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I don't know what you were thinking when you added those interjections to every other sentence but this post is condescending as hell.

javert 13y ago
I didn't take it that way, for some reason. I interpreted them as friendly, and I thought they were helpful in making what I think is a very good point.
- xarball 13y ago
  I write like that on occasion. Pretty sure it's because my thought process isn't like a linear story. It's more like a series of contextually leveled bullets -- each inner statement adding some useful (albeit sometimes unnecessary!) information to the overall discourse. I can assure you that people who write like that don't mean to be intimidating or rude. They're probably just trying to leave no gap unexplored! (Much like how programmers have to think!)
jmduke 13y ago
I honestly wasn't trying to be condescending, and apologize if it came off that way. (I'll leave the original post unedited so it doesn't look like you're crazy or anything.) That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  >That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that. It doesn't seem very loaded to me. The implication is simply that G+ is bad. Nothing more. That's a reasonable implication for someone to make. It's not a 'have you stopped beating your wife' type of question.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Or the other obvious interpretation is - they place pretty much zero value on their users (or perhaps even a negative value on those whiny privacy conscious tech-crowd users that hang out on commie un-monetized sites like HN…).
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      That's a very strange interpretation to me. They clearly care a lot about G+. So why would saying G+ > users imply that the value of users is small?
      - jkrems 13y ago
        Because the title implies that Google does not think that G+ is something users would want. There are people who genuinely like G+ and maybe even think it's awesome that YouTube now is so tightly integrated with it. So a title implying that Google did G+ because they wanted to exploit ad dollars from users without caring about the users themselves, IS a "did you stop hitting your wife"-like question.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        Because the "value" that Google generates from (toa very good first approximation) everything they do – comes from advertisers not "users". While the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the _product_" is old and overused – any pragmatic view of Google's motivations needs to take into account that in any engineering/marketing/management argument about a user-impacting decision, "but this is what the advertisers want" is going to jold _way_ more sway than "but maybe as many as a few hundred thousand privacy conscious users might (gasp!) SIGN AN ONLINE PETITION!" (And cynical-me suspects there's been a meeting going something like "Hey Sergey? Notice how there's been all these revelations about us snitching everyone's private email to the NSA?" "Yeah Larry, what of it? We seem to be getting away with it - it hasn't even registered a blip in our revenue/profit charts." "Yeah, _that's_ my point. The stupid fucking general public DON'T GIVE A DAMN. You know all those requests our advertisers keep making about tracking real identities across the entire internet? We could _so_ do that!" "Yeah, but what about our 'Don't be evil' motto?" "Sergey, do I have to threaten you with leaking your redtube browsing history _again?_")
- davidgerard 13y ago
  I think it's relevant to ask in the context of "just what the hell do you think you're doing when you get up every morning to feed this thing? You do actually have to justify that."
  - michaelt 13y ago
    If "this thing" is Google it's fairly understandable why someone would work there. It's only been in the past year or two that Google's been popularly seen as focusing on G+ to the expense of users and innovation. Internally a lot of parts of the company are probably quite similar to the Google of 2010 which everyone liked. And if they hate social networks what are they going to do, move to Facebook or Twitter?
  - mbesto 13y ago
    Actually you don't. Let's stop pretending that any you can't trace any product/service back to something "evil". "Oh that MacBook you use for work...ya it was made in a sweatshop in China. How do you justify that?"
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
konspence 13y ago
It was possibly - likely, even! - a botched use of classical rhetoric.
- igravious 13y ago
  It is quite possible - likely, even even! - that this rhetorical flourish is contagious, habit-forming and memetic.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    nah.

javert 13y ago

I didn't take it that way, for some reason. I interpreted them as friendly, and I thought they were helpful in making what I think is a very good point.

xarball 13y ago
I write like that on occasion. Pretty sure it's because my thought process isn't like a linear story. It's more like a series of contextually leveled bullets -- each inner statement adding some useful (albeit sometimes unnecessary!) information to the overall discourse. I can assure you that people who write like that don't mean to be intimidating or rude. They're probably just trying to leave no gap unexplored! (Much like how programmers have to think!)

jmduke 13y ago

I honestly wasn't trying to be condescending, and apologize if it came off that way. (I'll leave the original post unedited so it doesn't look like you're crazy or anything.) That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that.

Dylan16807 13y ago
>That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that. It doesn't seem very loaded to me. The implication is simply that G+ is bad. Nothing more. That's a reasonable implication for someone to make. It's not a 'have you stopped beating your wife' type of question.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Or the other obvious interpretation is - they place pretty much zero value on their users (or perhaps even a negative value on those whiny privacy conscious tech-crowd users that hang out on commie un-monetized sites like HN…).
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    That's a very strange interpretation to me. They clearly care a lot about G+. So why would saying G+ > users imply that the value of users is small?
    - jkrems 13y ago
      Because the title implies that Google does not think that G+ is something users would want. There are people who genuinely like G+ and maybe even think it's awesome that YouTube now is so tightly integrated with it. So a title implying that Google did G+ because they wanted to exploit ad dollars from users without caring about the users themselves, IS a "did you stop hitting your wife"-like question.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Because the "value" that Google generates from (toa very good first approximation) everything they do – comes from advertisers not "users". While the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the _product_" is old and overused – any pragmatic view of Google's motivations needs to take into account that in any engineering/marketing/management argument about a user-impacting decision, "but this is what the advertisers want" is going to jold _way_ more sway than "but maybe as many as a few hundred thousand privacy conscious users might (gasp!) SIGN AN ONLINE PETITION!" (And cynical-me suspects there's been a meeting going something like "Hey Sergey? Notice how there's been all these revelations about us snitching everyone's private email to the NSA?" "Yeah Larry, what of it? We seem to be getting away with it - it hasn't even registered a blip in our revenue/profit charts." "Yeah, _that's_ my point. The stupid fucking general public DON'T GIVE A DAMN. You know all those requests our advertisers keep making about tracking real identities across the entire internet? We could _so_ do that!" "Yeah, but what about our 'Don't be evil' motto?" "Sergey, do I have to threaten you with leaking your redtube browsing history _again?_")
davidgerard 13y ago
I think it's relevant to ask in the context of "just what the hell do you think you're doing when you get up every morning to feed this thing? You do actually have to justify that."
- michaelt 13y ago
  If "this thing" is Google it's fairly understandable why someone would work there. It's only been in the past year or two that Google's been popularly seen as focusing on G+ to the expense of users and innovation. Internally a lot of parts of the company are probably quite similar to the Google of 2010 which everyone liked. And if they hate social networks what are they going to do, move to Facebook or Twitter?
- mbesto 13y ago
  Actually you don't. Let's stop pretending that any you can't trace any product/service back to something "evil". "Oh that MacBook you use for work...ya it was made in a sweatshop in China. How do you justify that?"
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

konspence 13y ago

It was possibly - likely, even! - a botched use of classical rhetoric.

igravious 13y ago
It is quite possible - likely, even even! - that this rhetorical flourish is contagious, habit-forming and memetic.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  nah.