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Are you saying friends and family using Google are an obstacle to you using something else? Or maybe if you use something else, that makes you so uncool that your friends and family are not more likely to follow you, but actually less? I guess what you're actually getting at is that my switching doesn't automatically make my friends and family switch, but why insist that change only happen in blocks of people all at once? How does that help?


The original comment was pointing out that in order to break the monopoly of Google, the wide society will need to switch to something else, not just a few tech-interested people.


The thing is, that kind of logic claiming the futility of individual action does not weaken the grandparent's advice.

If you're an advertiser, you can't just switch from Google and hope to change anything. You'd be hurting yourself to no benefit, probably. Collective action is your main hope.

It's not like this for users of search. Google can lose its search leadership one user at a time. When the user switches, "the problem is gone" for that user, and Google has that much less revenue. Gradient descent is powerful.




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