13 ms·

I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any

by stoev 9y ago

I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently. It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them. Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees. I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.

dogruck 9y ago
That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added). Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments. Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this. But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
- xxs 9y ago
  The article was published on the 25th of Feb, 2016 (so 2016 in the title).
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News. Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    The phenomenon is as old as news. The terminology and hyper awareness is fresh.
mattmanser 9y ago
It's Saturday, HN turns incredibly hostile at the weekends.
- caseymarquis 9y ago
  This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed this (I havn't)? Could probably do a word count on the top 30 articles over the course of a few months to find out.
lsmarigo 9y ago
> by the same group of people Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).
- eulo__ 9y ago
  This has been my view for a while too. Most internet forums I use are a shadow of their former selves. When I first started browsing hn I was blown away with how smart and insightful the posts were. Ideas I had never thought of and quite a few I struggled to even comprehend. It's very rare to see that now days.
  - pault 9y ago
    Are you sure it's not because you're better educated and harder to impress? I thought the same thing until I did a deep dive on some old articles and the comments weren't noticably different.
    - eulo__ 9y ago
      Probably a factor, I also think it's partly because the forums I use at the moment used to be programming centric, but have since broadened their appeal. Hn to Tech business, reddit to literally everything. Lobste.rs has been a fantastic alternative for decent discussion
      - smaddox 9y ago
        Thanks for pointing out Lobste.rs. I had never seen it before. It looks like it adds back some of the good ideas from the Slashdot of yore.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
draw_down 9y ago
> disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees Works for me. People should be disdainful of that.
indubitable 9y ago
Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. We should of course base our opinions of writings based on what is written instead of what is written about, but the vast majority of people do not do this. And it goes both ways. Is the response to this publication of the article unreasonably negative, or was the response to the original publication unreasonably positive? And of course as you aptly point out there's a much greater concern about bias in reporting now a days, and an article that is essentially a single sided puff piece for a company/individual/field/etc is something that is going to draw far more scrutiny than it might have not all that long ago.
- dageshi 9y ago
  > Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me. Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.
  - pault 9y ago
    People are starting to realize that the productivity gains of automation aren't being shared by everyone, and they've decided to blame the automators instead of the politicians. I am slightly concerned that being a developer will become anathema in certain circles. (As usual, I blame Reagan)
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    As someone inside the US, I feel like there was a theme of opposition to fracking not long ago, and it switched to opposition to tech, almost as if it was orchestrated. This could be just my paranoid tendencies speaking, but if the anti-silicon valley sentiment is largely genuine, why does it seem to me like the anti-fracking sentiment has disappeared from the forums I read? It's as though some astroturfing campaign was attacking what was perceived as the strongest industry in the American economy, and when it didn't make much of a difference, moved on to another target.
110011 9y ago
That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all. One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc." While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.
- koalaman 9y ago
  I don't think that they do this anymore, but under Balmer this was a key part of their strategy to compete. https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-google-meetings-in-d-c/ https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-googl... http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawmedia/ http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawme... I suspect that the campaign was ultimately quite successful at bootstrapping an army of unpaid trolls.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  There was a "spectacular bias" before too, but it was reflexively in favor of things Google did.
linkmotif 9y ago
Interesting take! I’ve wondered this too. But have thought just recently HN is a place where ppl have good healthy conversations on the whole.
icantsayr 9y ago
I love the articles and links here but absolutely hate the obnoxious arrogant pedantic audience.
tyingq 9y ago
I think a fair amount of it is a change in how some of the HN crowd feels about Google. Any negative comment about Google used to be met with an instant swarm of downvotes here. That's changed somewhat recently.
kop316 9y ago
I wonder if it's simpler than that: Google (Alphabet) has destroyed a lot of good will in the past two years, and the comments in the section reflect that. I can think of several instances in the past two years that makes me mistrust them more, such as taking down accounts at random and taking a peron's entire digital life with it (causing me to move as much as possible off of Google), the random flagging of documents (aka, they actively scan them and will take off content they don't like), etc. On the stock Android phone (I have a Nexus), it has felt that they have been trying actively to suck up as much data as possible (the final straw for me to put on a custom ROM is when their google keyboard sent everything I typed to thir servers, effectively making it a keylogger). I personally think the skeptism they have now is very warrented, and the days "Don't be evil" is long gone.
- goialoq 9y ago
  Ranking documents by quality and choosing what to index has been Google's mission since Day 1. That never changed.
  - kop316 9y ago
    What I was referring to was the incident recently where they flagged people's Google docs (even private ones) and locked people out of it.
douglaswlance 9y ago
hackernews has been infiltrated by wantrepreneurs and techno-communists.
- sctb 9y ago
  Even if that were true, the guidelines would ask you to state something substantive about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
brudgers 9y ago
The same story can generate different conversations depending on the tenor of early comments, who makes those comments, who sees those comments, and if and what response those comments illicit. Things as small as whether or not a post appears on a weekend or weekday (the previous was a Thursday -- $ date --date="618 days ago") makes a difference. On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.
oxryly1 9y ago
I think it's because team management in tech, despite acknowledgement of the results of these studies, hasn't actually integrated the results meaningfully, so we're not really better off 2 years later.

by stoev 9y ago

dogruck 9y ago

That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added). Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments. Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this. But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.

xxs 9y ago
The article was published on the 25th of Feb, 2016 (so 2016 in the title).
emodendroket 9y ago
> But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News. Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.
- dogruck 9y ago
  The phenomenon is as old as news. The terminology and hyper awareness is fresh.

mattmanser 9y ago

It's Saturday, HN turns incredibly hostile at the weekends.

caseymarquis 9y ago
This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed this (I havn't)? Could probably do a word count on the top 30 articles over the course of a few months to find out.

lsmarigo 9y ago

> by the same group of people Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).

eulo__ 9y ago
This has been my view for a while too. Most internet forums I use are a shadow of their former selves. When I first started browsing hn I was blown away with how smart and insightful the posts were. Ideas I had never thought of and quite a few I struggled to even comprehend. It's very rare to see that now days.
- pault 9y ago
  Are you sure it's not because you're better educated and harder to impress? I thought the same thing until I did a deep dive on some old articles and the comments weren't noticably different.
  - eulo__ 9y ago
    Probably a factor, I also think it's partly because the forums I use at the moment used to be programming centric, but have since broadened their appeal. Hn to Tech business, reddit to literally everything. Lobste.rs has been a fantastic alternative for decent discussion
    - smaddox 9y ago
      Thanks for pointing out Lobste.rs. I had never seen it before. It looks like it adds back some of the good ideas from the Slashdot of yore.
- emodendroket 9y ago

draw_down 9y ago

> disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees Works for me. People should be disdainful of that.

indubitable 9y ago

Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. We should of course base our opinions of writings based on what is written instead of what is written about, but the vast majority of people do not do this. And it goes both ways. Is the response to this publication of the article unreasonably negative, or was the response to the original publication unreasonably positive? And of course as you aptly point out there's a much greater concern about bias in reporting now a days, and an article that is essentially a single sided puff piece for a company/individual/field/etc is something that is going to draw far more scrutiny than it might have not all that long ago.

dageshi 9y ago
> Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me. Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.
- pault 9y ago
  People are starting to realize that the productivity gains of automation aren't being shared by everyone, and they've decided to blame the automators instead of the politicians. I am slightly concerned that being a developer will become anathema in certain circles. (As usual, I blame Reagan)
- perl4ever 9y ago
  As someone inside the US, I feel like there was a theme of opposition to fracking not long ago, and it switched to opposition to tech, almost as if it was orchestrated. This could be just my paranoid tendencies speaking, but if the anti-silicon valley sentiment is largely genuine, why does it seem to me like the anti-fracking sentiment has disappeared from the forums I read? It's as though some astroturfing campaign was attacking what was perceived as the strongest industry in the American economy, and when it didn't make much of a difference, moved on to another target.

110011 9y ago

That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all. One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc." While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.

koalaman 9y ago
I don't think that they do this anymore, but under Balmer this was a key part of their strategy to compete. https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-google-meetings-in-d-c/ https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-googl... http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawmedia/ http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawme... I suspect that the campaign was ultimately quite successful at bootstrapping an army of unpaid trolls.
emodendroket 9y ago
There was a "spectacular bias" before too, but it was reflexively in favor of things Google did.

linkmotif 9y ago

Interesting take! I’ve wondered this too. But have thought just recently HN is a place where ppl have good healthy conversations on the whole.

icantsayr 9y ago

I love the articles and links here but absolutely hate the obnoxious arrogant pedantic audience.

tyingq 9y ago

I think a fair amount of it is a change in how some of the HN crowd feels about Google. Any negative comment about Google used to be met with an instant swarm of downvotes here. That's changed somewhat recently.

kop316 9y ago

I wonder if it's simpler than that: Google (Alphabet) has destroyed a lot of good will in the past two years, and the comments in the section reflect that. I can think of several instances in the past two years that makes me mistrust them more, such as taking down accounts at random and taking a peron's entire digital life with it (causing me to move as much as possible off of Google), the random flagging of documents (aka, they actively scan them and will take off content they don't like), etc. On the stock Android phone (I have a Nexus), it has felt that they have been trying actively to suck up as much data as possible (the final straw for me to put on a custom ROM is when their google keyboard sent everything I typed to thir servers, effectively making it a keylogger). I personally think the skeptism they have now is very warrented, and the days "Don't be evil" is long gone.

goialoq 9y ago
Ranking documents by quality and choosing what to index has been Google's mission since Day 1. That never changed.
- kop316 9y ago
  What I was referring to was the incident recently where they flagged people's Google docs (even private ones) and locked people out of it.

douglaswlance 9y ago

hackernews has been infiltrated by wantrepreneurs and techno-communists.

sctb 9y ago
Even if that were true, the guidelines would ask you to state something substantive about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

brudgers 9y ago

The same story can generate different conversations depending on the tenor of early comments, who makes those comments, who sees those comments, and if and what response those comments illicit. Things as small as whether or not a post appears on a weekend or weekday (the previous was a Thursday -- $ date --date="618 days ago") makes a difference. On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.

oxryly1 9y ago

I think it's because team management in tech, despite acknowledgement of the results of these studies, hasn't actually integrated the results meaningfully, so we're not really better off 2 years later.