23 ms·
This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.
by CivBase 6y ago
This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.
- absolutelyrad 6y ago[deleted]
- redisman 6y agoWhat good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership that demanded this feature
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- calcifer 6y ago> What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership I believe this line of thought and justification was addressed for good in the Nuremberg Trials.
- edgyquant 6y agoThat is beyond hyperbole. These are people implementing a caching feature not individuals leading human being into death camps. A false equivalency seldom matched.
- salawat 6y ago>I was only following orders. It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.
- pmoriarty 6y agoThe crimes are not equivalent, but the "I was just following orders" excuse is just as bogus in both cases. If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.
- redisman 6y agoWhat if you didn't know the ultimate goal of the delay feature you implemented? The ticket could have been fairly generic/abstract.
- curryst 6y agoNot at all. It was a prevalent defense there, and their view of those crimes was the the Superior Orders defense was a mitigating factor, but that the crimes were too severe to allow them to escape all culpability like that. It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility. It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse. Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.
- ForHackernews 6y agoI wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves? I always wonder this with things like the Volkswagen emissions cheating - how do those engineers rationalise it?
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoWell, working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go, this just seems like more of the same to me. To be fair, unlike VW diesels, it's also not directly damaging anyone's health, but it's still a nasty business.
- inetknght 6y ago> it's also not directly damaging anyone's health I completely disagree. Have you noticed how much targeted advertising has sold out our world and affected peoples ability to rationally think?
- claudeganon 6y agoAdvertising has done more damage to people’s mental health and self-image then just about any other industry.
- manigandham 6y ago> working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go No, it's the same as any other industry. A single company or negative behavior doesn't define everyone.
- engineeringwoke 6y agoNo, ad tech is well-known as the particularly abusive part of these monopolistic businesses. It's a race to the bottom, and someone has to code them there. It's bad.
- bigbubba 6y agoIt's common practice in the advertising industry to exploit people's feelings of inadequacy. This is an industry that doesn't think twice about making an emotionally vulnerable teenager feel like a loser if they think it will help them sell some shitty product as the 'solution.' This is directly harming people's health.
- jefftk 6y agoIt looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, and I'm friends with some of the people at the link. Speaking only for myself.)
- three_seagrass 6y agoSo tl;dr: Traditional HTML+JS ads have always needed an extra second delay to load because of cross-domain UX degredation, but because AMP is pre-caching pages, they're able to pre-cache the ads too? Is that what I'm reading?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI believe that the idea is that if the ad is amp, you can be sure it will load fast and not impede the ux of the page, whereas if it's html/js, you can't. It isn't about whether it is cached or not.
- ngold 6y agoSo taking websites hostage and demanding a ransom in the form of an amp link. Thanks.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoIf the top-line goal is to make the page as responsive as possible, I'm a little stumped as to what the alternative would be beyond delaying the loading of arbitrary html and JS. Can you think of a way to load arbitrary HTML immediately and not cause any page responsiveness issues on, say, a three year old Android device?
- creato 6y agoBut this sounds like a technical limitation that makes sense? This entire comment chain is mostly people interpreting the lawsuit as claiming this was a deliberate artificial delay for business reasons and getting outraged about that, not a technical issue.
- mtgx 6y agoPeople are way too quick to defend Google around here - and I'm saying that as a former Google evangelist. Google does a LOT of crap like that these days. Most people just aren't aware just how "evil" they've become, or prefer to defend them with nonsensical arguments like "see, Google still throws the Don't Be Evil motto somewhere at the very end of their multi-page work of conduct document, so technically they still believe in it!"
- nicetryguy 6y agoYeah... They aren't the same Google of 20 or even 10 years ago...
- itsoktocry 6y ago>Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed. Isn't it the CEO?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- broknbottle 6y agomore than likely a single "Rogue" engineer
- dfee 6y agoThis was sarcastic, right?
- withinboredom 6y agoSomeone’s gotta be the scapegoat...
- arthurcolle 6y agoObviously yes, probably on the back of stuff like Jerome Kerviel, and Tom Hayes, where one "rogue X" is capable of taking down Y.
- devmunchies 6y ago"air quotes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes
- Ygg2 6y agoYou mean scapegoat?
- onion2k 6y agoThe engineer is responsible for it. The CEO is accountable for it.
- momokoko 6y ago
- amelius 6y ago> This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed. That's it. I'm putting a 1-second delay into my webserver right now, when it detects Google Chrome.
- rriepe 6y agoThis idea is one github repo away from being viral.
- Quekid5 6y agoThat'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search... This whole AMP mess just shows how insidiously evil a HugeCorp can be through sheer system complexity. Was it intentional? Well, I guess court cases will show that, but sheesh... even if unintentional it's extremely chilling.
- crazypython 6y ago> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search... Then don't add it for Googlebot User-Agents or IPs.
- cpeterso 6y agoGoogle probably crawls with non-Googlebot User-Agent strings periodically to test if sites are serving different content to Googlebot and regular browsers.
- SolarNet 6y agoBut this mitigation would still fail. They might test for different content, but they probably don't include a periodic test like this in their timing tests, and if they did, it would just be an outlier.
- Quekid5 6y agoI have no insider knowledge, but I'm going to guess that they even crawl using actual Chrome browsers once in a while... and penalize deviations from what you serve to the GoogleBot... and also factor in response times for either. I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.
- Karishma1234 6y agoBefore jumping to conclusion me might have to hear the other side as well.
- emmelaich 6y agoKarishma, you were shadowbanned. I've seen nothing in your comment history which would warrant this so I've vouched this comment.
- fossuser 6y agoReminds me of this story: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoSuch artificial delays are already intentionally inserted for the purposes of allowing header bidding, regardless of AMP. Are most users aware of that. What this alleges Google is doing with AMP is making the delay worse, but there is still a delay. This is part of the price the user pays for online advertising. Not just (potential) visual distraction of advertising, but (real) time waiting for advertisers to bid before an ad can be shown. (What does a message like "Page loading..." really mean. Imagine if the message was "Advertisers bidding...") Advertisers might fail to get the user's attention or click, but they are always successful in stealing the user's time, with help from "ad tech" companies like Google. Regardless of whether the user ever looks at the ad, or clicks, she still has to wait for header bidding to complete.
- spockz 6y agoThe problem here is that there allegedly an additional artificial second of delay on non-amp ads vs amp ads. This is seen as anti competitive.