I do think it's a good experience to try either way since the challenges are so different from that of startups. These large multinationals look for different skills some of which you can't really develop at startups.
Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.
Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations is not only a UX nightmare, but it doesn't even prevent tracking. Horrible pointless legislation.
What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as well as everything else I've read (eg. that recent article here from a founder who's startup was acquired by Google and she left due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn't innovated much recently and its products like Google Search have deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort of like what happened to IBM).
The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn't know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can this VP even reverse a linked list? /s
Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.
The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners. It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.
You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.
For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates.
Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off.
That's a good idea. I think upvoting can still work though particularly if the platform can use your upvotes to infer what kind of content you like and give you more of that.
I have not found any serious alternatives. The main problem is the chicken and egg problem where no one cares unless other people are using it. I created my own alternative as a side project (https://zsync.xyz) with some differences (eg. tags instead of subreddits), but there are no users - and why should there be?
I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs.
I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.
I totally agree on the general superiority of tags vs. subreddits, and did the same for my Reddit/HN alternative https://zsync.xyz . I can see the case for private communities/forums, but I think tags make more sense for most use cases.
My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-liners, and hivemind took over and ruined the site.
An ideal Reddit would be able to show you posts/comments that you're most likely to enjoy, such as via a "sort by" option tailored to you, or other sort by options like an "insightful" that actually works and doesn't just give you low effort one-liners that add nothing to your life.
High quality content in general needs to be better incentivized, and right now it's not. Anyways I have a lot of ideas around that I wrote elsewhere so will refrain from dumping then all here [1]
The challenge with developing a Reddit alternative however unfortunately is not technical, it's overcoming the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is on there.
I completely disagree. As a developer, standups have always ended up devolving into the bane of my existence, and now I only work for companies that don't do them (or at a minimum, allow them to be async).
I do think it's a good experience to try either way since the challenges are so different from that of startups. These large multinationals look for different skills some of which you can't really develop at startups.
And the money doesn't hurt.