In some ways, it's quite astonishing to see how little has changed since 2011.
"Get on Hacker News and Techcrunch, post ads on Facebook and Google Adwords". I think back in 2011 I would expect this list to be completely obsolete in 10 years. Back then, it felt like the whole ecosystem would shift every two years..
The current players are comfortably entrenched. Thankfully China does not allow them to operate there. It gives us some hope that new players will form and become competitive like TikTok. Google and friends are only beholden to their stock holders.
Google and Facebook destroy competitors. And make sure new entrants cannot gain traction. They are about as anti-competitive as they can be.
I agree that they both hold onto their monopolies. But I don't think it's because they "destroy competition". Take Bing for example: it is quite alive. Google just delivers better search results. Yes the results have been deteriorating, but every time I get frustrated with them and try Bing as standard search engine, I switch back after a week. I don't like the google monopoly, but their core product is still not being challenging by anything I know of.
To be fair, Google can deliver that quality because they have so much more data. For every search in Bing where a user clicks on the first result and never clicks back on the first search, Google will much more. Likewise, for every frustrated chain of search refinements in Bing, Google will have many more to learn from.
Their position as market share leader gives them everything they need to know to maintain quality. Any deterioration in search quality with the data Google has means far worse than the competition in relative terms.
Which is a complete shame since people like quality in absolute terms so it’s gonna stay that way. Even I’ve tried DuckDuckGo and Bing - regardless of how not-Google they are, the results are absolutely worse. So I’m not switching either, despite knowing how Google keeps its position.
"Get on Hacker News and Techcrunch, post ads on Facebook and Google Adwords". I think back in 2011 I would expect this list to be completely obsolete in 10 years. Back then, it felt like the whole ecosystem would shift every two years..