The difference is trust:
These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.
The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:
https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...
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Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.
The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too.
That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.
Couple of points from someone who survived working for the Evil Empire when the entire technology world wanted to see "M$," "Micr0Squ1sh," "MacroSloth," and many other clever puns crushed under the weight of first the Department of Justice and later Netscape/Mozilla and Apple and Google.
First, you get used to it, especially faster once you realize it's not personal. The people making the comments are just seeing your company and what you do from the outside. They don't know your personal or professional reasons and, sometimes, rationalizations for those decisions. But you still really should come back and read the words and maybe even rebut them when you feel like it. Why? Because...
Second, there's a reason people are making these comments. Are they good reasons? Maybe. Are they your customers and do they, quite literally, hold the fate of your paycheck and continued good fortune and success in your hands? Damn right. Hiding from the negative feedback is just as much a "bubble" as negative feedback is on HN. You know what sucks worse than negative words on Hacker News? Negative words spoken at friendly social gatherings by people who aren't emotionally and financially invested in the technology industry because once those happens, your company is SCREWED.
You can't stop people having the feelings they do about your employer but you can ask why those feelings exist and what you can do to change them. Sometimes there's nothing but, often, there really is something.
That post was both an answer to the OP's question and a refutal of the idea that the only way here was evil.
I think it's important for people to recognize an echo chamber and to realize its ramifications. At the same time, I agree that it's important for employees to understand how their products/actions will be perceived (even those of us who don't work on projects that get written about here).
Thanks for sharing. =)
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm
developers into using their framework, or to funnel all
traffic through Google
TBH it doesn't matter what their intent was, it matters what the results of their actions were.The packaging thing doesn't seem like a "fix" to the URL issue so much as a "let's add a feature to Chrome that lies to users and then make it a web standard".
How? If they had gone the Apple News route of making publishers integrate directly with them, that would have been consolidating power. Instead, they ask publishers to output pages that any link aggregator can use, and many other link aggregators do use.
I don't question the intentions of the team. I question the intentions of Google.
> for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem
Yes, which is a thing I object to even more than I object to AMP.
But, truthfully, here's my real problem with AMP: I genuinely hate AMP formatted pages, and they are increasingly being foisted on me. Every time I have to manually copy/edit/paste a URL to get the real page, I get a little bit angry, and I'm having to do that increasingly often. If there were some way I could opt out of getting AMP links, I wouldn't be quite so emotional about it.
There are a small handful of things about the web that make my suspect that I'll generally just stop using the web at some point, and AMP is one of those things.
Regardless of their intent, Google IS strong-arming publishers, by:
* Pushing publishers to do something effectively none of them want to do (and making them pay for it)
* Limiting lucrative Google search real estate if they don't
* Not having any publishers or content makers on the technical steering committee of AMP (3/7 are Google employees, another 3 are platform people who exploit content (Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest)
You know how I know that Google is strong-arming publishers?
Because none of them would implement AMP if they weren't being strong-armed.
Logically speaking, if publishers wanted to make their sites faster, and considered it cost effective, they would have already done it.
The simplest way to do this is to boost the rank of small-foot-print/fast-loading websites. That would mean websites with little-to-no-ads-or-shitty-JS-scripts will get ranked higher up. Tweak the base offset till the required performance numbers are reached.
Why on earth would you assume this, so obviously contradicted by the evidence?
The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid
The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy. It's not a matter of 'everyone' being malign, it's that we live in a society (which often, and tellingly, mislabels itself an 'economy') carefully designed to place the worst people in positions of power.
Most people understand this now (even if they're not sure what to do about it yet). It's perhaps unsurprising that the news takes a while to filter through to those benefitting most.
Molochian[0], not Darwinian. And it's not just placing the worst people in positions of power, but ensuring that people in any kind of decision-making position are the worst people they personally can be.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google.
Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP).
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less.
I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them.
For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.
To work at Google has to be an ethical decision by now. If you are not at Google internally working against its evil tactics subverting it wherever you can and work against its taking over the web, then you are probably working for the evil machinery. For an entity spying on people wherever it gets the chance, seducing uneducated people into helping them to track as many people as they can online and shred their privacy, while trying to come up with "new standards" all the time, trying to make others jump on the bandwagon to unfree Internet.
So in general, a person with ethical concerns should avoid working for Google, no matter how good the pay.
Going out of your way to work for a mega-corp like Google is unnecessary.
It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off.
I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions.
How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?
Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot.
> engineers still sign up i
A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.
The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people.
Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy:
One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left.
No one mentioned it.
He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work.
I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.
I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.
A) Runs out of funds
B) Ruins its prestige by accepting lower quality people
I personally wouldn't bet on B), however once ad money dries up, it's possible Google we know will just be a Yahoo of future era.
1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy.
(I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more).
2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this.
From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace.
The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades.
I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees.
Local effects matter more.
Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.
Also, there's some "just following orders" and "what could I possibly do about it" mentality. Bad things tend to happen to "troublemakers", and your only option is often to leave; but you're comfortable, and there's no guarantee that the next company will be any better, so you start asking "how bad is it?"