There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user engagement. They leaned on all that data and activity to refine and improve their products.
Google’s search results were better, and delivered faster, than its competitors. Netflix constantly fiddled with its recommendation algorithm, introducing customers to their next favorite show. Amazon could tell, based on your purchase and search history, what products to show you next. None of these services were perfect, but all of them were better-than-the-competition. Data optimization was a race to the top. The big platforms had a self-reinforcing advantage. And they took that challenge seriously.
What I have now come to recognize is that the focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact. Platform executives and their senior managers believed optimization was important, and they built internal reward structures that rendered it true. But this only lasted until they decided to discard it.
From the vantage point of 2025, optimization is clearly no longer a priority for the tech platforms. Google’s search results have gotten worse. Google doesn’t care. Facebook is awash in AI slop. It welcomes the slop. Amazon is filled with fake products and fake reviews. All of these companies still dominate their categories. Degrading the user experience isn’t costing them. The motivating belief that these companies had to optimize, or else they would be out-competed, no longer drives Silicon Valley behavior. Optimization was an era. That era has ended.
Substack funds Nazis! Don’t give them any clicks
You’re not wrong about the Nazis, but since Substack doesn’t run ads, clicking will technically cost the company money.
Nope, it’s just giving clicks to the people that choose to put their website on substack. Those are the customers that need to leave the platform to rot. Going on their website will just keep them active and continuing their business with Substack.
Fuck em and don’t give Nazi enables clicks or money.
that’s not how any of this works
Oh they’re optimizing for something else now.
As reluctant as I am to use the word “innovation” I think it’s that rather than optimization.
Those companies started off as plucky underdogs, doing whatever they do slightly better than the incumbents of the time.
Now that they’re each the monopolistic incumbent, they have no need to do anything better than their competition.
I look forward to a decade of small businesses delivering great value to customers where big tech wont until its too late
Ehh they try, but they get bought out by bigger dogs as soon as they start creeping into their market share
they are still optimizing. it’s just their interest diverges ever more from the rest of us.
this is the real misalignment problem: not between human and AI, but between ordinary people and big tech.
Once you become a monopoly on such global scale, you can start screwing your customers for much higher profits and keep going like this for a decade. Your chokehold on the business ensures compatitors can’t arise very quickly.
Bullshit, there was no optimisation. People started complaining about google’s search results ages before AI, Amazon recommendations always were a joke, they didn’t have an incentive to do anything as they have their monopolies for decades now.
Personally I think google search went to shit once people started figuring out how to optimize seo to consistently get their results at the top
