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Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine: > "The goals of the advertising business model do not
by itamarst 7y ago
Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine:
> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
At the time they thought this was a bad thing...
- minikites 7y agoMoney can change almost anyone's opinion about almost any subject.
- goobynight 7y agoRight. And most people are fully persuaded by much lesser sums.
- mam2 7y agoThey are not exactly in charge anymore
- dvtrn 7y agoTime for the Upton Sinclair quote?
- numpad0 7y agoThey cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
- pb7 7y agoEvil is also subjective.
- cptskippy 7y agoAnd yet they felt the need to remove the "don't be evil" clause from their code of conduct.
- SquareWheel 7y agoStill there, as it always has been. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
- scott_paul 7y agoAnd yet, they are observably evil.
- pb7 7y ago1) It’s still there. 2) They have zero obligation to follow what’s in the code because it is not a legal document. Calling out the removal of something means you should call out all the companies that never had it in there to begin with.
- jcoffland 7y ago"Don't be evil" used to be Google's company moto. It was downgraded to being just part of the code of conduct.
- cco 7y agoOnly on the end closest to "neutral", past some arbitrary point your subjective opinion on evil stops mattering to people with morals.
- kryogen1c 7y agoi see people say this and act in accordance with this principle all the time, and its entirely wrong. a moral is not something that IS "good", its something ABOUT "good". saying someone is moral is calling someone principled - it says nothing about whether their principles (morals) are good or bad. we need to discuss morals because they are axiomatic and foundational. if you take a strict moral view that doing harm of any kind is always wrong, you will never be able to discuss anything with someone who believes in the needs of the many over the needs of the few. saying "moral people always recognize evil" is dangerously blind, circular reasoning, and the mechanism of several atrocities in history.
- LiquidSky 7y ago>They cared not to be evil back then. The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
- vorpalhex 7y agoNo there was a time that Google was genuinely not evil and repeatedly limited their potential profit to act in what they felt was an appropriate manner. Granted that was many years ago now, but I can remember distinctly that change over because that's when I started to move away from them.
- mikelyons 7y agoAbsolute power corrupts absolutely.
- ikeyany 7y agoThey follow up on that thought: > In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
- teachrdan 7y agoGoogle is not optimizing for the fewest number of ads. They are optimizing for profit from ads.
- mkolodny 7y agoThen later in that section: > we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent This change seems to go directly against their belief that it's crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it's way less transparent, or "easy to perceive or detect", that an ad is an ad.
- dana321 7y agobackrub.. still cracks me up when i see it.
- hinkley 7y agoI value input from new coworkers precisely because I often lose focus on things that I care about, often to be replaced by a nebulous feeling of discomfort. There's something to be said for maintaining a certain low rate of turnover in an organization to keep ideas and ethics on the menu. I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren't enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning. At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is "surrounding yourself with yes-men". I don't think Page & Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago. ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/google_bed_plane/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/google_bed_plane/ )