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by siren2026 3 hours ago
That's exactly why I used to love tech (and working in tech) 20 years ago and why I lost faith in tech completely.

We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.
1 comments
antod 3 hours ago
yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.

Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.

Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.

And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.

All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.

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ethagnawl 2 hours ago
> ... when I first stumbled on to the internet ...

StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.

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