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.

Ouch. I certainly got that impression from reading Consciousness of Sheep though. Watkins is one of the few who doesn't sugarcoat the UK's condition. Unfortunately there are few journalists here in the USA of whom the same could be said. Progress ideology is nowhere stronger than here.

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.

I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.

Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it's not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They're an old company with a big name and a lot of money.

Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.

Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it's Reddit's turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.

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!

FB is a desert compared with the old days, and Twitter will get there as well. Maybe the "AI revolution" can replace all the organic human content with fake people, but that's about their only chance long term. If you can even call such a thing a "win".