive rent extraction and industry-wide innovationless gatekeeping is merely an emergent property and is not driven by the choices of any particular individuals, no sir-ee!

If only there were specific people making those executive decisions that enshittify everything, we could all try to hold them at least a little bit accountable for it. We could call them "executives" or something.

Alas, corporate growth-at-all-cost policies are merely an emergent property with no one particularly responsible for them at all. It's not like there's something as damning as, say, an email thread outlining exactly who made all those shitty decisions.

am I missing something or are we talking about the specific policy decision to make the site suck more for clicks? I'm sympathetic to the argument that there are lots of other contributing reasons for google getting worse and that they aren't really addressed in the article, but the causal link between this one guy and engagement hacking couldn't be more clear.

I'm also sympathetic to the argument that the real issue is systemic (we all live in capitalism), but again, the topic is the specific policy decision to make the site suck more for clicks. sighing about inevitability in response to a very informative article about that decision isn't a method of critique, it's a method of dismissal, and it comes across as rather lazy thinking

in vacuum, you could say that if not him, there would be some other manager doing the same, pushed to the top by the same forces. but in this case, we have a dude who destroyed yahoo search for "growth"/short term profit, then when that company basically fell apart in large part due to his motherfuckery, he jumped ship, moved to google, failed up however many times he had to, and did exactly the same thing. you would know that if you read the article

I like to think that there exists a small god whose portfolio consists of punishing people who use the word "narrative" as a bludgeon. He strongly resembles late 2000's-era Terry Pratchett and is a dab hand with a lighting bolt.

@solrize @dgerard did Raghavan write this?