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Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible

Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever. So far I've only seen companies be decent until an idealistic founder leaves or dies, then the MBA's take over and the worst possible way to make the most money takes over pretty quickly.

ethbr1 3y ago
> until an idealistic founder leaves or dies At which point they're more interested in maximizing the value of their shares, so they can do other things. Therefore, they specifically leave their company in charge of profit maximizers. It just takes a subsequent decade or so for the track record of decisions to finally make that unavoidably obvious to employees and the general public.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kentm 3y ago
I'm beginning to believe that it's just impossible to do advertising ethically. The hypothesis is that an advertising firm that attempts to do so will perform worse than ones doing unethical things, and eventually lose customers.
- forward1 3y ago
  All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery. Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it. People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business are simply unaware or willfully ignorant of its costs. Typically it is the latter, or as Upton Sinclair beautifully put it — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  - freedomben 3y ago
    what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?
    - forward1 3y ago
      Must there be an alternative? What if the world is not ethical by design? What does the evidence say about it?
      - radiator 3y ago
        This is quite deep. And delivered in socratic style, nonetheless.
        forward1 3y ago
        Yet past the sarcasm, you're not able to offer a compelling counter-argument. I wonder, why is that?
      - freedomben 3y ago
        Fair point, but if we're stretching the definition to the point where nothing can be ethical, then there isn't any meaning to the word "ethical" as it relates to a binary "is" or "is not." If we agree that nothing can be fully "ethical," there still should be some continuum on which to place the current system, unless you contend that every system and/or action is ethically equal, which I would further contend erases any meaning of the word rendering the premise moot. So that said, is there any system that is more ethical than the current?
        forward1 3y ago
        We're not "stretching" anything. I made a simple assertion: business cannot be ethical, but it is inherently exploitative. I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism. People would rather bury their head in the sand and think they're acting virtuously in this world. The cognitive dissonance here is frankly alarming, if it weren't so expected for entitled first-world engineers.
- treyd 3y ago
  I've come to this conclusion a long time ago. If consumers have perfect information about a class of product from different producers then advertising would be completely useless and the market for that product would be completely efficient (on the consumer side). Of course consumers don't have perfect information, and that's what the marketing industry claims their purpose is to address. But really the role that the marketing industry (at least for typical products and services) actually plays is to selectively give information to consumers to influence their buying decisions against how they would behave in an efficient market. And then it's a very short and slippery slope to just straight up lying about products and manipulating consumers through their insecurities, which we see happening all the time with how the marketing industry has developed for the last few decades especially with online advertisements.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It's corporate behaviour modification and social engineering. Perhaps not a surprise to anyone familiar with Bernays and his Propaganda. I don't see it as information asymmetry, so much as mostly mediocre products and services designed to a budget trying to look more exciting and life-changing than they could ever hope to be. The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it.
    - daddylongstroke 3y ago
      >The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it. Yes, exactly this right here. It was straight up bizarre to grow up with near 0 advertising in commie Eastern Europe and get hit with a shockwave of fairly disgusting ad bullshit when we moved to the US. I was shocked at people putting up with it as if it is something to be tolerated instead of burned to ashes. I continue to be shocked.
      - JetSpiegel 3y ago
        I don't think is socially acceptable in the West to mention the good parts of the other side of the Iron Curtain. You must always mention the Stasi. Even though the Berlin wall came down 30 years ago, the End of History ethos remains.
- dspillett 3y ago
  It might be possible, were it not for the fact that the advertising industry has their customers so convinced that the stalking they do is truly effective compared to a mix of scatter-gun approaches and simply advertising in relevant places. No one will buy advertising services from a company that says “yeah, we don't do that thing that everyone else says is essential”. It doesn't actually have to be effective, those buying advertising services just have to be somewhat convinced that it might be. (I'm separating the ethical matters in advertising from those in selling here, even if spreading awareness through advertising was made less unethical by removing the stalking and other irritations, that still leaves a lot of room for unethical sales techniques)
- fomine3 3y ago
  It's true for pure capitalism. What we need is strict regulation, but some regulation make situation worse.
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  Advertising, the entire industry, exists to convince you to buy something you don't want, hence why you have to be talked into it, through psychological manipulation, preying on your insecurities, repetition via repeat ad exposure, and insane amounts of money and testing to build brand recognition and create biases to certain companies dubbed "brand loyalty"... so, there is no such thing as ethical advertising. Advertising is psychological manipulation at scale and it's effective. How does one ethically manipulate someone into doing something they wouldn't do if not influenced to do so? Ethical advertising can't exist, the same way two masses can't occupy the same point in space at the same time.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Thats a bit of a pessimistic if realistic take. Advertising in its ideal form is meant to inform you of something that could improve your life (happiness, productivity, health, etc...). It could conceivably be "let the consumer know that our product solves their problems that competitors can't solve or for a cheaper cost." Of course, cutting corners leads to more profits for less effort, so that's what often happens. Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful.
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      > Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful. Sure, if that existed in a vacuum, and not in a capitalist economic system where you are rewarded by doing unethical things to generate more profit. In reality, there is no way to successfully deploy ethical advertising. Even if one tried, it could never compete with the ones not being ethical, since they will have higher returns, and infinitely more budget as a result, to make it so your ethical ad is never even shown to a single human eyeball
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      Although, the sharing of useful information is different than an advertisement, entirely, so such a thing wouldn't be called an ad. Wikipedia exists to share information and inform us of something we might find useful. It doesn't need to be pushed on anyone. It just needs to exist in the open. Anytime something is brought to you that you didn't ask for, demanding your attention, there is motive behind why it's being done, be it a coworker pitching a tool to you trying to get buy-in and force a decision they want to be made in their favor, a flyer of sales happening at the grocery store that's delivered to your door on Sunday, or the blinking square ad impression telling you that if you just give up some of your money, they will provide you with a service that will make you feel like you're making progress on something (and then you'll convince yourself that's true even if it's not because nobody likes to admit they made a mistake and wasted time and/or money). Ads are forced upon us, telling us something, and there is so much motive behind why it's being done, people will spend millions to make sure you see it. Even if it's just a tidbit of info, selling no product, whoever is motivated enough to pay a lot of money for you to see it, has motive to push an agenda which you seeing that info stands to benifet from. It's still manipulation. It's not possible to be ethical. The only example of real world ethical advertising I can think of, would be the million dollar webpage. A webpage of pixels purchased to show an ad, that you have to willingly make the decision to navigate to and look at, and that website no longer exists, which proves my point pretty well imo
- rsync 3y ago
  I disagree. I’m in no hurry to defend advertisers but it’s easy to think of non abusive, morally neutral advertising. Local grocer has a sign hanging in the little league outfield, etc.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Google ads used to be great. Just include some ads based on the content you’re looking at. Not based on some weird history and cookies. I don’t mind those ads. But just keep them small, light, non interesting, and don’t sell my data.. be the platform that protects my data when matching up advertisers.
- int_19h 3y ago
  "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].* It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." — The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
foxyv 3y ago
It's just Goodhart's law. Our economy is profit centric. The way public companies are structured, the only metric anyone cares about is profit. Everything else just sloughs off over time.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Seems like a great argument for companies to remain private, no? Absolute control is the only way.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    Or we could just build some sort of regulations into the market that protect workers and help encourage labor organization.
whyenot 3y ago
Patagonia is an example of a company that is trying to be "decent" even after its founder is no longer involved. So far, it seems to be working. In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.
- depressedpanda 3y ago
  Apple might be less bad than, say Oracle, but it's still an evil mega corp. Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.
  - voisin 3y ago
    > Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. Do you have any evidence to support your statements? Any arguments or just conclusions?
    - depressedpanda 3y ago
      They cracked down on ads talking about privacy, to the applause of everyone. Then they launched their own ad tech service. It's obvious privacy was used as an excuse to make more money. I hope you're not asking for any evidence of their authoritarianism, it should be apparent to anyone who knows anything about the company. They readily cooperate with authoritarian regimes; look at their behavior in China, or how they assisted the totalitarian regime in Belarus to the detriment of pro democracy protesters. "Obeying local laws" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, but is very convenient if all you care about is profit maximization.
      - voisin 3y ago
        > Then they launched their own ad tech service. It's obvious privacy was used as an excuse to make more money. Is their ad technology invading user privacy like Meta or Google? I have come across nothing discussing this.
chrisweekly 3y ago
A "B-Corp" designation provides precisely this kind of framework for execs to have formal obligations beyond profit-seeking.
maronato 3y ago
> company constitution IANAL either, but I feel like the closest we had to something like this was the non profit part of OpenAI, which should’ve had the power to fire the CEO. Reality was a bit more messy than that, and profit won over ethics. I can’t imagine Google shareholders not throwing a fit for not being allowed their cash cow to grow, and eventually finding a way to bypass the constitution.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
  A "company constitution", just like every constitution, is just a bunch of paper where someone drawed some letters. If there's something to be gained by changing it or trowing it out altogether, it will happen eventually.
hyperliner 3y ago
[dead]
quonn 3y ago
> "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever. They would find a way around that, for example by buying other companies in order to not make a profit.
jaredklewis 3y ago
> Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever. It's possible. Of course hard to imagine the kind of investor that is going to want to invest in a company like this and SV pretty much runs on VC money. If given a choice, I'll take 1st percentile salaries at company w/o profit cap constitution over taking a pay cut. It's like, if you make $350k+ a year...just sort of budget that you might one day lose that job. The vast, vast bulk of the country pays all their expenses, cares for their children, elderly family members, sick relatives and so on with <$100k salary. You can insure yourself against any hardship in unemployment with a top 1% salary.
cyanydeez 3y ago
IBM used to count Jews in the ghetto. This is corporate America. it's your cool uncle when you're young and it's the same uncle when you realize as an adult that that's just not how adults should behave.
tptacek 3y ago
If you're taking, say, the Google of 2014 as a reference point, they appear to have had a relatively small fraction of their current headcount at the time.
foinker 3y ago
The allure of short term profits is largely the point of all companies. Google in particular was never decent, they struck data harvesting gold with Search and Maps, then used the infinite money they were making off of advertisers to ensure that no other option besides Google could ever be viable, through manipulation of search results, manipulation of business customers, regulatory capture, etc. Now they are free to let the quality of their products slide into the abyss without fear of users jumping ship. Where would we jump to? This is what every tech company you've ever heard of has been striving to do for a couple of decades now. It's either that or create hype -> pump valuation -> sell the business to a larger entity before they have to answer for long-term stability.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gymbeaux 3y ago
I don’t think you can have a company both be public and ethical in the way you’re describing, at least in the US where you’ll get sued for giving some profits back to employees instead of to the shareholders, for example. Though if the company stays private, they’re subject to the “benevolent dictator” problem where the company is only ethical because the leader is. At least with a public company (or a non-profit), the CEO is subject to discipline by the board of directors.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yes it is inevitable, unless some luck charm happens to hit the company, it is no accident that most companies in mankind's history, never survive beyond the third generation since they were founded.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
The company never had any integrity^1 and has always lacked a moral compass.^2 1. Paper at TREC announcing the search engine cited harmful influence of advertising and promised a search engine "in the academic realm". They never delivered. Sold out. That was before they even went public. 2. "Don't be evil". Given the amount of highly personal data it collects, and the lack of regulation, the company truly needed some sort of ethical code. But they never even tried. Instead they let their senior management engage in harassment, settled every suit brought against them for privacy violations, paid off the competition, and routinely accepted enormous regulatory fines. Pure, unaudulterated greed. The Google playbook is the furthest thing from "keep the margins less than or equal to 10%". It's the work of SillyCon Valley. It's the same playbook adopted by Facebook to keep Zuckerberg from being ousted. Keep reasonable people from having any ability to change anything. There is nothing "cool" about it.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >There is nothing "cool" about it. Not now of course, but I think that they lost their way mostly after the first decade. For the first decade they launched a bunch of services that were so much better than anything else it seemed like sci-fi, and they did so without obtrusive advertising or shady tracking. Even Chrome was cool, to outcompete Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS seemed impossible back then but chrome was just so much better than anything else that they managed to do it. I think the extreme money-fountain from ads started the corruption, and the threat of Facebook created a paranoia inside Google that removed all the floodgates.
DonnyV 3y ago
You can prevent this by bringing democracy into the workplace. Right now the workplace is like a dictator ran country or monarchy. Its a very top down tiered system In a co-op structured company it is owned and operated by its employees. You vote as a collective on how much the CEO makes, if you even need one. How the work is done, how much everyone should be getting paid, etc.
tech_tuna 3y ago
As a user of many Google products and an old timer who legit appreciates how Google actually made it possible to search the internet effectively, I am no longer a Google fanboy. I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected. I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.
valval 3y ago
“I swear communism is going to work this time guys!!”
xnx 3y ago
What happens to Google when Larry and/or Sergey decide to give up control? I feel like there's still possibility for a curveball from one of them.

ethbr1 3y ago

> until an idealistic founder leaves or dies At which point they're more interested in maximizing the value of their shares, so they can do other things. Therefore, they specifically leave their company in charge of profit maximizers. It just takes a subsequent decade or so for the track record of decisions to finally make that unavoidably obvious to employees and the general public.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kentm 3y ago

I'm beginning to believe that it's just impossible to do advertising ethically. The hypothesis is that an advertising firm that attempts to do so will perform worse than ones doing unethical things, and eventually lose customers.

forward1 3y ago
All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery. Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it. People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business are simply unaware or willfully ignorant of its costs. Typically it is the latter, or as Upton Sinclair beautifully put it — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- freedomben 3y ago
  what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?
  - forward1 3y ago
    Must there be an alternative? What if the world is not ethical by design? What does the evidence say about it?
    - radiator 3y ago
      This is quite deep. And delivered in socratic style, nonetheless.
      - forward1 3y ago
        Yet past the sarcasm, you're not able to offer a compelling counter-argument. I wonder, why is that?
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Fair point, but if we're stretching the definition to the point where nothing can be ethical, then there isn't any meaning to the word "ethical" as it relates to a binary "is" or "is not." If we agree that nothing can be fully "ethical," there still should be some continuum on which to place the current system, unless you contend that every system and/or action is ethically equal, which I would further contend erases any meaning of the word rendering the premise moot. So that said, is there any system that is more ethical than the current?
      - forward1 3y ago
        We're not "stretching" anything. I made a simple assertion: business cannot be ethical, but it is inherently exploitative. I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism. People would rather bury their head in the sand and think they're acting virtuously in this world. The cognitive dissonance here is frankly alarming, if it weren't so expected for entitled first-world engineers.
treyd 3y ago
I've come to this conclusion a long time ago. If consumers have perfect information about a class of product from different producers then advertising would be completely useless and the market for that product would be completely efficient (on the consumer side). Of course consumers don't have perfect information, and that's what the marketing industry claims their purpose is to address. But really the role that the marketing industry (at least for typical products and services) actually plays is to selectively give information to consumers to influence their buying decisions against how they would behave in an efficient market. And then it's a very short and slippery slope to just straight up lying about products and manipulating consumers through their insecurities, which we see happening all the time with how the marketing industry has developed for the last few decades especially with online advertisements.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's corporate behaviour modification and social engineering. Perhaps not a surprise to anyone familiar with Bernays and his Propaganda. I don't see it as information asymmetry, so much as mostly mediocre products and services designed to a budget trying to look more exciting and life-changing than they could ever hope to be. The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it.
  - daddylongstroke 3y ago
    >The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it. Yes, exactly this right here. It was straight up bizarre to grow up with near 0 advertising in commie Eastern Europe and get hit with a shockwave of fairly disgusting ad bullshit when we moved to the US. I was shocked at people putting up with it as if it is something to be tolerated instead of burned to ashes. I continue to be shocked.
    - JetSpiegel 3y ago
      I don't think is socially acceptable in the West to mention the good parts of the other side of the Iron Curtain. You must always mention the Stasi. Even though the Berlin wall came down 30 years ago, the End of History ethos remains.
dspillett 3y ago
It might be possible, were it not for the fact that the advertising industry has their customers so convinced that the stalking they do is truly effective compared to a mix of scatter-gun approaches and simply advertising in relevant places. No one will buy advertising services from a company that says “yeah, we don't do that thing that everyone else says is essential”. It doesn't actually have to be effective, those buying advertising services just have to be somewhat convinced that it might be. (I'm separating the ethical matters in advertising from those in selling here, even if spreading awareness through advertising was made less unethical by removing the stalking and other irritations, that still leaves a lot of room for unethical sales techniques)
fomine3 3y ago
It's true for pure capitalism. What we need is strict regulation, but some regulation make situation worse.
wutwutwat 3y ago
Advertising, the entire industry, exists to convince you to buy something you don't want, hence why you have to be talked into it, through psychological manipulation, preying on your insecurities, repetition via repeat ad exposure, and insane amounts of money and testing to build brand recognition and create biases to certain companies dubbed "brand loyalty"... so, there is no such thing as ethical advertising. Advertising is psychological manipulation at scale and it's effective. How does one ethically manipulate someone into doing something they wouldn't do if not influenced to do so? Ethical advertising can't exist, the same way two masses can't occupy the same point in space at the same time.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Thats a bit of a pessimistic if realistic take. Advertising in its ideal form is meant to inform you of something that could improve your life (happiness, productivity, health, etc...). It could conceivably be "let the consumer know that our product solves their problems that competitors can't solve or for a cheaper cost." Of course, cutting corners leads to more profits for less effort, so that's what often happens. Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful.
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    > Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful. Sure, if that existed in a vacuum, and not in a capitalist economic system where you are rewarded by doing unethical things to generate more profit. In reality, there is no way to successfully deploy ethical advertising. Even if one tried, it could never compete with the ones not being ethical, since they will have higher returns, and infinitely more budget as a result, to make it so your ethical ad is never even shown to a single human eyeball
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    Although, the sharing of useful information is different than an advertisement, entirely, so such a thing wouldn't be called an ad. Wikipedia exists to share information and inform us of something we might find useful. It doesn't need to be pushed on anyone. It just needs to exist in the open. Anytime something is brought to you that you didn't ask for, demanding your attention, there is motive behind why it's being done, be it a coworker pitching a tool to you trying to get buy-in and force a decision they want to be made in their favor, a flyer of sales happening at the grocery store that's delivered to your door on Sunday, or the blinking square ad impression telling you that if you just give up some of your money, they will provide you with a service that will make you feel like you're making progress on something (and then you'll convince yourself that's true even if it's not because nobody likes to admit they made a mistake and wasted time and/or money). Ads are forced upon us, telling us something, and there is so much motive behind why it's being done, people will spend millions to make sure you see it. Even if it's just a tidbit of info, selling no product, whoever is motivated enough to pay a lot of money for you to see it, has motive to push an agenda which you seeing that info stands to benifet from. It's still manipulation. It's not possible to be ethical. The only example of real world ethical advertising I can think of, would be the million dollar webpage. A webpage of pixels purchased to show an ad, that you have to willingly make the decision to navigate to and look at, and that website no longer exists, which proves my point pretty well imo
rsync 3y ago
I disagree. I’m in no hurry to defend advertisers but it’s easy to think of non abusive, morally neutral advertising. Local grocer has a sign hanging in the little league outfield, etc.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Google ads used to be great. Just include some ads based on the content you’re looking at. Not based on some weird history and cookies. I don’t mind those ads. But just keep them small, light, non interesting, and don’t sell my data.. be the platform that protects my data when matching up advertisers.
int_19h 3y ago
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].* It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." — The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

foxyv 3y ago

It's just Goodhart's law. Our economy is profit centric. The way public companies are structured, the only metric anyone cares about is profit. Everything else just sloughs off over time.

no_wizard 3y ago
Seems like a great argument for companies to remain private, no? Absolute control is the only way.
- foxyv 3y ago
  Or we could just build some sort of regulations into the market that protect workers and help encourage labor organization.

whyenot 3y ago

Patagonia is an example of a company that is trying to be "decent" even after its founder is no longer involved. So far, it seems to be working. In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.

depressedpanda 3y ago
Apple might be less bad than, say Oracle, but it's still an evil mega corp. Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.
- voisin 3y ago
  > Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. Do you have any evidence to support your statements? Any arguments or just conclusions?
  - depressedpanda 3y ago
    They cracked down on ads talking about privacy, to the applause of everyone. Then they launched their own ad tech service. It's obvious privacy was used as an excuse to make more money. I hope you're not asking for any evidence of their authoritarianism, it should be apparent to anyone who knows anything about the company. They readily cooperate with authoritarian regimes; look at their behavior in China, or how they assisted the totalitarian regime in Belarus to the detriment of pro democracy protesters. "Obeying local laws" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, but is very convenient if all you care about is profit maximization.
    - voisin 3y ago
      > Then they launched their own ad tech service. It's obvious privacy was used as an excuse to make more money. Is their ad technology invading user privacy like Meta or Google? I have come across nothing discussing this.

chrisweekly 3y ago

A "B-Corp" designation provides precisely this kind of framework for execs to have formal obligations beyond profit-seeking.

maronato 3y ago

> company constitution IANAL either, but I feel like the closest we had to something like this was the non profit part of OpenAI, which should’ve had the power to fire the CEO. Reality was a bit more messy than that, and profit won over ethics. I can’t imagine Google shareholders not throwing a fit for not being allowed their cash cow to grow, and eventually finding a way to bypass the constitution.

kikokikokiko 3y ago
A "company constitution", just like every constitution, is just a bunch of paper where someone drawed some letters. If there's something to be gained by changing it or trowing it out altogether, it will happen eventually.

hyperliner 3y ago

[dead]

quonn 3y ago

> "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever. They would find a way around that, for example by buying other companies in order to not make a profit.

jaredklewis 3y ago

> Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever. It's possible. Of course hard to imagine the kind of investor that is going to want to invest in a company like this and SV pretty much runs on VC money. If given a choice, I'll take 1st percentile salaries at company w/o profit cap constitution over taking a pay cut. It's like, if you make $350k+ a year...just sort of budget that you might one day lose that job. The vast, vast bulk of the country pays all their expenses, cares for their children, elderly family members, sick relatives and so on with <$100k salary. You can insure yourself against any hardship in unemployment with a top 1% salary.

cyanydeez 3y ago

IBM used to count Jews in the ghetto. This is corporate America. it's your cool uncle when you're young and it's the same uncle when you realize as an adult that that's just not how adults should behave.

tptacek 3y ago

If you're taking, say, the Google of 2014 as a reference point, they appear to have had a relatively small fraction of their current headcount at the time.

foinker 3y ago

The allure of short term profits is largely the point of all companies. Google in particular was never decent, they struck data harvesting gold with Search and Maps, then used the infinite money they were making off of advertisers to ensure that no other option besides Google could ever be viable, through manipulation of search results, manipulation of business customers, regulatory capture, etc. Now they are free to let the quality of their products slide into the abyss without fear of users jumping ship. Where would we jump to? This is what every tech company you've ever heard of has been striving to do for a couple of decades now. It's either that or create hype -> pump valuation -> sell the business to a larger entity before they have to answer for long-term stability.

deleted 3y ago

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gymbeaux 3y ago

I don’t think you can have a company both be public and ethical in the way you’re describing, at least in the US where you’ll get sued for giving some profits back to employees instead of to the shareholders, for example. Though if the company stays private, they’re subject to the “benevolent dictator” problem where the company is only ethical because the leader is. At least with a public company (or a non-profit), the CEO is subject to discipline by the board of directors.

pjmlp 3y ago

Yes it is inevitable, unless some luck charm happens to hit the company, it is no accident that most companies in mankind's history, never survive beyond the third generation since they were founded.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

The company never had any integrity^1 and has always lacked a moral compass.^2 1. Paper at TREC announcing the search engine cited harmful influence of advertising and promised a search engine "in the academic realm". They never delivered. Sold out. That was before they even went public. 2. "Don't be evil". Given the amount of highly personal data it collects, and the lack of regulation, the company truly needed some sort of ethical code. But they never even tried. Instead they let their senior management engage in harassment, settled every suit brought against them for privacy violations, paid off the competition, and routinely accepted enormous regulatory fines. Pure, unaudulterated greed. The Google playbook is the furthest thing from "keep the margins less than or equal to 10%". It's the work of SillyCon Valley. It's the same playbook adopted by Facebook to keep Zuckerberg from being ousted. Keep reasonable people from having any ability to change anything. There is nothing "cool" about it.

Kon5ole 3y ago
>There is nothing "cool" about it. Not now of course, but I think that they lost their way mostly after the first decade. For the first decade they launched a bunch of services that were so much better than anything else it seemed like sci-fi, and they did so without obtrusive advertising or shady tracking. Even Chrome was cool, to outcompete Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS seemed impossible back then but chrome was just so much better than anything else that they managed to do it. I think the extreme money-fountain from ads started the corruption, and the threat of Facebook created a paranoia inside Google that removed all the floodgates.

DonnyV 3y ago

You can prevent this by bringing democracy into the workplace. Right now the workplace is like a dictator ran country or monarchy. Its a very top down tiered system In a co-op structured company it is owned and operated by its employees. You vote as a collective on how much the CEO makes, if you even need one. How the work is done, how much everyone should be getting paid, etc.

tech_tuna 3y ago

As a user of many Google products and an old timer who legit appreciates how Google actually made it possible to search the internet effectively, I am no longer a Google fanboy. I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected. I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.

valval 3y ago

“I swear communism is going to work this time guys!!”

xnx 3y ago

What happens to Google when Larry and/or Sergey decide to give up control? I feel like there's still possibility for a curveball from one of them.