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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 craz

by 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]

by jmduke 13y ago

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]