What's odd to me is how everything is so metricized. Clearly over metricization is the downfall of any system that looks meritocratic. Due to the limitations of metrics and how they are often far easier to game than to reach through the intended means.

An example of this I see is how new leaders come in and hit hard to cut costs. But the previous leader did this (and the one before them) so the system/group/company is fairly lean already. So to get anywhere near similar reductions or cost savings it typically means cutting more than fat. Which it's clear that many big corps are not running with enough fat in the first place (you want some fat! You just don't want to be obese!). This seems to create a pattern that ends up being indistinguishable from "That worked! Let's not do that anymore."

Agree you have to mix qualitative with the quantitative, but the best metrics systems don't just measure one quantity metric. They should be paired with a quality metric.

Example: User Growth & Customer Engagement

Have to have user growth and retention. If you looked at just one or the other, you'd be missing half the equation.

I think that a good portion of the problem is that there are groups involved in metrics:

1) People setting the metrics 2) People implementing/calculating the metrics 3) People working on improving the metrics (ie product work)

2 is specially complicated for a lot of software products because it can some times be really hard to measure and can be tweaked/manipulated. For example, the MAU twitter figures from the buyout that Musk keeps complaining about, or Blizzard constantly switching their MAU definition.

Often 2 and 3 are the same people and 1 is almost always upper management. I argue that 1 and 2 should be a single group of people (that doesn't work on the product at all) and not directly subject to upper management and not tracked by the same metrics they implement (or tracked by any metrics at all).

Absurdity, unfairness, and failure often result from selective blindness to reality, whether willful or unintentional. Hyperlogical people sometimes lack empathy or an ability to conceive of, to understand, or prefer to trivialize ambiguous situations, politics, biases, human factors, or nonfunctional requirements. Always keep looking for one's own and organizational blind spots.

Oh god. The blind faith in reductive, objectivist, rationalist meritocracy that somehow "everything can be measured perfectly" and "whatever happens is completely unbiased as proscribed by a black-and-white, mechanical formula". No, sorry, that's insufficiently holistic in accounting for intangibles and supportive effort, and more of a throwback ideology that should've died in the 1920's. Some degree of discretion is needed because there is no shortcut to "measuring" performance.

I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving.

I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I look for leads on that kind of organization?

Let's start with replacing Google. Count me in.

While DDG, Brave, Kagi etc are working generously to replace Google search. The other areas that I think get less attention and needs to be targeted to successfully dismantle them and their predatory practices are Google maps and Google docs.

Maps are hard because it requires a lot of resources and money and whatever but replacing docs should be relatively easier.

Using OSS to commoditize complements plays a big role in breaking up big advantages.

There is big tech open source consortium working on maps now to commoditize it: https://siliconangle.com/2022/12/15/aws-microsoft-meta-tomto...

Not sure it'll work. I think half the advantage comes from the integration across all these tools (maps, search, etc). Have you ever tried to use duckduckgo? It surprised me what I take for granted in Google's user experience.

I wholeheatedly agree with you. The GMaps experience is vastly superior. Additionally, when I'm referring to Gmaps, I think one of the critical features that I would love to replace with Open Source is Places. With due respect, I find both Google and Yelp a*holes in this area. While OpenStreetMap is really good for mapping, I'm still looking to find(or create) somethign that can supplement OSM with Places/Business data.

(paid user of Kagi here)

FWIW, Kagi is built on top of Google search, so yes it's "replacing" (for you and me) a dependence on Google search, but it is categorically not a from-the-ground-up replacement for Google search.

Oh that's pretty smart

OpenStreetMaps is pretty decent, and I find it better than Google Maps in most cases.

What does a zero cost / zero IP / cooperative model of a Google killer look like?

It can't have ads, and it can't hide any knowledge that exists which could help the user.. even if the knowledge is proprietary.

It must repeal copyright laws by force. It must drain all silos and know all things. And it must utilize the entirety of the library Genesis.

I would imagine GitHub and technology social media

Problem is, worker owned co-ops would still require money to do anything even remotely competitive to existing businesses.

So... people go walk up for handouts from VCs....and the story begins lol.

The hard part about starting worker owned co-ops is financing. We need good financing systems for them. People/firms who are willing to give loans for a reasonable interest, but on the scale of equity investment in tech start ups.

The problem is risk —- most new businesses will go under. Who’s going to take on that unreasonable risk without commensurate reward (high interest loan rate, if any, or equity).

Co-ops could go the angel/VC route for funding if they don’t give up a controlling share.

I guess it depends on how much equity you own as to what is better (to your first paragraph), and how large the paycheck is (to the 2nd paragraph.