I also remembered his post about dropping $50k on the site redesign*
I actually thought it was a big W for him when I saw this post. But I guess, if you consider the opportunity cost of Google employment, it's a financial L.
It's funny, since Stack Overflow has done EXACTLY this since day one (i.e. generate cash, with user knowledge provided for free).
The only difference is SO uses community, gamification & reputation facades, to convince users to participate for free.
With OpenAI its simply a blackbox, no credit is given.
So I guess the lesson is people are willing to participate and share things for free, as long as they're given credit, community standing or something along those lines.
Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.
Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.
Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.
As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.
Regional and national media are swallowing it up, yeah the country needs the investment, but at what price ? Gov still mum on what it took to 'land' the deal (tax/land break).
I remembered the Amazon HQ2 hoopla from years back, that U.S state/local govs were turning over backwards to land it, offering a lot of incentives. And I just looked the yesterday, that deal (HQ2) is still on hold and it was for just as much ($5 billion).
Conflating the three is easy, because instead of paying for delivered value, the company is doing arbitrage on location ( like it could do with gender, race or anything else)
All companies will take advantage of maximizing their profit or reducing cost, but it's a slippery slope once a subjective metric to determine value is used.
I for one live in a "low" CoL, but my AWS bill is just the same as a person in NY, SF or Geneva, should I also expect a discount because "my income is lower"? Or is it only fair to be billed equally, because the value all of us get is the.same ?
Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he be paid any less ? Why ?
> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I actually thought it was a big W for him when I saw this post. But I guess, if you consider the opportunity cost of Google employment, it's a financial L.
* https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/