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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Google has their version of the internet. Facebook has their version of the internet. As time slides forward just think of how many users won't know the real internet from these rubber doll versions.

Congrats humanity. Your best invention ever and it only 20 years or so to completely fuck it up. This is why we can't have nice things.

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People need to own the means of production. In this case, it's the search engine and social network. We can't rely on companies, because they are greedy, nor on government, because it is corrupt. This is what happens when we don't own the tools we use - we are subject to exploitation, others making fortunes on our backs and abusing us by incessant tracking.

I'm amazed that there is no federated (not owned by a single entity), anonymous search engine to this day and we're still pouring our brains into Google. Google knows more about a person than his spouse, doctor and lawyer put together!

Correction: There is no federated, anonymous search engine that gives good results.

There cant be.

People/powers-to-be would fuck it up, there would be "copyrighted material" and eventually it would be declared an illegal activity.

Only companies such as Google and Facebook prevail not due to technical reasons, but due to political power. They are selected by the likes of CIA, invested in and nourished to their position, and do their bidding. And alternatives are extinguished.

Google should not have existed had copyright laws been enforced as they are towards another search engine, thepiratebay.org

Your response sounds more like the religious groups howling "world will end" whenever a new scientific progress is made. Internet survived because of its obvious commercial value. Google and Facebook are doing nothing new but making their ends meet.

Neither of those points are much of a defense. By that same token, one could defend e.g. Microsoft's aggressive misuse of their market dominance in the 90's: 'Windows survived because of its obvious value; MS is just making ends meet.'

It can still be a good or a bad thing for the web as a platform.

Hopefully adoption is slow enough that the default behavior of any "blessed" libraries like this WP plugin can be encouraged to be less ... well, not evil, of course ... but really, why does that toolbar and 'X' need to be there? Browsers have a back button.

My take is simply that this is not a good look for Google, and hopefully they realize that. The article featuring the WP plugin, and these discussions on HN that give a lot of attention to the carousel, and how it competes with non-AMP results, don't build goodwill for the project.

>many users won't know the real internet

Many users have no need for 'real internet'.

>completely fuck it up

No. 'Real internet' is still there, it's not getting absolutely smaller, only relatively to 'rubber doll' one

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