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I attended Google's creator conversation event, and it turned into a funeral

• oraphalous 2y ago
  The whole world seems dedicated to the goal of extracting value rather than creating it.
  • throwaway48476 2y ago
    Or tricking someone else into creating value for you to take.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      People tend to create value inherently. If they are not receiving the benefit of that then it would most appropriately be described as theft with the aid of blind regulators.
  • mmaunder 2y ago
    You're surrounded by and typing on valuable goods and services that you received in exchange for a store of value called money, which you received by providing value to someone else.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • metadat 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      It's a free country. You're free to implement a search engine and let anyone use it for free. Good luck paying for it, though.
      • rurban 2y ago
        So we need to persuade the NSA to finance our new search engine? Or should we turn to Putin or Xi? The European surveillance services would not be able to
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          You still have to pay the NSA, in the form of taxes.
      • stavros 2y ago
        This is kind of disingenuous when the grandparent comment is complaining exactly about the particular way this country is free in.
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          Not at all. If someone wants to fund a charity search engine, they can do it. No matter how you structure it, somebody is going to have to pay for it. Another way of saying it is there's no such thing as a free lunch. In any society, any where, any time. You might as well wish for an antigravity machine :-)
          • stavros 2y ago
            Depending on who pays, the incentives are different. In a socialist society, where some things are funded by the government, those things are generally much more aligned with the interest of the public than in capitalism, where most money wins.
            • s1artibartfast 2y ago
              Man, those Cambodians really loved the killing fields. You should have seen how excited they were
            • WalterBright 2y ago
              > In a socialist society, where some things are funded by the government, those things are generally much more aligned with the interest of the public than in capitalism Just for fun, compare the Soviet built Lada cars with cars built by capitalists. Or the contents of supermarkets. Or the quality of health care. Oh, and the advice given to American tourists visiting the Soviet Union - pack a couple pairs of blue jeans, as they are great for trading for stuff! I'll make it easy - name any consumer product made by the Soviet Union that was preferable to one built by greedy capitalists. Did you wonder why the US did not import Soviet made consumer products?
    • smsm42 2y ago
      I'm sure that the glorious Communist Party would build a google where every site is equal in ranking and always occupies the first page.
      • metadat 2y ago
        Not making any claims or value judgments about other economic structures. I wanted to point out that the value extraction aspect of capitalism is fundamentally cold blooded / soulless / impersonal.
        • smsm42 2y ago
          As opposed to value extraction under socialism, also known as "GULAG", "down to countryside", "killing fields", "reeducation camps" and "transitory labor regime". The most prominent feature of all those is how kind, warm blooded, soulful and personable they are. Literally everybody who was there (and came out alive, which wasn't easy) makes sure to point that out.
          • metadat 2y ago
            You seem really hung up on the other economic structures, which aren't actually relevant to this discussion. Why is that?
            • smsm42 2y ago
              Maybe because they are relevant, but you refuse to admit it because it would reveal your original claim as shallow, lazy and pointless.
    • pvaldes 2y ago
      Capitalism and thief are different things. We should stop using the first to justify the last. If this people was lured to work for free, this is not capitalism.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    Anything you get for free, that requires someone else to work to provide it, means you're going to pay for it one way or another.
    • thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Sure, if it doesn't exist before you order it. If it's already been made, someone may even pay you to take it away.
    • lesostep 2y ago
      It could be true for things that could only be "used" once. But I don't think that it's a valid point at all times. Recently, for example, I've made a little "Linux for dummies" zine, and put it on my shelf. Sometimes guests take it, read it, and put it back. Technically, all of them get to read it for free, through no additional cost to me, because this zine already existed before they knew they wanted to "use it", and this zine will continue to exist after they "use it".
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        Do you let random people use your car for free, too? Do you pay for their gas as well?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• synack 2y ago
  Maybe don’t put ads between every paragraph on your blog.
  • infecto 2y ago
    I could not read the whole thing or even get the gist of the parent site. Looks like one of those late 2000s content farm sites filled but chum box ads. Low quality all around.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • iandanforth 2y ago
    Not that this invalidates your comment, but why do you put yourself through ads? Block them.
  • quuxplusone 2y ago
    The site also disables the back button (on mobile Chrome). I have no idea why the site owner thinks their site was downranked (and the article never says: it assumes some context I lack), but I cynically wonder if it's related to the back-button and video-ad thing. Edited to add: This article here provides some information about the meeting/roundtable thing described in TFA. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-creator-summit-38196.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-creator-summit-38196.htm...
    • CamelCaseName 2y ago
      I haven't read your linked article, but it's crystal clear when you get downranked. One day your analytics show you're getting less and less traffic from Google, while other sources remain constant. What else could be the reason?
  • stefan_ 2y ago
    This is exactly the kind of trash spam site I want Google to ban. Maybe thats why this writer had such a gloomy feeling.
  • 2y ago
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Will google ever recover the culture, or did management kill it? Maybe that’s the purpose of our economic system? No inefficient fun?
  • DANmode 2y ago
    Google is not simply a moneymaking tool. You're missing a(t least one) piece of the puzzle.
    • musicale 2y ago
      I'd like to think so. If Google didn't provide some useful goods (Pixel phones) or services (Google Cloud) then it would be a purely financial company.
      • nine_k 2y ago
        For a ton of people, the ads Google sells are very useful. The ads make their products visible. It's weird (do you often click on ads?) but the effect exists, some customers do come this way. Businesses, big and small, readily buy ads. This is what powers their empire, not selling phones or even GCE. Search is but a delivery vehicle of ads, maybe one of the most powerful but not the only one. (Disclaimer: I don't buy or sell ads, and run an ad blocker in my browsers.)
        • WalterBright 2y ago
          I don't think I've ever clicked on a banner ad. I don't even see them, as my brain just treats them as a featureless background.
          • BrandoElFollito 2y ago
            This is what I noticed to when I had to disable the ad blocker on some sites. The ads are annoying because they break the reading flow (I think it is called parallax when the ad moves with your scrolling, but slower - I hate that). My brain just compensates to keep z smooth reading peace but I have no idea what the ad is about.
• wpietri 2y ago
  Wow, this is impressively brutal. I don't know anything about search or ranking these days, but the way insist on putting an AI summary at the top of every page definitely is good evidence for the theory that Google doesn't give a damn about the people doing all the actual work that makes a search engine valuable.
  • wrycoder 2y ago
    Same for Amazon reviews.
  • forgetfulness 2y ago
    They must be planning on milking what value can be had from the web to which they used to be the entryway, and clash with OpenAI, MS and Apple over AI trained on curated datasets, to layer some semblance of a business model over it. And I say milking because the relationship to websites is now parasitic for the most part.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    I started using Google search like ChatGPT, for asking questions and reading the AI responses. In many simple cases, it suffices. As an actual search engine, Google search is still not bad, but now one of the many, without a large edge it used to have; I try it when DDG does not bring results I want, or I query DDG when Google does not bring results I want.
    • __rito__ 2y ago
      If you are doing this, I suggest giving the Perplexity app a try. It's very fast, convenient, and accurate. It was Perplexity, and not ChatGPT that reduced my Google usage.
  • CamelCaseName 2y ago
    I'm not really sure what option Google has. It's do or die.
    • taskforcegemini 2y ago
• Animats 2y ago
  "It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google’s." What Google seems to be doing is banning aggregation sites. There was a previous posting today by someone who was complaining about low ranking for his book review and link farm site. Google wants to be the only aggregator. Why fan out queries to another level of aggregator? A list of the 20 sites he's talking about would help. How many of those are aggregation sites?
  • sanderjd 2y ago
    The whole article is pretty confusing to me. It's never made at all clear what this event was supposed to be about or why this specific set of people were there. Presumably it wasn't "invite people who run 'shadowbanned' sites" when they don't acknowledge that there is such a thing. So what was it, then?
    • bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
      > Presumably it wasn't "invite people who run 'shadowbanned' sites" when they don't acknowledge that there is such a thing. So what was it, then? Answer: it WAS to invite people who run shadowbanned sites, they just don't acknowledge that there is such a thing.
      • DidYaWipe 2y ago
        Which makes no sense. How did they phrase the invitation, then? The writer is too lazy to say.
        • toofy 2y ago
          A few years ago, a guy went super viral with a video of himself getting punched outside of a bar. He cried nonstop and went on the typical outrage media tour. Over and over declaring how unfair it all was “These people attacked me because I wore a hat! They attacked me because the color of my hat!” It seemed super suspicious from the jump, I kept asking myself, “There has to be more to this story, this guy is being incredibly vague, is there more to this?” A couple days after his media circus tour, videos from other people started popping up. these videos told us a little bit more. video after video of this guy—for hours—trying to start fights with dozens of people. multiple videos of him complaining while getting ejected from various bars by bouncers. he spent like 6 hours at many, many bars provoking and then feigned shock when it happened. “my hat. every time i go to this particular city, they physically beat me because they don’t like my hat” … ya left a little bit of important context out eh friend? this blog post feels very similar to me as that guys initial video. something is missing.
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  What exactly are these websites, why do their webmasters have a special relationship as "Google Web Creators," and how is it so many of them were coincidentally shadowbanned? This article is interesting about the state of Google as seen by a visit to the campus and at a dismal event, but I still don't have a clear idea who the people let down by Google are.
  • maltelandwehr 2y ago
    In September last year, Google released an update called "Helpful Content Update" (HCU) that was supposed to demote made-for-Google spam websites. Usually, a blog with dozens of articles from cheap authors that are optimized to rank well in Google. Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites. There was a lot of public discourse on X/Twitter on this topic for months. This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
• mmaunder 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > It's spam For what product? Or do you mean there are simply too many submissions? > Ads overlayed on ads overlayed on ads. That's a fair critique, but does it merit flagging? If "too many ads spoils the reading experience" is a cause for flagging content that would otherwise have some merit, then we should also be flagging all the submissions to otherwise-aboveboard news sites which happen to have pay/subscribe walls. I'm not entirely against that in theory, but AFAIK that's not where the informal bar is set right now.
• neilv 2y ago
  I don't know how accurate this writeup is, but the characterization of behavior was eerily familiar. If they'd been talking about a certain other place that I know, I would've wanted to shout "Exactly!", and would've implicitly believed that's what they saw. There's a type who exhibits a combination of arrogance and self-interested fixation. There's no malice, and they aren't sociopaths, and they don't think of themselves as jerks. But they have a sense of superiority and entitlement, and can be aggressively, er, norms-bending, to get what they want. Some environments seem to either attract them, or to nurture them. It's something unclear to me about the individual environment, not the external kind of organization (e.g., one high-prestige organization has a lot of it, but another high-prestige organization of the same kind doesn't). I could attribute it to "culture", because I don't have any more specific theory, and play by ear how to try to filter or nurture it out of a collective. But I suspect there's a critical mass of that type gaining positions of influence in the organization, at which point the culture becomes irreversible, since there's too much arrogance to see it as a problem. At that point, I'd guess the rest of the people should be looking at their options for leaving, and also try not to think or behave like that type themselves.
  • maltelandwehr 2y ago
    > I don't know how accurate this writeup is There are now 5+ writeups from different attendees. They all agree on the larger points: Google has no solution to the problem. Google asked attendees if they have ideas for a solution. Google told people their content is good and they deserve to rank.
• dare944 2y ago
  "Empty too, was the rest of Google’s behemoth campus. Their numerous buildings are surrounded by beautiful, park-like pathways with no one to enjoy them but the groundskeepers. They follow the paths with their lawnmowers, weaving between softly shaded employee parking lots, with no one to park in them." Without comment on the rest of the article, I can personally confirm that this particular statement is disinformation. I was there, in person, at the Google Mountain View campus, on October 29, 2024 visiting as a representative of an external partner (and as a long ago former employee). I did not attend this event, but I was nearby the entire day. Throughout the day the building I was in was very busy, with many people coming and going and working at desks. At lunchtime, we walked to the Google cafe a few buildings away which was brimming with people, to the point where our group of three struggled to find a table to eat at. Of course there may have been buildings on campus which were empty or sparsely utilized. But the area I was in (western end of Charleston Rd) was anything but empty. In the future, the author should try to stick to the truth when making their point.
  • isaacfrond 2y ago
    You need to read better: The day before, he led the group on a tour of Google’s biggest office So that would be October 28. Apparently, the office was closed that day. As the author was there on 29 as well, it’s still pretty misleading though.
• mtnGoat 2y ago
  I've been invited so two similar events over the past couple decades and one company I worked for had standing weekly meetings with Google. All I can say is my experience is pretty much they same, they lure you in wanting info and to help you, but don't give any answers and just keep wanting more info. In the end they didn't unblock us and in my opinion built a lot of what we shared into their systems. It was a knowledge theft exercise in my opinion, was NOT in any way meant to help anyone but Google.
  • mtnGoat 2y ago
    in fact the standing weekly meetings were cancelled after we got to the point where the entire half hour was consumed with going over all the AIs their end had they we were still waiting for answers on. Since we never got any, we cancelled the meetings as wasteful.
  • DidYaWipe 2y ago
    This article doesn't give any specifics on the "shadow-banning." I am totally willing to believe in any douchebaggery anyone reports from Google, but I (as anyone should) require specifics to give any credence to the writer's claims. This "article" fails to answer the first questions you'd have. For example, how did Google single you out for this invitation? The article asserts that it was all "shadow-banned" site owners, but then says the Google employee denied all shadow-banning. So how was the invitation phrased? I'm not even going to waste time breaking down the rest of the empty bullshit in this article. It's unfortunate, because I'll bet every claim made against Google is true. But I'm not going to give a single one credence without specifics. If you're too lazy to provide those, you don't deserve support.
    • CogitoCogito 2y ago
      You could maybe consider directing these questions to the author of the article? Given the context, I'm sure he'd appreciate the feedback.
      • DidYaWipe 2y ago
• CamelCaseName 2y ago
  > It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google’s. Yeah, this is a nice thought, but Google is still a ~$3T business and probably will be for at least the next decade or two. There's no karma or justice in the world, only cutthroat businessmen. And Google hires as many of those as they can.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    > There's no karma or justice in the world Life isn't fair, nature isn't fair, nothing made by man is fair. The best we've got is providing people with freedom. And cutthroat businessmen have provided all the luxuries and food you have.
• encoderer 2y ago
  > page has 22 ads > calls chief search scientist “elderly” > concludes google is dying Author if you’re reading this the answer lies within.
  • PawgerZ 2y ago
    First suggested "Trending" article: Diddy Party Planner Reveals Freak Off Requirements Yeah, I'm thinking you're right.
• danpalmer 2y ago
  > took place on October 29 > The day before, he led the group on a tour > The building was empty Monday, October 28th, was a work from home day.
• slowhadoken 2y ago
  Lmfao
• pzo 2y ago
  Google business model is mostly ads (~80% revenue) and majority of their ads are from google search (~60% of revenue). This allowed them to subsidise many other projects in the past. These days they have a lot of competition in ads scene (meta, tiktok, x, reddit, amazon) and also other are gunning at google search: perplexity, searchGPT, bing. Apple choosing OpenAI for Apple Intelligence. Amazon teaming with Anthropic for Alexa. On top of that antitrust in EU and USA. That's the reason google is killing lots of projects or loosing on many fronts these days or they aggressively try to monetise other projects (Youtube, Manifest V3.0). If they don't win in this AI race or diversify revenue/business model enshitification will continue.
  • red-iron-pine 2y ago
    the enshitification will continue regardless, because stock prices need to go up and they will eventually run out of runway. in theory, winning the AI race gives them more runway, but we've hit the limit of LLMs and there is a lot of hope that some magical Gen-AI daddy will come in and fix everything. even if they get there, will it be profitable compared to competitors? and for how long?
• bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  I'm telling you, many google employees are in a cult. They deny evidence in full confidence because thats what they're told say their work place.
• iamnotsure 2y ago
  Google procures to poison guests with dead animals and alcohol.
• seethedeaduu 2y ago
  I will just leave this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
  • meiraleal 2y ago
    I hope one day HN will evolve to stop being a nest of (x/g)ooglers downvoting anything against google. This cancer of a company and culture must go
    • self_awareness 2y ago
      It's really funny how the Internet shifts the "best company in the whole world" to a "worst company culture, needs cancelling" in just a few years. Makes me wonder about the point of current internet trends in general.
      • meiraleal 2y ago
        Monopolies aren't funny at all but people defending them are
• pikseladam 2y ago
  I visited this website, and Chrome ended up blocking around 2,500 third-party cookies. Websites like this should face consequences for such behavior—it’s like dealing with a live malware site.
  • cowboylowrez 2y ago
    yeah the website was so uniquely bad, I couldn't continue to read with firefox. links worked ok tho.
• cowboylowrez 2y ago
  Google should play fair but if its not required by law I can understand if they don't, if there are business benefits to being unfair and no requirement to be fair, why would Google change?
  • maltelandwehr 2y ago
    This is one of the few instances where Google is actually trying to do better but cannot figure out how. Hence this event where owners of affected websites were put in direct contact with the product managers and software developers working on the topic. But yeah, in general Google is often not incentivized to play fair. See the demotion of price comparison websites after Google Shopping ads were placed on top of search results.
• oglop 2y ago
  Feel bad for the author. This was clearly an information pump. They just wanted info from them. That’s it. Of course google lies. Of course they steal. It’s Google and it’s not 2007 anymore. Don’t trust them. Don’t engage with them. They just steal and harvest from others. They couldn’t even keep a simple chat app running. It’s a trash company filled with trash people who will talk down their nose at you while destroying the fabric of society. Pretty par for the course these days for anything tech though. I work in tech and can say we are awful, vampiric, and pretty much useless people who get off on having power over people through knowledge. If you approach most software engineers with that understanding they are much easier to deal with, but that doesn’t make them and the industry any less parasitic. I hate my career choices.
• smsm42 2y ago
  Two things I don't get here. First: if I am not happy with my site's placement in google (I don't care, but if I did), and I complain, nobody would even acknowledge my existence. I have no idea how I could even talk to a live human working for Google. People who get invited to "conversation" are obviously very special. In what way? What did they do to deserve that? Second: certain people built their business on certain aspects of behavior of certain technology that does not belong to them and they have zero control over. These aspects changed, and their business is suffering. I understand their frustration. But why do they expect that the technology owner would do anything to help them? They aren't their paying clients. The technology owner's interests are in no way aligned with theirs. Why do they think anything would be done? Oh, and also - why do they think anything can be done? I mean Google's codebase by now is decades of code stacked on top of older code. Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. I mean some people probably know how some parts work, but overall likely nobody knows why the ranking is such and not other. And each change shuffles things around and some pages go up and some go down. Why should anybody in Google prioritize the complaints of those who went down, and even if they did - it only would result in replacing one group of complainers with a similar group of complainers with identical complaints. It is obvious that there's no perfect ranking that would satisfy everyone, and likely at the complexity it is every change leads to unpredictable chain of rearrangements. Googlers can politely listen to those who got unlucky but they likely can't promise them anything more than that.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • trelawney101 2y ago
    I follow another creator who attended this event. Apparently, they filled out a feedback form complaining about how they were wrongfully punished by Google search. More importantly, this creator (and I assume others as well including OP) has a good social following. He has been criticizing Google's treatment of small publishers, how Google AI is stealing content, and how bad the current search results are. The criticism is gaining traction, especially after Google Search's anti-trust trial. So, I am assuming Google wanted to take some steps and thought inviting the loudest voices would help bring the criticism down. I kinda agree with your second point. These people built a business around a technology that they have no control over. But my only reservation is that said technology is Google—a huge monopoly and literally the gateway to the Internet. You can't let huge monopolies that control all entry and choke points go scott-free over these things.
• soniman 2y ago
  They're complaining because they run human written sites but they've been deranked because Google can no longer tell human content from AI. Google is now privileging sites like Forbes, USA Today and Reddit. Google wants to rank their sites but it can't distinguish their content from the ocean of AI content. They have a legitimate gripe, that Google is no longer favoring niche content sites.