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There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time.

It doesn't need to have a huge amount of users, it doesn't need to get the majority of the market share, and it doesn't need to earn more revenue, or even any revenue at all, in order to deliver a better user experience. Such things are not mutually exclusive.

I believe this is most likely to happen with the help of peer to peer technologies, combined with a healthy synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers. Steemit is a crude proof of concept for such a system. In Steemit, comments and posts are scored with a reputation algorithm, and assigned a tag. There's absolutely no reason why web links can't be associated with an arbitrary number of contextually-weighted tags, and a contextual reputation algorithm.

Everything that Google does could be done in a peer to peer manner, with each user bearing a small piece of the responsibility. Wikipedia is a great example of this, with many users contributing to the system. No single company could ever produce the amount of content that the Wikipedia userbase has created. Even though Wikipedia uses a centralized foundation and centralized server, the editing culture itself is decentralized, with a set of principles being the main driver of decision-making.

I bring up blockchain technologies, much to the disgust of many users on HN, but only because I see those technologies as lowering the barrier to creating systems such as Wikipedia, through automating, standardization, and enforcement of some of the mechanisms. It also creates a guarantee that a central authority doesn't exist and therefore cannot be manipulated in subtle ways by those in positions of greater power - That is a big appeal factor for a significant number of users, even if it is not the majority.




>>> There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time.

Yes. Google cannot be beaten.

I don't think that any domain has more money to offer than advertising/marketing and certainly not easier. Then the real time auction and pricing systems that run Google are truly incredible.

Business wise, google is milking the perfect cow perfectly. There isn't a better cow or a better milking strategy.




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