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The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs

The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. are fantastic services in that they work really well on a massive scale. However, Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information puts too much power into the hands of one corporation, whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population. I've been working as a SWE at google (in ads...) for over two years and I've really started to loathe it over the past year. The pay is fantastic and it's really hard to walk away from that, but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me... We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. edit: added quotes around "good intentions"

lazyjones 5y ago
All these services are easy to replace. What isn't yet available elsewhere is the content discovery possibilities provided by Youtube, especially what would be considered "pirated" content on other sites without deep ties to the government (e.g. full CDs, movies that get uploaded and stay on yt for a long time, to be downloaded by millions).
- andai 5y ago
  A search engine for videos?
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Deep ties to the government alone won't do it. You'll need deep ties to these content industries, and that will cost you money. Google has it. Most startups probably won't.
- semitones 5y ago
  "All these services are easy to replace" - I would like to agree, but I think that statement trivializes the endeavor a bit too much. For Docs for example: Sure, from a technical standpoint, creating a webapp that lets you modify a document, syncs over new changes on a regular basis, and lets multiple users collaborate on the same doc and the same time is certainly harder than making a hello world calculator, but it's definitely not that hard. Most of us could figure out how to do it, especially since it's 2021 and our hardware is up to the task. However, what is stupidly non-easy, is getting billions of people to use your solution, and for it to become the "standard" in society, for powerusers and non-powerusers alike, and for it not to have hiccups when a billion people use it. Oh, also, you need to somehow pay for the physical infrastructure that supports it, and the human beings that maintain it (hardware + software). The situation would be even more complicated for YouTube because of the nature of the content, i.e. a single video on YouTube might be viewed by billions of people, while even the most popular docs are viewed by thousands at most, and even then making a copy of a text document to then distribute off-platform is pretty trivial. And yes, we can spit out terms like blockchain w/ proof of stake, IPFS, etc. - but the tech isn't even the hard part, it's everything else that's hard (adoption, consensus, complexity for non-powerusers, funding, etc.)
  - Hizonner 5y ago
    Why does any one thing have to be a "standard"? That's part of the problem.
    - dudus 5y ago
      Exactly, if we replace one standard for another what problem are we solving if the main goal was to reduce centralization.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - judge2020 5y ago
      If nobody uses something, what difference does it make?
      - j4yav 5y ago
        Everyone uses it or nobody uses it aren’t the only two options.
    - dimitrios1 5y ago
      Exactly. We only need a "standard" because everyone builds walled gardens and easy content distribution to multiple platforms is intentionally difficult. Right now you have to watch a "YouTube" video, instead of just a video on YouTube.
    - semitones 5y ago
      Standards != centralization. Standards apply more to protocols, and centralization applies more to ownership of data. For instance, there is an enormous benefit to the entire world from using a standard IP/TCP stack. Yet, we don't seem to suffer from a centralized authority making controversial or conflict-of-interest decisions regarding that stack. So what I was suggesting is that document-editing abide by some global protocol/standard, which would include storage, versioning, and permissions. As far as the choice of user-facing interfaces and implementations of logic around those standards, there need not be just one, or even a few. Everyone can bring something cool to the table and anyone can use whichever flavor they wish.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Point is Google can offer services like Docs for free and still invest money in continually improving them because it sells advertisement-space on its free products. Sure you could build your own. But how would you finance the maintenance of your software and its free-for-customers delivery platform? Answer: By either selling advertisement, or by charging people for using it. The problem really is that by now Google has monopoly. Therefore it is difficult or impossible for you to compete with them.
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    As a user, I don't need to compete with Google. I just need an alternative. If I needed collaborative document editing (as a replacement for Docs, a feature I don't use), I'd probably try something like https://www.samepage.io/ https://www.samepage.io/ . My only use of Docs at the moment is for maintaining some stock price calculations and tracking with the =GOOGLEFINANCE(...) function. There's probably some personal finance apps out there that do the same.
andai 5y ago
Google docs etc aren't even Google's inventions, Google just bought them. I think it's important to emphasize that, to dispel the notion that you need to be a big company to make a product like that.
- semitones 5y ago
  I agree that you do not have to be a big company to make a product like that, but it seems like you have to be a big company in order to host and deliver it.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Anything that becomes a danger of breaking away from the ecosystem gets bought out. Indeed that seems the end goal of most startups
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    No you have to be a big company to resist the urge of getting bought out. Or you have to either have aspirations of becoming a big platform company or a plan to survive and be happy watching big companies push you to fifth place in a category you once dominated.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    Nah. Hosting is cheaper than it's ever been at any time in history, the costs only become a concern if you have lots of users in which case you should be generating lots of revenue to pay for the increased hosting costs.
    - rootsudo 5y ago
      Hosting is at an all time low, while innovation, time and putting time to a project like this is not.
    - semitones 5y ago
      There's more to hosting than just spinning up a fleet of containers you know (not even that that is necessarily trivial...). Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users? Just do what google does and run ads on the side? Then what's the difference?
chaganated 5y ago
resignation or gtfo
- semitones 5y ago
  maybe soon
  - chaganated 5y ago
    good on ya
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
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shadowgovt 5y ago
Funny enough, I arrived at the opposite conclusion during my tenure as SWE... Google wasn't taking responsibility for the wide sweep of its arms as the gorilla in the room, and was trying to stay neutral ("We just build services; expecting us to be responsible for them is like expecting fire not to burn") in a situation where they fundamentally can't. Google is already non-neutral... they ban all sorts of content on search and comply with law in multiple countries. It's never a question of "Should Google be neutral," but instead "How neutral."
- nomoreplease 5y ago
  > in a situation where they fundamentally can't. I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's not actually neutral; that's letting harmful content spread at the speed of Internet discourse. We already know, for example, that they aren't going to allow Google Docs to be used to wide-cast child pornography. They never have. It appears the only change is that they're adding new categories of misinformation to the "harmful content" list. When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      CP is already illegal and google doesn’t need to arbitrate whether its illegal or not. Blocking CP is neutral and a basic. It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society. Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be. I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.
cabalamat 5y ago
> The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions my arse. Google, and the US ruling class in general, seems very, very keen that everyone believe the 2020 US election was fair. Which to my mind is very suspicious. I think the election was probably rigged, and I think the democratic primary was also rigged, in 2016 and 2020, to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning, because he represented a threat to the ruling class. US elections are about as free and fair as Russian or Iranian elections -- and I bet in those countries the ruling class also tries to prevent people from saying they aren't.
jensensbutton 5y ago
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. Who's going to pay for and operate it? And why won't they be subject to the same pressures that got us here?
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on a globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." Google's job is to take away the motivation to do this work. Alernatively, if it looks like someone is doing it, hire or acquire them.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Can't I get Google Workspace right now which isn't ad-supported?
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    It looks like this would still not solve the parent commnter's problem with monitoring and censorship of "misleading content". https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html In particular You agree not to, and not to allow third parties or Your End Users, to use the Services: to intentionally distribute hoaxes, or other items of a destructive or deceptive nature; Your failure to comply with the AUP may result in suspension or termination, or both, of the Services pursuant to the Agreement. The availability of paid email hosting and document creation, editing and storage is, IMO, an example of the point I was making. If, e.g., businesses and other organisations were potentially upset about Gmail scanning (remember Google was sued for this and lost) then that dissatisfaction argubaly provides motivation to avoid Gmail. That motivation could potentially spread outside of businesses and other organisations. Google's job is to take away such motivation. Arguably Google Workspaces is Google doing its job of quelling a potential uprising, so to speak. They are taking away potential motivation to innovate away from Google and online advertising. (It also highlights the inherent flaws in a "free" services model. For many businesses and organisations, this is not acceptable.) Meanwhile, the company's core business remains unchanged: providing services for "free" while generating billions in profits through online advertising services.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Yes, true. Perhaps the bar is no higher for censoring a paid account and a free account.
jrsj 5y ago
Almost no one in this industry is actually making the world better. Just take the money and use that to make the world better if you can. Especially since all things considered your role at Google probably doesn’t make things better or worse either way.
efsavage 5y ago
I think there's a vacuum here in that society wants someone to intervene when Bad Things Happen, but we either can't agree who that should be or (more likely IMO) the right choice of person/organization just doesn't exist. So you end up with some people/organizations/governments stepping up to increase their power and/or protect their own interests. I think this is why Zuckerberg and some other big players have called for laws to regulate these things, which seems counterintuitive, but then FB can pass the buck and is more likely to maintain the status quo where they're on top. But until they are more insulated from the risks, they're going to be forced to defend themselves. Disclaimer: I too work for Google
- semitones 5y ago
  This is also probably why Google is advocating for the privacy sandbox and banning third-party-cookies, and staying ahead of the law tech-wise. Such that when the inevitable regulation of the playing field does come, they are sharing drinks and chuckling with the referees, while the other players are still struggling to figure out what their game plan is.
- charwalker 5y ago
  It's also easier for FB/etc to push for laws to be written when they can pour millions into a PAC to get their ideal language into those bills, if not straight up write sections themselves. They can lobby for fines that are lower than profit from acting in bad faith or anti-competitively (who even knows how much money FB saved by buying out Instagram/etc), they can run their own disinformation or targeted campaigns to sway public opinion, or simply minimize anything on their platform to hide it from users. There's a massive power imbalance there between a regular voter and Zuckerberg/etc, even an imbalance between a regular voters who can or cannot vote early or by mail. I support regulating these groups but that must be done within the right assigned via the constitution, existing precedent where available, and in depth knowledge of how these companies operate and how the tech influences consumers. It's complicated.
poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
Uh "good intentions"? I think you mean "ruling class lackeys"
drluke 5y ago
Maybe it time we make it easy for people to host thier own clouds… Like Nextcloud. All in one at home server with Owncloud Plug-N-Play. While we are at it, have it ready to go for hosting emails and Federated Social Media. To be honest, it would be a challange, but totally doable. Decetralize the interenet once again!
- hollasch 5y ago
  ISPs have shown increasing comfort with delisting sites they deem bad. I'm a huge proponent of commoditizing data hosting, but the culture today leans heavily toward "filtering" information.
  - drluke 5y ago
    ISP Censorship is next on their list… They are going to push normal discorse underground and bad ideas will just fester instead of being natually filtered out in the proving grounds of public discorse.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    It's not really culture. It's a small minority of radical extremists who get their own way repeatedly by threatening meltdowns out of all proportion to the severity of the problem, and emotionally manipulating their own managers ("you're a bad person if you don't do this"). And they do it again and again, until the organization starts to collapse and becomes a mere tool for their political agendas. The best way to push back on this is not some p2p techno fix. It's to systematically start firing anyone in an organization who demands the moral cleansing of customers or colleagues.
- umvi 5y ago
  Then there will be calls for cloud providers to remove "misleading" clients. (Read: AWS + Parlor, Cloudflare, etc) What we really need is a legal designation of a "public square" online that protects free speech online
  - drluke 5y ago
jodrellblank 5y ago
> "but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need" If I can ask this in a non-snarky way, did you ever honestly[1] think working on ads was contributing to a better world? If so, how? [1] 'honestly' contrasted with "it pays well so I'm not going to think about that" or "I say it does in public but I don't believe it".
deleted 5y ago
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izacus 5y ago
I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior company, that will magically have incentives to fight for them instead of making money. It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry. Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?
- duxup 5y ago
  The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands. I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
    - landryraccoon 5y ago
      That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.
deleted 5y ago
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duxup 5y ago
Who wants to be a consumer company that just has an anything goes policy? I sure as hell don't want to do it.
- prepend 5y ago
  I don’t know anyone proposing “anything goes.” I think the most common request is to remove illegal speech and stick there.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong The problem is that (I doubt) Google is really doing this out of some misguided attempt at "protecting" people but rather as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want. When America was a very religious (Christian) country, media distributors stayed away from anything that appeared "blasphemous". They didn't necessarily do it because there was a law against it (there were some odd laws here and there, but the media didn't start actually challenging them until religion really fell out of favor), but because they were afraid of consumer reactions. Google (and every other tech company) is doing essentially the same thing here: speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy and they just don't want to be attached to it because they do ultimately fear the consumer. Even if you found a globally adoptable alternative to google, the same people who pushed Google to ban distribution of "misleading content" would start looking for ways to ban your globally adoptable alternative - at the network level if necessary (look what happened to Parler before they agreed to follow the unwritten rules). At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech.
- semitones 5y ago
  "At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech." - that's a terrifying prospect. I agree, I don't think Google is trying to "protect" people. They are ultimately, almost always, protecting their pockets.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    In a sense that may be true, but how is that different from a bar owner asking people to leave if they are causing a disturbance by being confrontational with other patrons? The bar owner doesn't want a fight that can damage property. He doesn't want people to avoid the bar because someone is picking fights, when most of his clientele just want to kick back and socialize with their friends. Maybe the bar owner isn't trying to "protect" the rest of his customers, he's just trying to maintain a profitable business. Protecting his pockets. You could apply the same logic to dang, who helps keep HN a pleasant place by doing the same things the bar owner is doing. Yes I imagine he is paid a salary, by the management of YCombinator who see HN as one part of their strategy to make a profit, and therefore his motives are equally cynical. Ok. Honestly, you can probably reduce all human behavior to such simplistic motives if you want. What I see as someone being kind, you might see as a purely Darwinian strategy to get their genes in future generations. I'm not all that sure that is a helpful perspective, at least not most of the time.
WalterBright 5y ago
> whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population. Hell always comes when people feel they know what's best for everyone else, and attempt to forcibly implement it. I'm for people being free to choose what they believe their own individual self interest is. Even if it isn't what others imagine it to be. Even if those others are right.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
Google could be sued if they helped distribute dangerous misleading health-information. It's really not about their "good intentions" but about their self-interest. It's not about freedom of speech either. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want, and Google has the right not to distribute it. Free markets 101. The fact that Google has de facto monopoly in some areas is a problem that government needs to deal with.
- bopbeepboop 5y ago
  Google actively suppressed holding Fauci accountable for gain-of-function research. I don’t believe their censorship makes people safer — in practice, it seems to enable establishment dishonesty.
- prepend 5y ago
  They can only be sued now because they are trying to filter out content. Therefore anything remaining is intentional. I think it would be better to not take proactive filtering based on what they think is misleading and to instead rely on legal judgements to remove info. Misleading people isn’t illegal (in the US at least, currently). There are situations where it is and that would be a good line for Google to take. Now I want them to be sued enough times to make them stop doing this.
- analyte123 5y ago
  Google (and all other providers) can not be sued for their users distributing "dangerous" or whatever content. This is literally the purpose of section 230. The only exception is the sex trafficking stuff covered under SESTA/FOSTA. Whatever pressure they're getting to do this comes from somewhere besides the threat of private civil lawsuits.
hash872 5y ago
The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? Coordinating 1/6 wasn't necessarily illegal until- it was. If Islamic State is recruiting on Free Speech Drive, posting manifestos, encouraging Western residents to actual jihad- you wouldn't take that down? You'd leave it up if it hewed up to the line of being legal- really? Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands- you wouldn't take that down? It's easy to be an absolutist in an Internet argument, it's much harder when you face the sort of everyday content moderation issues you see in the real world
- walrus01 5y ago
  a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.
  - travoc 5y ago
    Is “seeing how the sausage is made” a requirement for having beliefs or opinions on the matter?
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Yeah, actually, yeah, sometimes it is.
guerrilla 5y ago
We have both nextcloud and LibreOffice.
ghanpatel 5y ago
and pay for it with... love?
constantinum 5y ago
Tools like Skiff[https://www.skiff.org/ https://www.skiff.org/] are on the path of being that "alternative" which is, quoting from their website "..a privacy-first collaboration platform with expiring links, secure workspaces, and password protection."
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
like, just stop using google, lol. What's wrong with computing the way it was intended? Stop using the cloud people.
summerlight 5y ago
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. How naive. The reality is terrible, probably much more than what you can imagine. Let's assume that someone tries to find out teenager victims for cybersex trafficking at a massive scale on your proposed infrastructure with "free-flowing information". How will you stop them from doing so? Is it just a hypothetical scenario? No. This actually happened on Telegram, which refused official government's order to shut down the chatting room on a victim's request. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case Please don't underestimate how far average people's malice can go. Both private and governmental intervention exist not just because of "good intentions", but it come from the real demands from the society.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Are we, as humans, entitled to a certain level of UX, or are we simply entitled to the ability to share information? Because if it's the former, then yeah Google itself needs to be replicated and provided for all humanity. If it's the latter, well what does FTP not have? I'm having a very hard time seeing how one specific implementation of any technology becomes so important that to live without it is to be deprived of a human right.
beebmam 5y ago
Please tell me why a private company should be forced to host content that they fundamentally disagree with. Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry Chinese state propaganda, for example? Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry ISIS propaganda? There are alternatives to Google. They should host that content there
- throwitaway1235 5y ago
  The argument would be the magnitude of their impact on how a member of society can search for, view or transmit information is too large for Google to be deemed a private company. If a private company impacts a nation's states democracy to such an extent that it rivals it in power, they ought to be classified as something else.
  - beebmam 5y ago
    So, in your opinion, what should a government force the company to do when they are classified as what you describe? Force them to host all speech? Does that include art? Disinformation? Propaganda? Porn? Spam? Terrorism? I don't think you've thought out the consequences of what you're advocating for. If you have thought it out, please explain exactly what speech they should be forced to host and what speech they shouldn't be.
    - throwitaway1235 5y ago
      Right. I personally never thought it was that complicated. Once a company is classified as a public utility (I believe Google is) it should be forced to host all legal content. You tell me what's illegal and I can safely tell you it can't be hosted by Google.
      - beebmam 5y ago
        By whose laws? Even within the US, there are plenty of different laws. Should it be an intersection of all laws, everywhere? Only content which is lawful around the world? Or regionally? Should people outside those regions be segmented off from content that isn't in their region? Moreover, you're saying that spam should be forced to be hosted by these companies, just like our snail-mail protects. Even if it takes up Exabytes of information. Should people who have their content removed be able to sue these companies for removing it?
ayngg 5y ago
You need to remember that people actually wanted Google and tech companies to be arbiters of truth and moderate content. This is what people asked for, so the real issue probably has to do with why people are comfortable with giving this amount of power to companies like Google in the first place.
swalsh 5y ago
I think what we need is a users bill or rights. There should be certain rules a company just can't decide to make, and there should be certain rights afforded to every user. Without that we're just choosing between which monarchy to rule us.
EGreg 5y ago
We developed an alternative to google and the services that it provides. It's part of a growing open source ecosystem that includes NextCloud for file management. If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
breck 5y ago
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. Yes! And the way we do it is simple: amend the US Constitution to abolish copyright and patents and ensure people have the right to intellectual freedom. https://reddit.com/r/ifa https://reddit.com/r/ifa
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  We can do it today on patent-unencumbered technology.
gumby 5y ago
Have you considered NextCloud? Even available as a service if you don't want to host the code yourself.
Florin_Andrei 5y ago
> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information That is exactly what's needed. When there's no penalty for bullshit, lies tend to self-perpetuate, like viruses. You may be fixated right now on some half-baked ideal of "free speech" and so on, but the fact is - a lot of people out there can't tell left from right. And in situations such as the current pandemic, when the consequences of spreading bullshit are thousands of deaths, your naive ideas about "freedom" need a reality check. > truly free-flowing information Which will then immediately get hijacked by bullshit-spewing AI bots and folks with agendas. See what happened recently with all the "freedom" emphasizing social networks. What you're proposing is the online equivalent of a country with no military, no police, no laws and no judicial system. This may be fine in some Ayn Rand fanfic novel for young adults, but it's not a reality where anyone would want to live.
_huayra_ 5y ago
I always wonder if it will be challenging to get people used to the idea of paying for these services from a non-Google provider. Although Google hoovers up cash hand over fist (hence the high salaries), having a well-polished set of apps that work as well for low cost is going to be a hard pill to swallow for so many folks that are just used to "free email" by now. I host my own email and pay about a dollar a month and my non-tech family members look at me like I'm some fool for not using the free stuff. Conversations about the value of data just go woosh over their heads :|
pfortuny 5y ago
The “public square” is free for speaking because it belongs to everybody. As long as a speech is said in a private place (e.gr. Google’s servers, facebook’s…) it is subject to money. It will never be free because it is not “public”.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Google, Facebook, Twitter have positioned themselves to be the de-facto public square by buying up their competition and making themselves effectively the only game in town for what they do.
yibg 5y ago
Perhaps. But isn't google (and facebook, twitter etc) also in a bit of a no win situation? They implement these types of measure and they get accused of censorship and being "arbiter of right vs wrong". They don't and they get accused of helping spread fake news and false information. Putting aside intent, cost etc. What can / should these companies do that'll make everyone happy?
colordrops 5y ago
Hanlon's razor has really messed up people's discernment. There are plenty of amoral, if not malicious, decisions by these companies, and these behaviors are intentional. All you HN commenters think you see the consequences clearly, and the execs making these decisions are doe-eyed innocents led down the wrong path... Are you serious?
dlahoda 5y ago
sure, try fluence.network
jhoechtl 5y ago
I think with ipfs the infrastructure is there. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
moneywoes 5y ago
When were they contributing to the global good?
api 5y ago
I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it. Advertisers (and governments and criminals) pay handsomely for surveillance-driven "free" platforms, but who will pay for the development, maintenance, productization, polish, and support of open decentralized alternatives? Users have been conditioned to believe that software should be free, and the more ideological people in the FOSS movement will tell you it's "not open source" if you don't give it away with no strings attached. I know people who will actually uninstall things if they do not have an OSI-compliant license. Look at how much work it takes to develop and maintain these centralized systems. Now consider that decentralized systems are more challenging to develop and scale because you have to deeply understand distributed systems instead of just hacking some code to run on one centrally managed 100% trusted platform. Where is the army of independently wealthy highly skilled developers who are going to do all this unpaid? I am not optimistic. Nobody pays for freedom, openness, or privacy. All the money and momentum is behind the current user-exploiting paradigm, and now we have a generation of programmers who are learning "cloud native" development and don't even know how to develop things that don't run this way. Edit: I once gave a presentation to a room of college kids and was discussing a peer to peer system. A student raised his hand and asked how two devices could communicate this way without "a cloud." He was not aware that it was possible for something to communicate directly with something else over a network without a server.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  > I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it. I don't know, I pay for O365. I know a lot of people that do. And remember; Google Drive is not free either. To get more than a minimal amount of storage you have to pay. As a result, most serious users of these services are already paying for them. However, we end up paying AND keep getting judgement on our data. It really should be E2E encrypted and these conditions should only apply for files that are actually shared with external people. However, I've heard many stories of people getting their accounts banned for having copyrighted content on their drive that was never shared at any point. If it wasn't for the fact that I mainly have O365 for other stuff (email in particular), I would never pay for OneDrive under these conditions. Imagine your computer suddenly going like "oh hey this is a downloaded movie, you shouldn't have this!!" and deleting it from its harddrive. Or worse, even forbidding you to log in and access any of your data. Ridiculous of course but this is the situation we now have with online storage. I back my OneDrive up every day for this reason.
alexfromapex 5y ago
Build your own cloud with NAS. It’s a game changer.
13years 5y ago
> contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me... This is the problem. We have arrived where we are because some group of people think that powerful companies "should make the world better". Historically, much of the major atrocities were carried out with these very intentions. How to build a tyrant in one simple lesson: 1) Take any normal person who wants to make the world better 2) Give them the power to do so
mioasndo 5y ago
You can build an alternative, and many already exist, but the average user is far more influenced by branding and ads than privacy or freedom.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides I'm pretty sure Facebook and Twitter aren't far behind in the pursuit of also actively banning content they deem misleading. I don't think it's a Google-specific problem.
- colordrops 5y ago
  They are ahead of the game; they've both been doing it for a while.
37r7dyysy 5y ago
As always, the question is who's going to do better? The Americans already gave it their best shot and this is where they ended up. Certainly not any of the members of the EU, it'd get hobbled by regulation as they've never cared about actual free speech of the kind the Americans value. It's sure not going to be coming out of anywhere in SEA or NAME with the way governments in those regions tend to operate. So who's left to do better at a scale that matters?
seaman1921 5y ago
must be one of those AWU promoters
octonion 5y ago
"we"? No "we" don't. If it bothers you so much, why don't you do it? No one is stopping you.
soheil 5y ago
> whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population. I intuitively I agree with you, but can you provide sources so next time someone argues against it I can back up that claim better?
cwkoss 5y ago
Don't quit, organize with other google workers to fight against the policies you disagree with from within until they fire you, then take a fat unemployment check until you find your next gig - somewhere hopefully with fewer moral compromises.
seniorgarcia 5y ago
I think I hate you. "But the money" is your argument for contributing to something you recognize as evil. Good on you for having at least some conscience so it "weighs on you". Apparently the money is too good though, or you don't care enough. Curious which one it is.
- sumnuyungi 5y ago
  The toxicity on HN is a strange combination of vitriol and superiority complex. I can't really think of many other forums that spew such hatred while morally grandstanding to such an extent.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    On the contrary, my experience from other forums is worse. HN audience tends to downvote simple grandstanding and demands sources etc. A paradise of moral paladins seems to be Twitter, deliberately designed to stoke tensions and dissuade people from reasoning.
yobbo 5y ago
> We should be able to implement services like these Implementation would be easy if we knew how to solve payments for decentralized hosting, maybe with ads as a possible business model. And the payments brokers mustn't be the central points either.
nobody_at_all 5y ago
Google has property rights. They don't want BS that is harming everyone on their property. I would ban the same on my property. That said, there is no reason to ever use Google. Nothing they offer is so critical that you must use them. I don't use Google for anything and never will because they are a spyware company. You willingly work for a spyware company and are trying to claim personal morals? How does that work in your mind? Genuinely curious. > We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. How does that work? Who pays for it? Who manages it? You realize that would create a de facto government if an actual government wasn't running it. Look at any website that has truly "free-flowing information". They all end up being a cesspool filled with racists, sovcits, terrorists, and pedophiles. Even places like Kiwifams has rules and deletes posts and bans users that violates their few rules.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
IX-103 5y ago
I don't think the answer is alternatives, as you would just be trading one master for another. What we need is 1) for clients to retain control of their data and 2) standardized formats and interfaces for handling data. If moving off of Facebook was as simple as creating an account somewhere else, then things would be different. If Google doesn't own your data you can tell them how they are allowed to use it. As for Google, I've given up on anything revolutionary from them. They have a lot of smart people with good ideas but they've grown so big that they can't "move fast and break things" without breaking whole sectors of the economy--and given the number of anti-trust suits Google is embroiled in, I think the governments of the world know it. That said, Google generally seems to at least try to do the right thing, even if no one there seems to know exactly what that is.
smrtinsert 5y ago
Quit or just admit you'd rather get paid. I have no problem ignoring calls from recruiters.
platz 5y ago
> has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me But not enough to have stopped you from joining in the first place or contributing your time in exchange for salary.
maa5444 5y ago
do something brave ... contact james o Keefe
dr_dshiv 5y ago
So happy we have companies like Google doing moral arbitration versus companies like Walmart/Newscorp doing this. Wait till round two of Idiocracy capitalism, we will miss these days.
fossuser 5y ago
I think Urbit’s first principles approach to this is really interesting. They’re the only ones I’ve seen that seem to have hit on a reasonable trade off to fix the common issues around federated services (simple administration, keeping versions in sync, first class network between users etc.) The functional OS design is really cool too - I think it has potential to solve a lot of these issues. I don’t really care that Google is removing dumb content from their services, but I agree that computing can be a lot more than it is. Users have lost ownership over their own compute. We have PCs, but everything is in the browser on someone else’s servers. Urbit is cool because it’s a way to get that ownership back.
yibg 5y ago
These alternatives exist though, they are just not popular. We can’t very well force people to adopt these alternatives to make them “global”. It’s also not clear to me what these alternatives should do differently. Should they just host anything as long as it’s not illegal? I just read an article today about how social media is killing people by spreading vaccine misinformation. So they’re going to get pressured anyways, just from a different source.
randomperson_24 5y ago
We need and will (and also do) have other alternatives. But as soon as it grows big enough to get public attention, censorship will come. Cause majority wants that.
rdl 5y ago
I guess you can be somewhat brave here knowing that you can get a new job in about 5 minutes. You might want to consider making a principled stand here, though.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
For posterity, readers should note this comment was the OP, initially. Not the support.google.com link. 980+ comments later, HN changed the thread and buried semitones' comment down here. semitones' point was a reasonable and important one: maybe people should think twice about hosting files and other data with a company like Google.
pabs3 5y ago
The alternative to Google is self-hosted Open Source and Free Software and it exists today. Unfortunately for you it isn't easy to find work on self-hosted FLOSS projects and there isn't much demand for consultants helping deploy those projects. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:SaaSS https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:SaaSS https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

lazyjones 5y ago

All these services are easy to replace. What isn't yet available elsewhere is the content discovery possibilities provided by Youtube, especially what would be considered "pirated" content on other sites without deep ties to the government (e.g. full CDs, movies that get uploaded and stay on yt for a long time, to be downloaded by millions).

andai 5y ago
A search engine for videos?
bilbo0s 5y ago
Deep ties to the government alone won't do it. You'll need deep ties to these content industries, and that will cost you money. Google has it. Most startups probably won't.
semitones 5y ago
"All these services are easy to replace" - I would like to agree, but I think that statement trivializes the endeavor a bit too much. For Docs for example: Sure, from a technical standpoint, creating a webapp that lets you modify a document, syncs over new changes on a regular basis, and lets multiple users collaborate on the same doc and the same time is certainly harder than making a hello world calculator, but it's definitely not that hard. Most of us could figure out how to do it, especially since it's 2021 and our hardware is up to the task. However, what is stupidly non-easy, is getting billions of people to use your solution, and for it to become the "standard" in society, for powerusers and non-powerusers alike, and for it not to have hiccups when a billion people use it. Oh, also, you need to somehow pay for the physical infrastructure that supports it, and the human beings that maintain it (hardware + software). The situation would be even more complicated for YouTube because of the nature of the content, i.e. a single video on YouTube might be viewed by billions of people, while even the most popular docs are viewed by thousands at most, and even then making a copy of a text document to then distribute off-platform is pretty trivial. And yes, we can spit out terms like blockchain w/ proof of stake, IPFS, etc. - but the tech isn't even the hard part, it's everything else that's hard (adoption, consensus, complexity for non-powerusers, funding, etc.)
- Hizonner 5y ago
  Why does any one thing have to be a "standard"? That's part of the problem.
  - dudus 5y ago
    Exactly, if we replace one standard for another what problem are we solving if the main goal was to reduce centralization.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - judge2020 5y ago
    If nobody uses something, what difference does it make?
    - j4yav 5y ago
      Everyone uses it or nobody uses it aren’t the only two options.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    Exactly. We only need a "standard" because everyone builds walled gardens and easy content distribution to multiple platforms is intentionally difficult. Right now you have to watch a "YouTube" video, instead of just a video on YouTube.
  - semitones 5y ago
    Standards != centralization. Standards apply more to protocols, and centralization applies more to ownership of data. For instance, there is an enormous benefit to the entire world from using a standard IP/TCP stack. Yet, we don't seem to suffer from a centralized authority making controversial or conflict-of-interest decisions regarding that stack. So what I was suggesting is that document-editing abide by some global protocol/standard, which would include storage, versioning, and permissions. As far as the choice of user-facing interfaces and implementations of logic around those standards, there need not be just one, or even a few. Everyone can bring something cool to the table and anyone can use whichever flavor they wish.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
Point is Google can offer services like Docs for free and still invest money in continually improving them because it sells advertisement-space on its free products. Sure you could build your own. But how would you finance the maintenance of your software and its free-for-customers delivery platform? Answer: By either selling advertisement, or by charging people for using it. The problem really is that by now Google has monopoly. Therefore it is difficult or impossible for you to compete with them.
- lazyjones 5y ago
  As a user, I don't need to compete with Google. I just need an alternative. If I needed collaborative document editing (as a replacement for Docs, a feature I don't use), I'd probably try something like https://www.samepage.io/ https://www.samepage.io/ . My only use of Docs at the moment is for maintaining some stock price calculations and tracking with the =GOOGLEFINANCE(...) function. There's probably some personal finance apps out there that do the same.

andai 5y ago

Google docs etc aren't even Google's inventions, Google just bought them. I think it's important to emphasize that, to dispel the notion that you need to be a big company to make a product like that.

semitones 5y ago
I agree that you do not have to be a big company to make a product like that, but it seems like you have to be a big company in order to host and deliver it.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Anything that becomes a danger of breaking away from the ecosystem gets bought out. Indeed that seems the end goal of most startups
- colechristensen 5y ago
  No you have to be a big company to resist the urge of getting bought out. Or you have to either have aspirations of becoming a big platform company or a plan to survive and be happy watching big companies push you to fifth place in a category you once dominated.
- root_axis 5y ago
  Nah. Hosting is cheaper than it's ever been at any time in history, the costs only become a concern if you have lots of users in which case you should be generating lots of revenue to pay for the increased hosting costs.
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    Hosting is at an all time low, while innovation, time and putting time to a project like this is not.
  - semitones 5y ago
    There's more to hosting than just spinning up a fleet of containers you know (not even that that is necessarily trivial...). Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users? Just do what google does and run ads on the side? Then what's the difference?

chaganated 5y ago

resignation or gtfo

semitones 5y ago
maybe soon
- chaganated 5y ago
  good on ya
dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 5y ago

Funny enough, I arrived at the opposite conclusion during my tenure as SWE... Google wasn't taking responsibility for the wide sweep of its arms as the gorilla in the room, and was trying to stay neutral ("We just build services; expecting us to be responsible for them is like expecting fire not to burn") in a situation where they fundamentally can't. Google is already non-neutral... they ban all sorts of content on search and comply with law in multiple countries. It's never a question of "Should Google be neutral," but instead "How neutral."

nomoreplease 5y ago
> in a situation where they fundamentally can't. I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's not actually neutral; that's letting harmful content spread at the speed of Internet discourse. We already know, for example, that they aren't going to allow Google Docs to be used to wide-cast child pornography. They never have. It appears the only change is that they're adding new categories of misinformation to the "harmful content" list. When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    CP is already illegal and google doesn’t need to arbitrate whether its illegal or not. Blocking CP is neutral and a basic. It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society. Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be. I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.

cabalamat 5y ago

> The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions my arse. Google, and the US ruling class in general, seems very, very keen that everyone believe the 2020 US election was fair. Which to my mind is very suspicious. I think the election was probably rigged, and I think the democratic primary was also rigged, in 2016 and 2020, to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning, because he represented a threat to the ruling class. US elections are about as free and fair as Russian or Iranian elections -- and I bet in those countries the ruling class also tries to prevent people from saying they aren't.

jensensbutton 5y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on a globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." Google's job is to take away the motivation to do this work. Alernatively, if it looks like someone is doing it, hire or acquire them.

robertlagrant 5y ago
Can't I get Google Workspace right now which isn't ad-supported?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  It looks like this would still not solve the parent commnter's problem with monitoring and censorship of "misleading content". https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html In particular You agree not to, and not to allow third parties or Your End Users, to use the Services: to intentionally distribute hoaxes, or other items of a destructive or deceptive nature; Your failure to comply with the AUP may result in suspension or termination, or both, of the Services pursuant to the Agreement. The availability of paid email hosting and document creation, editing and storage is, IMO, an example of the point I was making. If, e.g., businesses and other organisations were potentially upset about Gmail scanning (remember Google was sued for this and lost) then that dissatisfaction argubaly provides motivation to avoid Gmail. That motivation could potentially spread outside of businesses and other organisations. Google's job is to take away such motivation. Arguably Google Workspaces is Google doing its job of quelling a potential uprising, so to speak. They are taking away potential motivation to innovate away from Google and online advertising. (It also highlights the inherent flaws in a "free" services model. For many businesses and organisations, this is not acceptable.) Meanwhile, the company's core business remains unchanged: providing services for "free" while generating billions in profits through online advertising services.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Yes, true. Perhaps the bar is no higher for censoring a paid account and a free account.

jrsj 5y ago

Almost no one in this industry is actually making the world better. Just take the money and use that to make the world better if you can. Especially since all things considered your role at Google probably doesn’t make things better or worse either way.

efsavage 5y ago

I think there's a vacuum here in that society wants someone to intervene when Bad Things Happen, but we either can't agree who that should be or (more likely IMO) the right choice of person/organization just doesn't exist. So you end up with some people/organizations/governments stepping up to increase their power and/or protect their own interests. I think this is why Zuckerberg and some other big players have called for laws to regulate these things, which seems counterintuitive, but then FB can pass the buck and is more likely to maintain the status quo where they're on top. But until they are more insulated from the risks, they're going to be forced to defend themselves. Disclaimer: I too work for Google

semitones 5y ago
This is also probably why Google is advocating for the privacy sandbox and banning third-party-cookies, and staying ahead of the law tech-wise. Such that when the inevitable regulation of the playing field does come, they are sharing drinks and chuckling with the referees, while the other players are still struggling to figure out what their game plan is.
charwalker 5y ago
It's also easier for FB/etc to push for laws to be written when they can pour millions into a PAC to get their ideal language into those bills, if not straight up write sections themselves. They can lobby for fines that are lower than profit from acting in bad faith or anti-competitively (who even knows how much money FB saved by buying out Instagram/etc), they can run their own disinformation or targeted campaigns to sway public opinion, or simply minimize anything on their platform to hide it from users. There's a massive power imbalance there between a regular voter and Zuckerberg/etc, even an imbalance between a regular voters who can or cannot vote early or by mail. I support regulating these groups but that must be done within the right assigned via the constitution, existing precedent where available, and in depth knowledge of how these companies operate and how the tech influences consumers. It's complicated.

poorjohnmacafee 5y ago

Uh "good intentions"? I think you mean "ruling class lackeys"

drluke 5y ago

Maybe it time we make it easy for people to host thier own clouds… Like Nextcloud. All in one at home server with Owncloud Plug-N-Play. While we are at it, have it ready to go for hosting emails and Federated Social Media. To be honest, it would be a challange, but totally doable. Decetralize the interenet once again!

hollasch 5y ago
ISPs have shown increasing comfort with delisting sites they deem bad. I'm a huge proponent of commoditizing data hosting, but the culture today leans heavily toward "filtering" information.
- drluke 5y ago
  ISP Censorship is next on their list… They are going to push normal discorse underground and bad ideas will just fester instead of being natually filtered out in the proving grounds of public discorse.
- native_samples 5y ago
  It's not really culture. It's a small minority of radical extremists who get their own way repeatedly by threatening meltdowns out of all proportion to the severity of the problem, and emotionally manipulating their own managers ("you're a bad person if you don't do this"). And they do it again and again, until the organization starts to collapse and becomes a mere tool for their political agendas. The best way to push back on this is not some p2p techno fix. It's to systematically start firing anyone in an organization who demands the moral cleansing of customers or colleagues.
umvi 5y ago
Then there will be calls for cloud providers to remove "misleading" clients. (Read: AWS + Parlor, Cloudflare, etc) What we really need is a legal designation of a "public square" online that protects free speech online
- drluke 5y ago

jodrellblank 5y ago

> "but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need" If I can ask this in a non-snarky way, did you ever honestly[1] think working on ads was contributing to a better world? If so, how? [1] 'honestly' contrasted with "it pays well so I'm not going to think about that" or "I say it does in public but I don't believe it".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

izacus 5y ago

I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior company, that will magically have incentives to fight for them instead of making money. It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry. Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

duxup 5y ago
The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands. I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...
- throwaways885 5y ago
  > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
  - landryraccoon 5y ago
    That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

duxup 5y ago

Who wants to be a consumer company that just has an anything goes policy? I sure as hell don't want to do it.

prepend 5y ago
I don’t know anyone proposing “anything goes.” I think the most common request is to remove illegal speech and stick there.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong The problem is that (I doubt) Google is really doing this out of some misguided attempt at "protecting" people but rather as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want. When America was a very religious (Christian) country, media distributors stayed away from anything that appeared "blasphemous". They didn't necessarily do it because there was a law against it (there were some odd laws here and there, but the media didn't start actually challenging them until religion really fell out of favor), but because they were afraid of consumer reactions. Google (and every other tech company) is doing essentially the same thing here: speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy and they just don't want to be attached to it because they do ultimately fear the consumer. Even if you found a globally adoptable alternative to google, the same people who pushed Google to ban distribution of "misleading content" would start looking for ways to ban your globally adoptable alternative - at the network level if necessary (look what happened to Parler before they agreed to follow the unwritten rules). At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech.

semitones 5y ago
"At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech." - that's a terrifying prospect. I agree, I don't think Google is trying to "protect" people. They are ultimately, almost always, protecting their pockets.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  In a sense that may be true, but how is that different from a bar owner asking people to leave if they are causing a disturbance by being confrontational with other patrons? The bar owner doesn't want a fight that can damage property. He doesn't want people to avoid the bar because someone is picking fights, when most of his clientele just want to kick back and socialize with their friends. Maybe the bar owner isn't trying to "protect" the rest of his customers, he's just trying to maintain a profitable business. Protecting his pockets. You could apply the same logic to dang, who helps keep HN a pleasant place by doing the same things the bar owner is doing. Yes I imagine he is paid a salary, by the management of YCombinator who see HN as one part of their strategy to make a profit, and therefore his motives are equally cynical. Ok. Honestly, you can probably reduce all human behavior to such simplistic motives if you want. What I see as someone being kind, you might see as a purely Darwinian strategy to get their genes in future generations. I'm not all that sure that is a helpful perspective, at least not most of the time.

WalterBright 5y ago

> whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population. Hell always comes when people feel they know what's best for everyone else, and attempt to forcibly implement it. I'm for people being free to choose what they believe their own individual self interest is. Even if it isn't what others imagine it to be. Even if those others are right.

galaxyLogic 5y ago

Google could be sued if they helped distribute dangerous misleading health-information. It's really not about their "good intentions" but about their self-interest. It's not about freedom of speech either. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want, and Google has the right not to distribute it. Free markets 101. The fact that Google has de facto monopoly in some areas is a problem that government needs to deal with.

bopbeepboop 5y ago
Google actively suppressed holding Fauci accountable for gain-of-function research. I don’t believe their censorship makes people safer — in practice, it seems to enable establishment dishonesty.
prepend 5y ago
They can only be sued now because they are trying to filter out content. Therefore anything remaining is intentional. I think it would be better to not take proactive filtering based on what they think is misleading and to instead rely on legal judgements to remove info. Misleading people isn’t illegal (in the US at least, currently). There are situations where it is and that would be a good line for Google to take. Now I want them to be sued enough times to make them stop doing this.
analyte123 5y ago
Google (and all other providers) can not be sued for their users distributing "dangerous" or whatever content. This is literally the purpose of section 230. The only exception is the sex trafficking stuff covered under SESTA/FOSTA. Whatever pressure they're getting to do this comes from somewhere besides the threat of private civil lawsuits.

hash872 5y ago

The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? Coordinating 1/6 wasn't necessarily illegal until- it was. If Islamic State is recruiting on Free Speech Drive, posting manifestos, encouraging Western residents to actual jihad- you wouldn't take that down? You'd leave it up if it hewed up to the line of being legal- really? Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands- you wouldn't take that down? It's easy to be an absolutist in an Internet argument, it's much harder when you face the sort of everyday content moderation issues you see in the real world

walrus01 5y ago
a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.
- travoc 5y ago
  Is “seeing how the sausage is made” a requirement for having beliefs or opinions on the matter?
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Yeah, actually, yeah, sometimes it is.

guerrilla 5y ago

We have both nextcloud and LibreOffice.

ghanpatel 5y ago

and pay for it with... love?

constantinum 5y ago

Tools like Skiff[https://www.skiff.org/ https://www.skiff.org/] are on the path of being that "alternative" which is, quoting from their website "..a privacy-first collaboration platform with expiring links, secure workspaces, and password protection."

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

like, just stop using google, lol. What's wrong with computing the way it was intended? Stop using the cloud people.

summerlight 5y ago

> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. How naive. The reality is terrible, probably much more than what you can imagine. Let's assume that someone tries to find out teenager victims for cybersex trafficking at a massive scale on your proposed infrastructure with "free-flowing information". How will you stop them from doing so? Is it just a hypothetical scenario? No. This actually happened on Telegram, which refused official government's order to shut down the chatting room on a victim's request. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case Please don't underestimate how far average people's malice can go. Both private and governmental intervention exist not just because of "good intentions", but it come from the real demands from the society.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Are we, as humans, entitled to a certain level of UX, or are we simply entitled to the ability to share information? Because if it's the former, then yeah Google itself needs to be replicated and provided for all humanity. If it's the latter, well what does FTP not have? I'm having a very hard time seeing how one specific implementation of any technology becomes so important that to live without it is to be deprived of a human right.

beebmam 5y ago

Please tell me why a private company should be forced to host content that they fundamentally disagree with. Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry Chinese state propaganda, for example? Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry ISIS propaganda? There are alternatives to Google. They should host that content there

throwitaway1235 5y ago
The argument would be the magnitude of their impact on how a member of society can search for, view or transmit information is too large for Google to be deemed a private company. If a private company impacts a nation's states democracy to such an extent that it rivals it in power, they ought to be classified as something else.
- beebmam 5y ago
  So, in your opinion, what should a government force the company to do when they are classified as what you describe? Force them to host all speech? Does that include art? Disinformation? Propaganda? Porn? Spam? Terrorism? I don't think you've thought out the consequences of what you're advocating for. If you have thought it out, please explain exactly what speech they should be forced to host and what speech they shouldn't be.
  - throwitaway1235 5y ago
    Right. I personally never thought it was that complicated. Once a company is classified as a public utility (I believe Google is) it should be forced to host all legal content. You tell me what's illegal and I can safely tell you it can't be hosted by Google.
    - beebmam 5y ago
      By whose laws? Even within the US, there are plenty of different laws. Should it be an intersection of all laws, everywhere? Only content which is lawful around the world? Or regionally? Should people outside those regions be segmented off from content that isn't in their region? Moreover, you're saying that spam should be forced to be hosted by these companies, just like our snail-mail protects. Even if it takes up Exabytes of information. Should people who have their content removed be able to sue these companies for removing it?

ayngg 5y ago

You need to remember that people actually wanted Google and tech companies to be arbiters of truth and moderate content. This is what people asked for, so the real issue probably has to do with why people are comfortable with giving this amount of power to companies like Google in the first place.

swalsh 5y ago

I think what we need is a users bill or rights. There should be certain rules a company just can't decide to make, and there should be certain rights afforded to every user. Without that we're just choosing between which monarchy to rule us.

EGreg 5y ago

We developed an alternative to google and the services that it provides. It's part of a growing open source ecosystem that includes NextCloud for file management. If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

breck 5y ago

> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. Yes! And the way we do it is simple: amend the US Constitution to abolish copyright and patents and ensure people have the right to intellectual freedom. https://reddit.com/r/ifa https://reddit.com/r/ifa

robertlagrant 5y ago
We can do it today on patent-unencumbered technology.

gumby 5y ago

Have you considered NextCloud? Even available as a service if you don't want to host the code yourself.

Florin_Andrei 5y ago

> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information That is exactly what's needed. When there's no penalty for bullshit, lies tend to self-perpetuate, like viruses. You may be fixated right now on some half-baked ideal of "free speech" and so on, but the fact is - a lot of people out there can't tell left from right. And in situations such as the current pandemic, when the consequences of spreading bullshit are thousands of deaths, your naive ideas about "freedom" need a reality check. > truly free-flowing information Which will then immediately get hijacked by bullshit-spewing AI bots and folks with agendas. See what happened recently with all the "freedom" emphasizing social networks. What you're proposing is the online equivalent of a country with no military, no police, no laws and no judicial system. This may be fine in some Ayn Rand fanfic novel for young adults, but it's not a reality where anyone would want to live.

_huayra_ 5y ago

I always wonder if it will be challenging to get people used to the idea of paying for these services from a non-Google provider. Although Google hoovers up cash hand over fist (hence the high salaries), having a well-polished set of apps that work as well for low cost is going to be a hard pill to swallow for so many folks that are just used to "free email" by now. I host my own email and pay about a dollar a month and my non-tech family members look at me like I'm some fool for not using the free stuff. Conversations about the value of data just go woosh over their heads :|

pfortuny 5y ago

The “public square” is free for speaking because it belongs to everybody. As long as a speech is said in a private place (e.gr. Google’s servers, facebook’s…) it is subject to money. It will never be free because it is not “public”.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Google, Facebook, Twitter have positioned themselves to be the de-facto public square by buying up their competition and making themselves effectively the only game in town for what they do.

yibg 5y ago

Perhaps. But isn't google (and facebook, twitter etc) also in a bit of a no win situation? They implement these types of measure and they get accused of censorship and being "arbiter of right vs wrong". They don't and they get accused of helping spread fake news and false information. Putting aside intent, cost etc. What can / should these companies do that'll make everyone happy?

colordrops 5y ago

Hanlon's razor has really messed up people's discernment. There are plenty of amoral, if not malicious, decisions by these companies, and these behaviors are intentional. All you HN commenters think you see the consequences clearly, and the execs making these decisions are doe-eyed innocents led down the wrong path... Are you serious?

dlahoda 5y ago

sure, try fluence.network

jhoechtl 5y ago

I think with ipfs the infrastructure is there. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io

moneywoes 5y ago

When were they contributing to the global good?

api 5y ago

I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it. Advertisers (and governments and criminals) pay handsomely for surveillance-driven "free" platforms, but who will pay for the development, maintenance, productization, polish, and support of open decentralized alternatives? Users have been conditioned to believe that software should be free, and the more ideological people in the FOSS movement will tell you it's "not open source" if you don't give it away with no strings attached. I know people who will actually uninstall things if they do not have an OSI-compliant license. Look at how much work it takes to develop and maintain these centralized systems. Now consider that decentralized systems are more challenging to develop and scale because you have to deeply understand distributed systems instead of just hacking some code to run on one centrally managed 100% trusted platform. Where is the army of independently wealthy highly skilled developers who are going to do all this unpaid? I am not optimistic. Nobody pays for freedom, openness, or privacy. All the money and momentum is behind the current user-exploiting paradigm, and now we have a generation of programmers who are learning "cloud native" development and don't even know how to develop things that don't run this way. Edit: I once gave a presentation to a room of college kids and was discussing a peer to peer system. A student raised his hand and asked how two devices could communicate this way without "a cloud." He was not aware that it was possible for something to communicate directly with something else over a network without a server.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
> I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it. I don't know, I pay for O365. I know a lot of people that do. And remember; Google Drive is not free either. To get more than a minimal amount of storage you have to pay. As a result, most serious users of these services are already paying for them. However, we end up paying AND keep getting judgement on our data. It really should be E2E encrypted and these conditions should only apply for files that are actually shared with external people. However, I've heard many stories of people getting their accounts banned for having copyrighted content on their drive that was never shared at any point. If it wasn't for the fact that I mainly have O365 for other stuff (email in particular), I would never pay for OneDrive under these conditions. Imagine your computer suddenly going like "oh hey this is a downloaded movie, you shouldn't have this!!" and deleting it from its harddrive. Or worse, even forbidding you to log in and access any of your data. Ridiculous of course but this is the situation we now have with online storage. I back my OneDrive up every day for this reason.

alexfromapex 5y ago

Build your own cloud with NAS. It’s a game changer.

13years 5y ago

> contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me... This is the problem. We have arrived where we are because some group of people think that powerful companies "should make the world better". Historically, much of the major atrocities were carried out with these very intentions. How to build a tyrant in one simple lesson: 1) Take any normal person who wants to make the world better 2) Give them the power to do so

mioasndo 5y ago

You can build an alternative, and many already exist, but the average user is far more influenced by branding and ads than privacy or freedom.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago

> We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides I'm pretty sure Facebook and Twitter aren't far behind in the pursuit of also actively banning content they deem misleading. I don't think it's a Google-specific problem.

colordrops 5y ago
They are ahead of the game; they've both been doing it for a while.

37r7dyysy 5y ago

As always, the question is who's going to do better? The Americans already gave it their best shot and this is where they ended up. Certainly not any of the members of the EU, it'd get hobbled by regulation as they've never cared about actual free speech of the kind the Americans value. It's sure not going to be coming out of anywhere in SEA or NAME with the way governments in those regions tend to operate. So who's left to do better at a scale that matters?

seaman1921 5y ago

must be one of those AWU promoters

octonion 5y ago

"we"? No "we" don't. If it bothers you so much, why don't you do it? No one is stopping you.

soheil 5y ago

> whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population. I intuitively I agree with you, but can you provide sources so next time someone argues against it I can back up that claim better?

cwkoss 5y ago

Don't quit, organize with other google workers to fight against the policies you disagree with from within until they fire you, then take a fat unemployment check until you find your next gig - somewhere hopefully with fewer moral compromises.

seniorgarcia 5y ago

I think I hate you. "But the money" is your argument for contributing to something you recognize as evil. Good on you for having at least some conscience so it "weighs on you". Apparently the money is too good though, or you don't care enough. Curious which one it is.

sumnuyungi 5y ago
The toxicity on HN is a strange combination of vitriol and superiority complex. I can't really think of many other forums that spew such hatred while morally grandstanding to such an extent.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  On the contrary, my experience from other forums is worse. HN audience tends to downvote simple grandstanding and demands sources etc. A paradise of moral paladins seems to be Twitter, deliberately designed to stoke tensions and dissuade people from reasoning.

yobbo 5y ago

> We should be able to implement services like these Implementation would be easy if we knew how to solve payments for decentralized hosting, maybe with ads as a possible business model. And the payments brokers mustn't be the central points either.

nobody_at_all 5y ago

Google has property rights. They don't want BS that is harming everyone on their property. I would ban the same on my property. That said, there is no reason to ever use Google. Nothing they offer is so critical that you must use them. I don't use Google for anything and never will because they are a spyware company. You willingly work for a spyware company and are trying to claim personal morals? How does that work in your mind? Genuinely curious. > We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information. How does that work? Who pays for it? Who manages it? You realize that would create a de facto government if an actual government wasn't running it. Look at any website that has truly "free-flowing information". They all end up being a cesspool filled with racists, sovcits, terrorists, and pedophiles. Even places like Kiwifams has rules and deletes posts and bans users that violates their few rules.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

IX-103 5y ago

I don't think the answer is alternatives, as you would just be trading one master for another. What we need is 1) for clients to retain control of their data and 2) standardized formats and interfaces for handling data. If moving off of Facebook was as simple as creating an account somewhere else, then things would be different. If Google doesn't own your data you can tell them how they are allowed to use it. As for Google, I've given up on anything revolutionary from them. They have a lot of smart people with good ideas but they've grown so big that they can't "move fast and break things" without breaking whole sectors of the economy--and given the number of anti-trust suits Google is embroiled in, I think the governments of the world know it. That said, Google generally seems to at least try to do the right thing, even if no one there seems to know exactly what that is.

smrtinsert 5y ago

Quit or just admit you'd rather get paid. I have no problem ignoring calls from recruiters.

platz 5y ago

> has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me But not enough to have stopped you from joining in the first place or contributing your time in exchange for salary.

maa5444 5y ago

do something brave ... contact james o Keefe

dr_dshiv 5y ago

So happy we have companies like Google doing moral arbitration versus companies like Walmart/Newscorp doing this. Wait till round two of Idiocracy capitalism, we will miss these days.

fossuser 5y ago

I think Urbit’s first principles approach to this is really interesting. They’re the only ones I’ve seen that seem to have hit on a reasonable trade off to fix the common issues around federated services (simple administration, keeping versions in sync, first class network between users etc.) The functional OS design is really cool too - I think it has potential to solve a lot of these issues. I don’t really care that Google is removing dumb content from their services, but I agree that computing can be a lot more than it is. Users have lost ownership over their own compute. We have PCs, but everything is in the browser on someone else’s servers. Urbit is cool because it’s a way to get that ownership back.

yibg 5y ago

These alternatives exist though, they are just not popular. We can’t very well force people to adopt these alternatives to make them “global”. It’s also not clear to me what these alternatives should do differently. Should they just host anything as long as it’s not illegal? I just read an article today about how social media is killing people by spreading vaccine misinformation. So they’re going to get pressured anyways, just from a different source.

randomperson_24 5y ago

We need and will (and also do) have other alternatives. But as soon as it grows big enough to get public attention, censorship will come. Cause majority wants that.

rdl 5y ago

I guess you can be somewhat brave here knowing that you can get a new job in about 5 minutes. You might want to consider making a principled stand here, though.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

For posterity, readers should note this comment was the OP, initially. Not the support.google.com link. 980+ comments later, HN changed the thread and buried semitones' comment down here. semitones' point was a reasonable and important one: maybe people should think twice about hosting files and other data with a company like Google.

pabs3 5y ago

The alternative to Google is self-hosted Open Source and Free Software and it exists today. Unfortunately for you it isn't easy to find work on self-hosted FLOSS projects and there isn't much demand for consultants helping deploy those projects. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:SaaSS https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:SaaSS https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources