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> Simeon Vincent, a Google Developer Advocate for Chrome Extensions One has to love and admire the use of Newspeak by big companies... How is this Mr Vincent a

by bambax 7y ago

> Simeon Vincent, a Google Developer Advocate for Chrome Extensions One has to love and admire the use of Newspeak by big companies... How is this Mr Vincent an "advocate"? He's in charge of destroying extensions! On his Twitter bio [1] he also says he likes "helping people" and "the open web". The cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear. [1] https://twitter.com/dotproto https://twitter.com/dotproto

dessant 7y ago
And once asked a clear question, the developer advocate deflects and stops answering: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#issuecomment-547620810 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss...
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Did you link to the right thing? That isn't a deflection, they're asking permission to sideline the issue on uBlock's issue tracker into a discussion about Chrome/Chromium's extension policies, which incidentally they didn't get a clear answer to. > I also don't want to hijack this without the project's permission. @gorhill & contributors, do you mind having this discussion here or would you prefer if we moved it elsewhere? I haven't really been following this issue, but I did read the linked reply, so I may be missing some bigger context.
  - omnifischer 7y ago
    Would be nice if any hn-reader mediates between the two sides.
    - dsr_ 7y ago
      Mediation is for two sides having a reasonable difference of opinion. In Google's corporate opinion, Google's ads must not be blocked. In everyone else's opinion, all ads must be blockable at a user's option. That's not a difference that can be mediated.
  - dessant 7y ago
    That's the correct link, and it is deflection. When developers tell you that the extension review process is so unfair that it feels like bullying [1], and ask you what changes do you plan to introduce to prevent this, the least you can do as a developer advocate is to briefly answer the question, then open a thread on Google Groups and invite people there to continue the discussion. What they did was to introduce a break in the discussion. Most people subscribing to that GitHub issue, which was trending on HN [2], will not start monitoring Google Groups for any new discussion that may take place, which reduces the likelihood that there will be enough people pressuring them to give clear answers. [1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#issuecomment-546724468 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041
mtgx 7y ago
Google has been perfecting this language over the past few years, with press releases/blog posts of fame such as: "We're evolving Google Fiber" (read: We're killing it) or "We're releasing the End-to-End email encryption extension to the community" (read: We're abandoning developing and supporting it for Gmail), etc
goatinaboat 7y ago
“Hello, fellow developers! I myself am a developer, just like you! How’s everyone developing today? By the way <insert marketing spiel here>” It’s so transparent, I boggle at how anyone falls for it, or that companies still think it is a viable strategy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sametmax 7y ago
  They do that because it works. I remember clearly an interview of a very famous IT billionaire going this way: - What's the most annoying myth about you? - A myth migh be that I'm the most generous philantropist of all time. [...But] I havent' sacrified my time or economic well being the same way lots of unamed, amazing people do. So they're the worlds best philantropists. This is the least subtle humble-brag of all time. "People says I'm so incredibly amazing. But they are wrong. There are out there more amazing people." is gotta be next to the job interview answer "my biggest weakness is that I work too much" in the BS book. But the reactions to the interview are still, to this day, "this person is so humble", "he is such a good man", etc.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    Except that people do, in fact, say things not so far from "Bill Gates is the most generous philanthropist of all time". If you put "most generous philanthropist of all time" into your favourite search engine, I bet you will get a lot of top-N lists and I bet Bill Gates will be in all of them. (Unless they're things like "most generous philanthropists you've never heard of", "most generous female philanthropists", etc.) If I put that exact phrase, in quotation marks, into Google, the result I get up at the top is an article from 2007 (so, well before that interview) making that exact claim. [EDITED to add:] More precisely, it calls him "perhaps the most generous philanthropist of all time". I don't think it really counts as a humblebrag to say "it's a myth that I'm X" when there are in fact a lot of people saying you're X. He could, for sure, have gone further out of his way to avoid humblebragging: he could have said something like "I think a lot of people overstate how generous a philanthropist I am". But he was asked, specifically, what the most annoying myth about him was, and all the anti-humblebrag tactics I can think of right now avoid humblebragging by not stating a specific proposition at all -- so they fail to answer the question he was actually asked. And he could, for sure, have picked something else, maybe something about his time at Microsoft. But these days he's much better known as a philanthropist than as a Microsoft founder or executive, and I bet the things people (truly or falsely) believe about his Microsoft career aren't the things he considers the most annoying myths.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
Even if you don't share their opinion, you have to accept that some people honestly believe that advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons. Realistically, Mr Vincent is not in charge of being an advocate for anything other than Google's corporate interests. But he is not in charge of destroying extensions either. He may well be in charge of destroying ad blockers though.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > ...advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons That's a minor issue. The bigger issue is the fact that, if adblockers become truly popular, websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS. Remember Flash and 'Flash pages' back in the day? That, except worse.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    I'm not sure that is worse. A vast majority of the primary source web has no in page ads as it is things like orgs talking about their own products. If I could reliably filter the entire ad funded web from my search results on the basis of their using a blobs/DRM feature, I'm not sure how often I would do a search on the derivative web.
  - naringas 7y ago
    > websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS. they will just serve web assembly
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    I don't think sites will bake ads into the blob. It's too much server-side hassle. The equivalent today is just serving the ads from your own domain, and precious few people do that. The other option is a binary blob making a network request to an ad server, which can be blocked.
saagarjha 7y ago
Regardless of your opinion of his actions, attacking him here for being non-genuine doesn’t really help :/
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  his actions show he is disingenuous. you don't need to make any value judgements because his actions are inconsistent with his rhetoric.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I have found that picking at people for a decision that you don’t agree with is rarely useful; we already have people going through GitHub to find instances of other “disingenuous” behavior. Like the decision or not, the change is the product of an entire team at Google, and it’s not productive to harass the one person mentioned here because they’re an easy target.
    - hobs 7y ago
      They are literally the face of this decision - if you find yourself put in a position to make hard decisions you dont agree with, there's an easy out. Get a new job.
    - _jal 7y ago
      > it’s not productive to harass True. They won't change their mind. The only signal they will listen to is to stop using Chrome.
rusk 7y ago
> The cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear. While not wishing to speculate on specifics, there is medication in common circulation that can help with such inconvenient emotions.
roenxi 7y ago
This is classic modern Google. "Advocate" probably means he is advocating for the Chrome Extensions Team and not the Chrome extensions. That would allow him to have an internally consistent world model and is probably how greater corporate Google interprets the title. So communicating what the team is doing to the outside world, not defending the utility of the extensions.
Ygg2 7y ago
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

by bambax 7y ago

dessant 7y ago

And once asked a clear question, the developer advocate deflects and stops answering: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#issuecomment-547620810 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss...

Someone1234 7y ago
Did you link to the right thing? That isn't a deflection, they're asking permission to sideline the issue on uBlock's issue tracker into a discussion about Chrome/Chromium's extension policies, which incidentally they didn't get a clear answer to. > I also don't want to hijack this without the project's permission. @gorhill & contributors, do you mind having this discussion here or would you prefer if we moved it elsewhere? I haven't really been following this issue, but I did read the linked reply, so I may be missing some bigger context.
- omnifischer 7y ago
  Would be nice if any hn-reader mediates between the two sides.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    Mediation is for two sides having a reasonable difference of opinion. In Google's corporate opinion, Google's ads must not be blocked. In everyone else's opinion, all ads must be blockable at a user's option. That's not a difference that can be mediated.
- dessant 7y ago
  That's the correct link, and it is deflection. When developers tell you that the extension review process is so unfair that it feels like bullying [1], and ask you what changes do you plan to introduce to prevent this, the least you can do as a developer advocate is to briefly answer the question, then open a thread on Google Groups and invite people there to continue the discussion. What they did was to introduce a break in the discussion. Most people subscribing to that GitHub issue, which was trending on HN [2], will not start monitoring Google Groups for any new discussion that may take place, which reduces the likelihood that there will be enough people pressuring them to give clear answers. [1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#issuecomment-546724468 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041

mtgx 7y ago

Google has been perfecting this language over the past few years, with press releases/blog posts of fame such as: "We're evolving Google Fiber" (read: We're killing it) or "We're releasing the End-to-End email encryption extension to the community" (read: We're abandoning developing and supporting it for Gmail), etc

goatinaboat 7y ago

“Hello, fellow developers! I myself am a developer, just like you! How’s everyone developing today? By the way <insert marketing spiel here>” It’s so transparent, I boggle at how anyone falls for it, or that companies still think it is a viable strategy.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sametmax 7y ago
They do that because it works. I remember clearly an interview of a very famous IT billionaire going this way: - What's the most annoying myth about you? - A myth migh be that I'm the most generous philantropist of all time. [...But] I havent' sacrified my time or economic well being the same way lots of unamed, amazing people do. So they're the worlds best philantropists. This is the least subtle humble-brag of all time. "People says I'm so incredibly amazing. But they are wrong. There are out there more amazing people." is gotta be next to the job interview answer "my biggest weakness is that I work too much" in the BS book. But the reactions to the interview are still, to this day, "this person is so humble", "he is such a good man", etc.
- gjm11 7y ago
  Except that people do, in fact, say things not so far from "Bill Gates is the most generous philanthropist of all time". If you put "most generous philanthropist of all time" into your favourite search engine, I bet you will get a lot of top-N lists and I bet Bill Gates will be in all of them. (Unless they're things like "most generous philanthropists you've never heard of", "most generous female philanthropists", etc.) If I put that exact phrase, in quotation marks, into Google, the result I get up at the top is an article from 2007 (so, well before that interview) making that exact claim. [EDITED to add:] More precisely, it calls him "perhaps the most generous philanthropist of all time". I don't think it really counts as a humblebrag to say "it's a myth that I'm X" when there are in fact a lot of people saying you're X. He could, for sure, have gone further out of his way to avoid humblebragging: he could have said something like "I think a lot of people overstate how generous a philanthropist I am". But he was asked, specifically, what the most annoying myth about him was, and all the anti-humblebrag tactics I can think of right now avoid humblebragging by not stating a specific proposition at all -- so they fail to answer the question he was actually asked. And he could, for sure, have picked something else, maybe something about his time at Microsoft. But these days he's much better known as a philanthropist than as a Microsoft founder or executive, and I bet the things people (truly or falsely) believe about his Microsoft career aren't the things he considers the most annoying myths.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

Even if you don't share their opinion, you have to accept that some people honestly believe that advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons. Realistically, Mr Vincent is not in charge of being an advocate for anything other than Google's corporate interests. But he is not in charge of destroying extensions either. He may well be in charge of destroying ad blockers though.

otabdeveloper4 7y ago
> ...advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons That's a minor issue. The bigger issue is the fact that, if adblockers become truly popular, websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS. Remember Flash and 'Flash pages' back in the day? That, except worse.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  I'm not sure that is worse. A vast majority of the primary source web has no in page ads as it is things like orgs talking about their own products. If I could reliably filter the entire ad funded web from my search results on the basis of their using a blobs/DRM feature, I'm not sure how often I would do a search on the derivative web.
- naringas 7y ago
  > websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS. they will just serve web assembly
- big_chungus 7y ago
  I don't think sites will bake ads into the blob. It's too much server-side hassle. The equivalent today is just serving the ads from your own domain, and precious few people do that. The other option is a binary blob making a network request to an ad server, which can be blocked.

saagarjha 7y ago

Regardless of your opinion of his actions, attacking him here for being non-genuine doesn’t really help :/

appleflaxen 7y ago
his actions show he is disingenuous. you don't need to make any value judgements because his actions are inconsistent with his rhetoric.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I have found that picking at people for a decision that you don’t agree with is rarely useful; we already have people going through GitHub to find instances of other “disingenuous” behavior. Like the decision or not, the change is the product of an entire team at Google, and it’s not productive to harass the one person mentioned here because they’re an easy target.
  - hobs 7y ago
    They are literally the face of this decision - if you find yourself put in a position to make hard decisions you dont agree with, there's an easy out. Get a new job.
  - _jal 7y ago
    > it’s not productive to harass True. They won't change their mind. The only signal they will listen to is to stop using Chrome.

rusk 7y ago

> The cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear. While not wishing to speculate on specifics, there is medication in common circulation that can help with such inconvenient emotions.

roenxi 7y ago

This is classic modern Google. "Advocate" probably means he is advocating for the Chrome Extensions Team and not the Chrome extensions. That would allow him to have an internally consistent world model and is probably how greater corporate Google interprets the title. So communicating what the team is doing to the outside world, not defending the utility of the extensions.

Ygg2 7y ago

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.