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I have so many mixed feelings about Google. They unlike the fruit company, advanced society sooo far with their FOSS. I have sooo many degoogled products, and I

I have so many mixed feelings about Google. They unlike the fruit company, advanced society sooo far with their FOSS. I have sooo many degoogled products, and I need to give them credit for that. They also refused to comply with the CCP, something the fruit company was happy to do during the hong kong protests. They even continue to let ad blockers on their platforms. They also made it easy for a poor college kid to make apps, unlike the fruit company. But... They also suck. Canceling services, no customer service, removing the aux port to sell headphones, etc... They aren't the same company I was a fan of a decade or two ago. Not sure what I want out of this. While it seems like I'm taking Ls from all the FAAMG companies, I admittedly think my life has never been better from a tech point of view. (most of that is from GPT and Moore's law though)

edgyquant 3y ago
Even if they were the greatest company on the planet that doesn’t change that they dominate the ad market and internet and that has to change
- inductive_magic 3y ago
  I wish more people understood how horrible advertising truly is. Your life is essentially a compilation of what captures your attention. Embracing this perspective, any entity auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder is trading away a part of your life. People don't understand what this means. They also don't understand how cynical this is in the context of a search engine. I don't have a solution to this, but man, its horrible.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    This is a bit much. Attention is not that hard to control if you want to. It's sad if people allow their attention to be captured by doomscrolling/notification-clearing/etc but no more so than if they did so playing Solitaire or reading trashy magazines.
    - javajosh 3y ago
      Attention really is hard to control, and most people can't do it. In fact, the only way I've learned to exert real control over attention is by practicing meditation. Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs This seems too nonspecific. Influence is graded on a curve: early life experiences and childhood are formative, and the job of parents is to raise their children well. I don't think we should be equating the influence of internet ads with big experiences.
        javajosh 3y ago
        I agree, but we also shouldn't discount the thousands of little influences that affect us everyday, either. It's a bit like deflecting an asteroid: a big push early on will have the greatest effect, but thousands of little pushes later on will also deflect it. The key quality is the coherence of the impact - if they push in all directions, it may NOT have an impact. Arguably advertising is coherent in that it all seeks to increase your appetite for consumer behavior. And I would argue our parents do that to us, too, with gifts of toys and other trifles.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        I agree, but I think being aware of that is how we self-determine a bit better. Facebook sucks you in with notifications, and if you notice that you can disable notifications, or (as I did) uninstall the app and just use the website.
    - istjohn 3y ago
      That's naive. We all feel like we're the master of our story, but our history books show us that people are products of their time--their physical, social, and cultural environment. With determined effort, one person can fight the tide, but one person is a rounding error.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dirak 3y ago
    Ads are not at all horrible. Ads help connect products with the niche markets of people that could benefit from them. Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. Yes, when done distastefully, ads can be quite horrible (ie ads for gambling and other vices), but when done well, both the user and advertiser benefit. This has to be true, otherwise, if users never found ads useful they would never click on them, and then advertisers would’ve never pay for advertisements since they wouldn’t benefit them.
    - dr-detroit 3y ago
      [dead]
    - inductive_magic 3y ago
      I appreciate your perspective on the potential benefits of ads. However, I’m emphasizing a much deeper, existential concern here. Our lifes, essentially, are the sum of what we pay attention to. In this context, advertising doesn’t just sell products; it habitually redirects our attention, shaping our experiences and, consequently, our lifes in profound ways. The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience. It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.
      - istjohn 3y ago
        Not to mention the way it shapes culture, inculcating children with the materialist creed of insatiable consumers before they even know what advertising is.
    - shkkmo 3y ago
      > Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying. Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    I wish more people understood that if you had to pay for everything on the internet, it for modern intents and purposes would be dead. Even this site itself is a marketing device. (of course it is possible to show advertising without tracking. there's a lot of context to be had in many cases).
    - bilal4hmed 3y ago
      I find it hilarious when people complain about paywalls etc. If you want zero ads, then you have to pay. How will you pay otherwise, magic or thoughts n prayers?? then I love the "I dont want my computing resources to run ads", well then dont read the article !!
      - Workaccount2 3y ago
        "But the internet in 1996 was absolutely amazing and totally free!!" eyeroll
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    Oh, it gets worse. Tyranny amasses resources, and politics is power is marketing. Part of advertising absolutely is propagandizing humanity in the most traditionally appalling ways towards the most traditionally horrifying ends. It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from. I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from. Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.
  - yetanotherasian 3y ago
    I don't personally feel like I notice many ads online. Maybe they are subtly influencing me but mostly I seem to avoid them. Yes I have an ad blocker but I still see ads or open things in an guest or incognito window or something which doesn't have an ad blocker. I don't think I can name an ad I've seen in the last year. Maybe a few years ago there was that Nintendo ad that took over all of youtube. Maybe I've seen a movie ad on IDMB once that caught my attention. Mostly though, it's just background noise that I tune out. The only place I actually notice is Amazon, since it seems to often insert things I don't care about
dfxm12 3y ago
To put things into perspective, it sounds like most of your complaints are mostly from the point of view as a consumer, but what you like about them is that they enable you as a creator, being given access to modify FOSS, making it easy to create apps or as a responsible member of society, not complying with CCP, allowing ad blockers. If you ask me, the latter are infinitely more important than the first thing. Now, I will grant that Google also does a lot more to complain about.
noman-land 3y ago
To me Google contributing to open source is like Pablo Escobar giving food and goods to the poor people of Colombia.
kanbara 3y ago
you can create apps for free on apple platforms, just can’t publish without a sub. google most def supports CCP since their re-entry into china apple invented webkit and clang/llvm among others maybe look at things with a more open perspective. google and apple both do good as well as bad; it’s not a competition in terms of who abuses capitalism, the answer is everyone.
- sulam 3y ago
  Sorry, in what way is Google in China? No offices, no employees, products are not sold there, the only way to access their web products is VPN. Apple, on the other hand, sells their entire product lineup there. Some part of manufacturing is there, but most things are being built in Vietnam, Taiwan, etc, and FATP at most is in China.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    This does give Apple more influence over China, as well as giving China influence over Apple. At these scales influence is never one-directional.
- robmccoll 3y ago
  * Technically Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, but it's been 20 years and 10s of millions of lines of code since then. Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve created LLVM at UIUC. Chris was later hired by Apple who supported its development.
sanderjd 3y ago
Do they contradict themselves? Very well then they contradict themselves. (They are large, they contain multitudes.)
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
You are ignoring all the FOSS that never existed because Google killed it or prevented it from happening. Monopolies kill choices you will never even hear of, just by existing. You may believe some technologies are better off because a monopoly exists, but that's almost certainly always incorrect, monopolies impede progress.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  Google successfully maintained the fiction for more than a decade that they were the only place where fundamental work could happen. that alone was immensely damaging to progress and the overall health of the community. they bought up not just all the talented students, but all their professors too.
eitally 3y ago
A lot of those complaints, historically, are a direct result of Google's culture of being an engineering meritocracy: let everyone experiment, let employees easily transfer to new teams, and let the best product win. That does wonders for innovation if bureaucracy isn't an issue, but what you've seen in the past ten years is that bureaucracy has gotten in the way of innovation at the same time as Google has refused to adjust it's organization & culture to become more top-down and market driven. Since TK took over Cloud, you've started seeing this wholesale, and now this new "culture" (leadership focus & style) affects the Hardware & Platforms PAs, as well as the new Deepmind. Google isn't an engineering meritocracy anymore, but it's still a great place for engineers overall: wealthy, excellent perks, and some of the best talent anywhere. But, adjusting the culture to be truly market driven and in alignment with a clear purpose has (and is still) taken years, and has created lots of interim pain & suffering [of all kinds, both internally and for customers & consumers]. Google is becoming more like Apple & Microsoft, and if the alternative is "pretend to be like the old Google", this cannot be anything but positive.

edgyquant 3y ago

Even if they were the greatest company on the planet that doesn’t change that they dominate the ad market and internet and that has to change

inductive_magic 3y ago
I wish more people understood how horrible advertising truly is. Your life is essentially a compilation of what captures your attention. Embracing this perspective, any entity auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder is trading away a part of your life. People don't understand what this means. They also don't understand how cynical this is in the context of a search engine. I don't have a solution to this, but man, its horrible.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  This is a bit much. Attention is not that hard to control if you want to. It's sad if people allow their attention to be captured by doomscrolling/notification-clearing/etc but no more so than if they did so playing Solitaire or reading trashy magazines.
  - javajosh 3y ago
    Attention really is hard to control, and most people can't do it. In fact, the only way I've learned to exert real control over attention is by practicing meditation. Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs This seems too nonspecific. Influence is graded on a curve: early life experiences and childhood are formative, and the job of parents is to raise their children well. I don't think we should be equating the influence of internet ads with big experiences.
      - javajosh 3y ago
        I agree, but we also shouldn't discount the thousands of little influences that affect us everyday, either. It's a bit like deflecting an asteroid: a big push early on will have the greatest effect, but thousands of little pushes later on will also deflect it. The key quality is the coherence of the impact - if they push in all directions, it may NOT have an impact. Arguably advertising is coherent in that it all seeks to increase your appetite for consumer behavior. And I would argue our parents do that to us, too, with gifts of toys and other trifles.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        I agree, but I think being aware of that is how we self-determine a bit better. Facebook sucks you in with notifications, and if you notice that you can disable notifications, or (as I did) uninstall the app and just use the website.
  - istjohn 3y ago
    That's naive. We all feel like we're the master of our story, but our history books show us that people are products of their time--their physical, social, and cultural environment. With determined effort, one person can fight the tide, but one person is a rounding error.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Dirak 3y ago
  Ads are not at all horrible. Ads help connect products with the niche markets of people that could benefit from them. Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. Yes, when done distastefully, ads can be quite horrible (ie ads for gambling and other vices), but when done well, both the user and advertiser benefit. This has to be true, otherwise, if users never found ads useful they would never click on them, and then advertisers would’ve never pay for advertisements since they wouldn’t benefit them.
  - dr-detroit 3y ago
    [dead]
  - inductive_magic 3y ago
    I appreciate your perspective on the potential benefits of ads. However, I’m emphasizing a much deeper, existential concern here. Our lifes, essentially, are the sum of what we pay attention to. In this context, advertising doesn’t just sell products; it habitually redirects our attention, shaping our experiences and, consequently, our lifes in profound ways. The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience. It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.
    - istjohn 3y ago
      Not to mention the way it shapes culture, inculcating children with the materialist creed of insatiable consumers before they even know what advertising is.
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    > Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying. Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  I wish more people understood that if you had to pay for everything on the internet, it for modern intents and purposes would be dead. Even this site itself is a marketing device. (of course it is possible to show advertising without tracking. there's a lot of context to be had in many cases).
  - bilal4hmed 3y ago
    I find it hilarious when people complain about paywalls etc. If you want zero ads, then you have to pay. How will you pay otherwise, magic or thoughts n prayers?? then I love the "I dont want my computing resources to run ads", well then dont read the article !!
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      "But the internet in 1996 was absolutely amazing and totally free!!" eyeroll
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Oh, it gets worse. Tyranny amasses resources, and politics is power is marketing. Part of advertising absolutely is propagandizing humanity in the most traditionally appalling ways towards the most traditionally horrifying ends. It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from. I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from. Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.
- yetanotherasian 3y ago
  I don't personally feel like I notice many ads online. Maybe they are subtly influencing me but mostly I seem to avoid them. Yes I have an ad blocker but I still see ads or open things in an guest or incognito window or something which doesn't have an ad blocker. I don't think I can name an ad I've seen in the last year. Maybe a few years ago there was that Nintendo ad that took over all of youtube. Maybe I've seen a movie ad on IDMB once that caught my attention. Mostly though, it's just background noise that I tune out. The only place I actually notice is Amazon, since it seems to often insert things I don't care about

dfxm12 3y ago

To put things into perspective, it sounds like most of your complaints are mostly from the point of view as a consumer, but what you like about them is that they enable you as a creator, being given access to modify FOSS, making it easy to create apps or as a responsible member of society, not complying with CCP, allowing ad blockers. If you ask me, the latter are infinitely more important than the first thing. Now, I will grant that Google also does a lot more to complain about.

noman-land 3y ago

To me Google contributing to open source is like Pablo Escobar giving food and goods to the poor people of Colombia.

kanbara 3y ago

you can create apps for free on apple platforms, just can’t publish without a sub. google most def supports CCP since their re-entry into china apple invented webkit and clang/llvm among others maybe look at things with a more open perspective. google and apple both do good as well as bad; it’s not a competition in terms of who abuses capitalism, the answer is everyone.

sulam 3y ago
Sorry, in what way is Google in China? No offices, no employees, products are not sold there, the only way to access their web products is VPN. Apple, on the other hand, sells their entire product lineup there. Some part of manufacturing is there, but most things are being built in Vietnam, Taiwan, etc, and FATP at most is in China.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  This does give Apple more influence over China, as well as giving China influence over Apple. At these scales influence is never one-directional.
robmccoll 3y ago
* Technically Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, but it's been 20 years and 10s of millions of lines of code since then. Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve created LLVM at UIUC. Chris was later hired by Apple who supported its development.

sanderjd 3y ago

Do they contradict themselves? Very well then they contradict themselves. (They are large, they contain multitudes.)

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

You are ignoring all the FOSS that never existed because Google killed it or prevented it from happening. Monopolies kill choices you will never even hear of, just by existing. You may believe some technologies are better off because a monopoly exists, but that's almost certainly always incorrect, monopolies impede progress.

convolvatron 3y ago
Google successfully maintained the fiction for more than a decade that they were the only place where fundamental work could happen. that alone was immensely damaging to progress and the overall health of the community. they bought up not just all the talented students, but all their professors too.

eitally 3y ago

A lot of those complaints, historically, are a direct result of Google's culture of being an engineering meritocracy: let everyone experiment, let employees easily transfer to new teams, and let the best product win. That does wonders for innovation if bureaucracy isn't an issue, but what you've seen in the past ten years is that bureaucracy has gotten in the way of innovation at the same time as Google has refused to adjust it's organization & culture to become more top-down and market driven. Since TK took over Cloud, you've started seeing this wholesale, and now this new "culture" (leadership focus & style) affects the Hardware & Platforms PAs, as well as the new Deepmind. Google isn't an engineering meritocracy anymore, but it's still a great place for engineers overall: wealthy, excellent perks, and some of the best talent anywhere. But, adjusting the culture to be truly market driven and in alignment with a clear purpose has (and is still) taken years, and has created lots of interim pain & suffering [of all kinds, both internally and for customers & consumers]. Google is becoming more like Apple & Microsoft, and if the alternative is "pretend to be like the old Google", this cannot be anything but positive.