[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.

I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.

[balamatom]

One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.