Ruminations of a skeptic

Discovery Is Dead

• by Prashanth Kumar Duggishetti
Internet India Technology Rant

I've been spending days out to see what I use day-to-day, and where I discover content from. And here I am with a list:

  • Google.com
  • Duckduckgo.com
  • Github.com
  • Reddit.com
  • News.ycombinator.com
  • Bluesky.com
  • Xcancel.com
  • YouTube.com
  • Chatgpt.com

And that's it. This feels like a death blow to me; discovery is dead.

I got onto the internet when I was 7–8 years old, back in 2000, I guess, which would put me in as an early interneter from India. Finding content has gotten harder or more platformized, but once on a platform, it gets worse: you end up being a slave to the algorithm. I tried killing the algorithm on YouTube, but I still see it in action around suggested videos when watching stuff. I use old Reddit, but once in a while, a link does not work, so I am forced to open the new Reddit. I use web apps over apps.

I try hard to get away from Google and Facebook, but the modern world is making it harder and harder. I have banking web apps that now need you to install the mobile app and enter the one-time passcode from the mobile app onto the web app. Why not let me use TOTP on something like Bitwarden?

I understand the idea behind the goddamn banking app, but for the love of god, drop the policy. Let me disable the VPN. A fun thing: I tried the same app on Shelter; it failed because it can read my SMS from the main profile. India has some of the worst apps. I had a banking app close on me as it had a 3rd party cert installed. I use Firefox with AdGuard on mobile; it needs it for HTTPS.

I understand that I am an edge case, one in a few million, but this shit sucks. We have policy and products built by half-brained morons who have no understanding of how systems work. And this hurts.

These things are becoming the norm. We see a big issue, like "ooh, people are getting scammed digitally," so instead of cracking down hard on them, we instead create horribly complex, heavily fragile systems with one or two points of failure that can bring the whole nation down. Hit our cellular system; India becomes useless in a day.

You know what's interesting: for profit, we let adversaries build our infrastructure (China). You want to make it more fun? DDoS a single endpoint that sends OTPs, and we are golden. I think at some point I have to do this just to prove a point.

We Indians, who are considered the goddamn IT support of the world, can't for the love of god have our own OS. We can't even take the Linux kernel and build a good distro. We can't build a good office solution. As a country, we are slaves to Western tech and Chinese hardware. The vision at the top does not exist; all we have is showboating and aura farming. We get mogged by Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia when it comes to civic sense.

You can shout, "Oh Prashanth, what about this news article which says India is doing XYZ?" Well, what's the adoption for XYZ? How much of it is just someone doing a fun project for their resume before leaving the country?

You can always say, "WTF did you do?" Well, I am trying to fix the problem, or so I thought. I got scammed a couple of times in the process of helping others; those are stories for another day. I came back with skills that aren't helpful, but I have been putting in the time to do better. I would love to build for the bottom 30%, but at the same time, live my life.

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