There is no moral high ground in this story.
For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.
And if you want it, Google sees most credit card transactions. In 2017, they said, "Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States." https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... (Later reporting found a deal with MasterCard, at least.) So they could absolutely know if you bought the Amazon item or booked the hotel, if they wanted.
I wholeheartedly agree that there's a centralization concern about letting one company have so much power, but that doesn't change that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in another party being the review aggregator. If we can't figure out how to return control to the actual reviewers, Google is no worse of an aggregator.
There are distinct advantages to having a single cloud, with a single set of protocols/APIs/etc. The only issue I see is if Google starts filtering/blocking in a significant way, then the blocked communities will build their own infrastructure. But Google wouldn't want that data, since they are filtering it out in the first place, except perhaps to train their filters more accurately.
Again, ianal and dont really know what im talking about
But you do get 'compensated' you get a good feeling from it.
Along those lines there are many things that people do in which they get 'compensated' not by money or that money isn't the primary motivator.
Jeff Bezos does not get up and go to work every day because he wants to amass more money 'be compensated for what he does'. Yes it's a by product but I would argue it's not what drives him. He does it for other reasons and has other motivations.
Another example - A woman who volunteers at a hospital and doesn't get paid a salary does it to keep busy and to feel good not for 'compensation'.
Not saying money isn't important. But nobody comments on HN and gets paid although some people have made money as a result of commenting but my guess is that is not what led them down that road or kept them at it. [1]
[1] I say this from personal experience having made (to this day) a boatload of money making comments in another place (really you have no idea). But 100% never did it for that reason at all.
It’d be interesting to study how does HN thrives; more deeply understand the incentives that sustain the HN ecosystem.
If you want a thriving internet, get out of the way. Too many big companies and governments are trying to force us to see only certain things.
Stop that! Back to the early 90's.
TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google.
If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care.
If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).