Take that Cory Doctrow [0]

[0] - https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510969

They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps.

People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.

> In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1.

It's ad companies all the way down.

On the back of a cocktail napkin, I drew a map of you...

Once again, private equity ruined another fine company ... with incessant advertisements

Finding MapQuest on the PlayStore was a quest all on its own. More specifically, it does not exist on my PlayStore, and I had to install it on my phone remotely through the browser PlayStore.

Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.

I think a lot of people are desperate for tech giants to stand up to the current US administration.

I tried it out for a trip yesterday. I wanted to love the app—it has a great retro feel, and an ad-free subscription option—but it gave me weird routes and the audio was extremely stuttery.

It still says Ontario because there's no one left at MapQuest that knows how to change it.

I feel like it wasn't defiance as much as "we need to come up with a story why we don't have any developers who know how to update this".