Algorithms are not universally good and helpful. They should be designed to boost engagement only in that they serve to find content you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, not to boost engagement at all costs by feeding you things they think you will click on. It’s an important distinction.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.
Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
That was just the warmup. They got serious about it on January 21, 2010.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
♬♩ barely getting by ♩♫