by josephjrobison on 1/5/21, 12:17 AM with 399 comments
by hsbauauvhabzb on 1/5/21, 1:16 AM
My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone provider and NOT google.
My mailserver is marked as spam by gmail, a helpful HN commentor pointed out it may be my lack of ipv6 which appears to be the cause. I have no idea why ipv6 would indicate that I’m not a spammer, I can’t ask google because they don’t have a support line.
I understand others have far more expensive (read: >1m$) problems with google specifically, and I know I’m not alone here.
I just hope that by continually airing grievances with lack of (useful) customer service by major providers, they end up caving and investing in customer support.
Until then, fuck you google.
by weisbaum on 1/5/21, 3:12 AM
The other comments here mentioning cheap as a flag word are somewhat accurate but not entirely. Its possible to rank a site using the word cheap assuming you're supporting it correctly with related content about a specific product and proper explanation as to what makes it cheap.
Honestly, I am very sorry that you lost all your traffic and your revenue but this seems like a VERY fixable problem considering your backlinks. Take your best performing posts, and dramatically increase the word count, add more photos, add overviews of each product instead of just a single line or two pulled from reviews.
Happy to help with additional pointers if you want to shoot me a PM.
by manfredo on 1/5/21, 1:26 AM
Popularity of sites shift. People's tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant. And algorithm changes do shift attention to sites that previously weren't getting traffic. Would the world better with static search traffic? The incumbents always win, and newcomers have a tough time getting a foothold. That's what it would take to avoid situations like these, and I'm not sure if it's an improvement over the status quo. Between living in constant worry that the algorithm might change and shift search traffic, and a world where the algorithm never changes and search traffic remains rather static I'm not sure which is really better. In the latter goodcheapandfast.com might never even have existed.
Bing's blocking mechanism seems pretty crude, though, and not sharing why it was blocked seems particularly wonky. Sure it's a cat and mouse game between scammers and devs, but it'd be nice if they at least vaguely alluded to why the false positive happened.
by Imnimo on 1/5/21, 1:39 AM
The other possibility is that Google just updated their search algorithm in a way that happens to not like this website as much as it used to. Not because anything is wrong with it or because of any bug in the algorithm, just it now prefers different attributes, and that changes where this site ranks. If this is the case, there's really nothing to be done. There's no ground truth result ranking for any particular query - if Google feels its new results are better, that's their business.
If your entire business depends on an arbitrary algorithm preferring your website over other very similar ones, and you will lose everything if that arbitrary algorithm happens to change, eventually it's going to happen. It sucks, and it's maybe unfair in a cosmic sense, but there's really nothing to be done.
by nordic-nomad on 1/5/21, 1:26 AM
And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thing getting crushed.
Unfortunately it seems like he's the one person out there making a site like this honestly and over optimized for a search algorithm that was inevitably going to change. Building a brand and using a more personal voice instead of thinking you can win at SEO is always going to be the way to go.
by kevin_thibedeau on 1/5/21, 2:14 AM
by nandreev on 1/5/21, 2:11 AM
by jgilias on 1/5/21, 1:03 PM
At the time I was very much not happy about it. Now I'm happy it happened before I had scaled it too far and come to depend on that income too much. It made me realize that it's not only my work that my income depended on, but the whims of a single giant company. And that that's a position I don't want to find myself later down the road.
It's a sad truth that any internet business that's not yet a strong brand in itself is reliant on Google and their AI in a very unhealthy way. I have no idea how to fix this.
by dj_mc_merlin on 1/5/21, 2:19 AM
* the reviews for products are too short and vague
* until you actually read the top part and realize it was written by a human being, it looks exactly the same as all the other affiliate websites that get deranked (probably the reason he's getting 0 traffic)
* the "real reviews verified" badge screams SCAM to me, although I know less technical-minded people are persuaded by stuff like that
by jpeg_hero on 1/5/21, 1:21 AM
Have you looked at dumping the “wellness”?
> Your Money or Your Life”? YMYL is Google’s nickname for health and wellness websites.
https://radialgroup.com/google-ymyl-medic-update-health-well...
by chmod775 on 1/5/21, 12:15 PM
1. Your product seems useful, so useful in fact I bookmarked it.
2. However you hardly had any Google traffic to begin with - maybe Google traffic is not something you should optimize for - except for when people specifically search for your product
3. with which your landing page might not help.
Let me expand:
1. I tried a few searches on your site and it generally came back with good results. I like that the articles are short, to the point and didn't waste my time. Some commenters here recommend to make those articles longer for SEO - don't. Making users read long articles is the opposite of what your site promises.
2. Google traffic is way less important for useful websites than SEO people would make you believe. If your product is good, people will come - and come back. SEO can actually hurt the usefulness of your product, and thus its long-term growth. Never ever listen to SEO people who want you to make your product worse. I may be suffering from survivorship bias, but less than 10% of my site's traffic comes from search engines, and 99% of that search engine traffic was just people searching the name of my sites. I can't tell you whether any site could survive on this, but I can promise you that this "independence" comes with peace of mind (I don't care whether I show up on Google at all).
3. It took me a moment to figure your product out. "This website exists to make shopping less time consuming" did not help at all - there's hundreds of ways I can imagine one might make "shopping less time consuming" after all. My confusion ended when I read "Find above-average products selling for below-average prices". Maybe that should be at the very top with the search field directly below it - which can also contain text other than just "Search.". Check the mockup at the beginning of this post. You could place the "less time consuming" text somewhere else, I just was too lazy. Some things besides "less time consuming" that people might search are "best budget products", "best value for money", etc. - so you could make sure these show up on your landing page too. Except after the text that explains the site for the human visitor.
by zaroth on 1/5/21, 1:20 AM
Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would.
Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisting political sites, and feature hyper-partisan political infighting as a core tenant of their employee training and advancement practices.
GoodCheapFast alleges they have a 7% conversion rate from visitors to purchases. That’s insanely high, and indicates Google should be sending them as much traffic as possible if their goal is serving the end-user.
But since the site doesn’t advertise with Google, and in fact fosters a beautiful ad-free experience, its essentially an indictment of everything Google stands for and therefore must be eliminated.
by x87678r on 1/5/21, 2:08 AM
by jere on 1/5/21, 1:59 AM
Since you've never experienced this with other domains, does the word cheap have to do with it? When I think domains, "cheap" instantly reminds me of those early quasi-legal online pharmacies and if I see it in an email almost certainly it's spam of one sort of another. I could see being problematic in spam filters.
by alibarber on 1/5/21, 3:09 PM
Today's hilarity came from a search for "portable hf antenna reviews" - (a pretty niche topic - Ham Radio related) this brought up so much crap even as the first five (or two!) results. It is no surprise that Google is flexing some muscle in this area and people are ending up as collateral damage.
by freitasm on 1/5/21, 3:08 AM
Even on the free plan you can create "Firewall rules" (up to five). Create one that just logs the traffic from known bots. Claim the domain in Google Search Console (no script needed on page) and see the stats for that domain and match those with the Cloudflare traffic. This will help identify if there's something going on - are the Bingbot and Googlebot visiting or not at all? What pages are they looking at?
The robots.txt file is complex - repeated paths that shouldn't really be there. Perhaps create a Cloudflare rule to block access to those paths to everyone but the owner on a static IP address?
After this is done then the OP would know a bit more about what's going on.
by axegon_ on 1/5/21, 6:55 AM
by bartread on 1/5/21, 1:53 PM
Some fluctuations are explainable: a bit over half my traffic is from the US, so you can clearly see the effect of Thanksgiving. Most of the rest of my traffic is from the UK, western Europe, and Australasia, so holidays such as Christmas and New Year stick out like a sore thumb.
But sometimes I've seen pages disappear from the search index, or be heavily deranked for a week or two, before popping back up again. Often this has happened after I've published a (relatively speaking) large amount of new content to the site, but sometimes it's not easily explainable.
I also, every few months, get "invalid traffic" warnings in Adsense, even though the majority of my traffic is organic search traffic that Google itself is sending me. Generally revenue will drop to zero for a week or two before climbing back up, and shortly after the warning will disappear. Every time this happens I check Google's policies and sometimes have to fix the odd problem. Mostly though, I have no idea why this happens.
The site makes so little revenue it doesn't even cover its own hosting costs so it's not a big worry. However, I do see the potential for it to earn more were I to invest more in it. Still, I've realised that I'd have to be out of my mind to rely on Adsense revenue from this website as my sole source of income.
I'm not complaining at Google for this - any money the site earns is a bonus and, as I say, at the moment it doesn't even cover its own hosting (which at least keeps my tax return simplier). Still, if I were going to build some sort of indie business around it I'd have to think pretty hard about ways I might be able to get multiple channels for revenue. Unfortunately, like goodcheapandfast.com, the reality is that the source of every one of those streams would likely originate with organic search traffic.
by z3t4 on 1/5/21, 1:24 AM
by alphadevx on 1/5/21, 1:34 AM
For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons.
It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is it doing the same more broadly? I don't believe it is providing a good search experience to its users anymore.
by josephjrobison on 1/5/21, 4:09 AM
If small sites want to compete they have to specialize and go deep - it's hard to beat incumbents at the thing they've been doing for decades - and with paid staff/journalists writing the articles!
It's not so much the tech side of SEO, it's about the content.
by Teandw on 1/5/21, 10:00 AM
The website is another run of the mill affiliate website built with the sole purpose of making the owner some money.
The same old rubbish "here are 5-10 products that we've selected because we will make money." that other websites do - Where is the website actually helping or providing the visitors any value? It isn't.
The only research they seem to do on products is 1) Will I get commission if I send customers to it 2) Is it cheap. 3) Do the reviews look fake/real.
That's not helping anyone and provides no value. Hence why Google removed it's ranking. It provides literally no value or true content to visitors. Their product lists are all "The Best X products" - Best based on what? They're not buying the products and actually checking their good, they're just pulling products out of their backside from Amazon/Bestbuy.
How can this website honest create hundreds of "Best X products", without even using/testing any of them and think they've providing value to customers? The owner is kidding himself.
by bilekas on 1/5/21, 2:22 AM
Most likely, one or multiple of the algo's to determine value within results has been modified, which is a regular occurance. Has picked up the content on your site as not really beneficial / trustworthy for whatever the results are and so it has demoted your position.
Given almost every page of your site has at least 1 external referal link, its easy enough to imagine it being picked up as an auto generated site, with slapped in affiliates. Infact im surprised it hasnt happened sooner.
I'm not sure what you can do about it, other than reworking your entire site, obfuscating the referal links somehow and then hoping for the best.
Or branch out into other methods of content and earning if this is the only source of income for you, its rough, but that google algo and others are black boxes that you cant really depend on.. Eventually it will clear everyone off that's not investing in staying on top of these things.
by xer on 1/5/21, 10:57 AM
by swiley on 1/5/21, 1:29 AM
Someone is using gmail to send porn via mms gateways to an iterated list of numbers neighboring (and including) mine, some of which claim to be held by children. I looked but couldn't find the appropriate complaint form.
by zelphirkalt on 1/5/21, 7:10 AM
by thrownaway561 on 1/5/21, 12:09 PM
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cloth-masks
You will get dislisted because you are profiting from a pandemic. get rid of this content.
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-bourbons
Alcoholic content is a huge red flag and will cause blocks and delisting. get rid of this content.
once you remove the content, resubmit your sitemaps to both Google and Bing Webmaster tools and you will start to see traffic again.
Also, this might seem really stupid, but it would be nice to have a link to your homepage from the footer. it's annoying to have to scroll to the top of the page to click your icon to go to your homepage.
by franze on 1/5/21, 12:52 PM
If SEO is your strongest channel, use it to build your other channels. The more direct the channel the better.
If SEO is your weakest channel, use it to build your other channels.
by eecc on 1/5/21, 7:01 AM
These people’s psychology is to claim competence in some higher kind of logic allegedly embedded in this spontaneously emergent bureaucracy. Of course it’s just smoke and mirrors, there is no logic nor understanding. None
by beprogrammed on 1/5/21, 9:55 AM
by ReaganFJones on 1/5/21, 6:50 AM
It may be an affiliate link farm but it's one that's done the most basic level of analysis to find an acceptable item in a category.
It's not great but it's a time-saver compared to me reading potentially fake Amazon reviews myself.
by manub22 on 1/5/21, 7:49 AM
by cagenut on 1/5/21, 1:46 AM
I don't think it was any scheme or malice, far more like Lenny petting the rabbit, but the rabbit got very dead.
by erikbye on 1/5/21, 12:28 PM
Either way, very risky to quit your job for what is basically a content website with as few as 500 visitors daily average, if even that.
It does not seem to work well either, or at least contain very few products, I searched for steinberg ur-12 and got no match. A very popular entry level audio interface.
by reactchain on 1/5/21, 9:38 AM
by ClumsyPilot on 1/5/21, 1:29 AM
Creating a second domain that's basically a mirror to see if it's related to the domain
Attempt to 'recreate' the same content a standard platform like workpress to see if it's something about the presentation / etc. that the search engines are hating
I wish you all the best
by throwaway4good on 1/5/21, 5:17 AM
My suspicion would be that the site is explicitly, manually banned by some person at Google.
There is nothing to do about it except maybe start over with a new domain name, new server, preferably not under your own name (what name the domain name is registered under).
Short of that: Maybe implement Google Amp, Analytics etc ... but probably too late for that.
by 6510 on 1/5/21, 7:14 AM
by jgurewitz on 1/5/21, 4:04 AM
by Havoc on 1/5/21, 9:25 AM
Basically amounts to don’t quit your day job. Google and amazon are fickle friends
by kazinator on 1/5/21, 2:06 AM
It looks pretty cool, and all but ...
Why would/should Google's search engine send users to another search engine?
What GCF needs to do is become well-known, "like DuckDuckGo, but for shopping". Then people will save a bookmark (like I'm doing now).
EDIT:
Unfortunately, bookmark removed. This site doesn't appear very useful. I typed in numerous search queries, starting with generic categories like "bluetooth speakers" and "baby bib" and whatnot, and it came up with "Your search did not match any documents.". I tried some very specific products found in various online sites. Again, "Your search did not match any documents."
Finally, I got some results by just using "bluetooth". Hooray! Some other single-words are working.
The results appear to just be some product advice, followed by some links to selected products and price information on sites like Amazon.
I see now that there are links to categories below the search UI, but I don't see anything there I would be interested in looking for, and if any other categories exist, I have to guess what they are through the search box.
I tried doing some "site:www.goodcheapandfast.com ..." tagged searches in Google to confirm that the GCF pages are being indexed. They are in the index; just when you remove the site: syntax, they disappear; maybe they show up in the long tail of the search if you dig far enough, who knows.
by lazyjones on 1/5/21, 9:05 AM
https://sourcemaps.squarespace.net/universal/scripts-compressed/cldr-resource-pack-3e6d18ccbc01a401a2e61-min.en-US.js.map
by wallawe on 1/5/21, 2:46 AM
At this point since you don't have much to lose, it might be worth buying a new domain and 301'ing everything from goodcheapandfast.com to the new one.
You'd pass on most the link juice but lose the bad name.
by DrNuke on 1/5/21, 9:53 AM
by jraby3 on 1/5/21, 12:09 PM
by janmo on 1/5/21, 8:53 AM
by hasa on 1/5/21, 8:54 AM
by ajsharp on 1/5/21, 1:47 AM
by jcims on 1/5/21, 2:07 AM
I was actually moved by the author's plight. Their current situation seems very helpless and I truly respect the effort to swim upstream with a principled approach to delivering a service in a market that is rife with shenanigans. I personally tend to get sucked into analysis paralysis when purchasing new products and any quality signal I can get outside of what is placed in front of me is extremely valuable. Probably to amplify the author's point, I can't say I've ever heard of his site and it's not recognizable to me. One of my favorites for quite some time, Wirecutter, has lost all of my faith after a few buys based on their findings wound up being garbage.
I say all of that to try to underscore the fact that I'm only trying to be productive, but without this backstory and the author's attestation to everything they do to maintain integrity, I wouldn't find this site remarkable or memorable or compelling in any way. I appreciate the design, it's clean and fast, but in reviewing several of the product areas that I've actually been looking at recently I can't find anything compelling in the content that the site brings to the table. To be blunt, it's not obvious to me what the author does with their time if this is their bread and butter.
One example. A few months ago I decided I wanted to upgrade the microphone I use for videoconferencing. I wanted something that was fairly directional as I didn't want to have the microphone in the view of the camera and I was hoping for a relatively flat frequency response. I was also on the bubble about going with a USB microphone vs getting an XLR mic and USB audio interface, and comparing them by pivoting on that feature was useful to me.
Here is the list of Good Cheap and Fast streaming microphones (which seems relevant) on goodcheapandfast.com: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-streaming-mic...
Let's assume I get to that URL from a Google search result and this is my first an only impression. Right off the drop I notice a few things (i'm on a PC):
- Design is spartan and the site loads quickly. I can't actually tell that there are no ads b/c my ad blocking game is on point.
- There isn't an obvious brand, the site logo is understated and loses the battle with the headline for any attention.
- My eyes instead fall to the blue badge on the right 'Real Customer Reviews & Ratings [VERIFIED]'. This primes my expectation that I'm going to be seeing some verified reviews.
Maybe this is just me, but I don't start by reading the text. I start scanning down the page
.
.
. Omnidirectional I see this, see Cardioid is next and realize it's just a mini tutorial on pickup patterns, not going to read it.
.
.
. Dynamic v Condenser more tutorial stuff (let's be honest, in my head i'm thinking more copy/paste)
.
.
. How much does a good...cost. Not really interested in reading a paragraph on this...i have no idea what it says.
.
.
. Pyle USB PC Recording Condenser Microphone (PDMIUSB50) Pyle? Interesting pick for the top of the list. Solid value brand in amplifiers but not really known for anything in recording...but maybe they have a sleeper in this microphone, let's see those 'verified reviews'
.
.
. Fifine K669B USB Metal Condenser Recording Microphone
.
What? The next microphone already? This is where I stop scrolling. My eyes turn up and I see the entirety of the assessment of the Pyle microphone
Good Value: $56 | Great Deal: $50
Check Current Price on Amazon | Check Current Price on Walmart
Pyle's plug-and-play USB microphone is durable, sensitive and clear,
according to several online customers. Some reviewers warn that the mute
button makes an audible pop; others wish the stand was more durable.
OK, I click around a bit looking for a more detailed review of this product. Nothing. I grab the scroll bar and drag up and down the page, more of the same.
And then I leave. Sorry.
Again, I really empathize with the authors situation and respect their philosophy, but without some reason to really really drill into what is being presented the site is a non-starter.
by zelphirkalt on 1/5/21, 7:42 AM
Aside from that, yes, this is what happens, when we rely on Google traffic. Only advice I can give besides designing well (not necessarily according to Google wishes though), is to not get too dependent on Google.
by oliv__ on 1/5/21, 1:48 AM
by lanevorockz on 1/5/21, 11:47 AM
by devcamcar on 1/5/21, 1:35 AM
Just wanted to also complain about Google.
by mro_name on 1/5/21, 6:56 AM
by H8crilA on 1/5/21, 1:08 AM
I am guessing RankBain finally understood humor:
by Thaxll on 1/5/21, 1:38 AM
by JacobSuperslav on 1/5/21, 4:16 PM
by partingshots on 1/5/21, 1:27 AM
by rackforms on 1/5/21, 5:00 PM
"according to several online customers" - This phrase or a close variant is used in almost every review and it's really distracting. It feels too robotic and repetitive.
In general, it seems like "build quality" is a common complaint, which at these price points is likely always going to be an issue. I guess what I mean is with cheap prices I'm not expecting build quality to be great so repeatedly calling it out in a general sense isn't all that useful. Far more useful is when a specific part is called out, which in one case it is, the wire being flimsy. More of that!
In general, it would be nice to have more specifics instead of the constant generalities one associates with low/er-cost goods.
The phrase "noise cancelling" is used about 44 times in the article. From what I recall this may be considered "keyword stuffing", which is used to be (and almost certainly still is, a big old no-no). Of course how do you create an aggregate content page without mentioning the topic repeatedly? Well my friend that's the Google content paradox! - talk about something without actually mentioning it by name.
On general mission: it would be really nice to have the top "pick" better called out.
I read the first review and was ok, that sounds like an option I wouldn't have considered, good job site! But then said "Mpow hmmm... not a brand I've heard of", so I scanned down and came to the JLab's. I said "I've heard of them!" and read the blurb.
That's where the problem starts: For almost the same price the blurb makes the Jlabs sound "better" or at least more attractive than what I thought was the "top pick / best value".
I think some of this may have to do with the fact that in the Mpow's have two negative aspects pointed out "Others say that the battery life and microphone are disappointing", whereas the Jlabs only one: "pinch their ears". Mind this isn't about count so much as what's being called out: one may have bad battery life and the other may actually hurt my head lol.
The reason I say "problem" is sites like Wire cutter take a stand and proclaim "this is the best", even though in most cases the top 3 or more would all be just fine. As it stands, we have many low cost options presented and all with what appears to be potentially deal-breaking flaws; the end result is I don't really feel any better prepared that if I had just gone to Amazon and scanned reviews myself.
What's more, if I see something with 20 total reviews at 5 stars and a similar product with 40k 4 stars, I'll usually just go for the one with more reviews. In short, number of reviews is a strong signal for me, and I think / hope it would be trivial to add that as a metric to your site.
On Google: So in closing hopefully some of those thoughts are useful in some way, but I did want to close by saying I absolutely feel your pain.
Someone like you posts a traffic drop off story and we all rush in to say this is why, but what we forget is Rome wasn't built in a damned day. If this traffic penalty sticks it's pretty safe to say you're business and dream is dead. No google means no traffic means no site. Business is hard but what we need to agree upon is the promise of the internet was to democratize and incubate. The early internet certainly did, the modern, not so much.
I think we can all agree that the best ideas should rise to the top and be rewarded. We should also agree that a single company shouldn't have that power, but the Internet's users. Legislation is the only cure here, so far as I can see, as this exact scenario plays out time and again and it's always at our expense, both business owners and internet users.
Good luck, and keep at it!
by blunte on 1/5/21, 2:27 AM
Google seems to behave like a hybrid Borg collective which spawns mini collectives, isolates them from the hive, allows them to go explore and mature somewhat, and then either absorbs them (assimilate!) or kills them if they don't fit back in.
While surely there are some humans at the top making strategic decisions, it feels to an end user that they are utterly soulless. The collective works to observe processes and outcomes (based on metrics which don't include human concerns or at least weight them very low), and then it makes changes and iterates. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already elements within the Google-beast which are unknowable to the humans working there. The concepts or goals and results may be knowable, but the path taken may not.
It should be obvious that the current "internet" (easy name for the state of online-anything these days) system is unsustainable. Perhaps it will go the way of the AI operating system in Her (2013 film), simply ignoring humans (whereby the humans will be able to use whatever of the services are accessible until they become inaccessible or non-functioning); or maybe it will determine that the best path which results in the best outcomes is to do absolutely nothing - thereby ending all operation. Naturally the humans with access to the source and the systems can attempt to correct the errant course once it is recognized, but short of a complete rewrite with a new approach, it will fail. They will go the way of all giant companies (and countries) who have sat at the top of the hill for too long and lost the values which led them to the top.
Facebook will hopefully go the way of reality TV (or is that still a thing?). How or why? Who knows. Perhaps another few rounds of global lockdowns will make everyone so desperate for actual human contact that they eschew social networks and take up dancing, casual sporting, dinner parties, and other great life activities. (Or more likely, their ads will get worse and worse until the stench is so bad that no respectable company would be caught with an ad on Facebook; the money would vanish, the talent would bail, and eventually they would get bought by a Comcast and rebranded as AhOLe or somesuch.)
Amazon will eventually ONLY sell cheap knockoff products up until the original creators stop creating, and the copycats are left to try to imagine and make their own unique products (the result of which will be a physical form on par with the nonsensical text they currently put on boxes and in instruction booklets).
Microsoft will still make and sell Office and Windows, forever and ever, because humans will never collectively choose to get educated on technology; it's easier to just keep using what you've always used. (Not to say that Windows or Office is bad, but it's often not the best choice.) Still, MS will outlive Google.
Apple will continue to exist and maybe hold a high place until eventually the designers, wild-thinkers (there must still be some there) get replaced with stock market drones with one monitor dedicated to the current quarter revenue projection spreadsheet. Then it will be a slow decline. MS will outlive them.
Almost forgot Twitter. The orange monster will fade into the history book which nobody wants to read, and the followers of orange monster will predictably be so poor as their local economies dry up (except for the private prison jobs, but there are only so many positions to fill) that they won't be able to afford the shoddy Comcast internet that is the officially sanctioned local monopoly internet. Besides, words will have been replaced with PopTop or whatever the latest 3 second video service is. They'll be too late to pivot to GIFs only since Imgur has been lying in wait for this moment.
Well, what a bit of fun this was. Might be that we're worrying about nothing, or perhaps worrying about entirely the wrong thing. Surprise, asteroid!
by pcdoodle on 1/5/21, 1:20 AM
by exabrial on 1/5/21, 1:10 AM
by thrower on 1/5/21, 1:28 AM