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Comment by pb7 | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is incredibly biased against Google. There was recently an informal survey[0] in "Tech Twitter" (i.e. other technical people) regarding opinions about the top tech companies and Google scored second highest overall behind Apple, with something like 85-90% positivity overall across different questions. Facebook, for reference, was something like 35-40%.

[0] https://coda.io/@sriram-krishnan/2020-state-of-the-tech-indu...

Edit: n=3017, 93% are in tech industry.

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The universal experience is that Hacker News is incredibly biased against whatever you happen to favor.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Agree as a rule and even in this particular case, but I think the Hacker News sentiment is closer to the sentiment elsewhere for companies like Facebook and Uber. I do not favor Facebook at all, for example, but defend them equally in instances where I would defend others. I do favor Uber (or at least tech-enabled ride sharing companies in general) but think the common criticism here is warranted even though I do not feel nearly as strongly one way or another. It's a mixed bag.

Edit: Why was my GP moved to top level? It made much more sense as a response to the comment questioning the true sentiment.

Or perhaps those on your twitter are incredibly biased towards Google? Twitter is repeatedly presented as a general sentiment test, yet this is just not true.

Also, what on Earth is "Tech Twitter"? My forays (now abandoned as fruitless) into twitter show it as dispersed as any other social media group - if not more so.

I can't imagine anyone being able to run a cross-sectional survey of 'tech' over twitter without massive buy in from either twitter or dozens of disparate groups who would have no interest in measuring tech giant positivity scores.

Those twitter results seem in line with the general population.

Approval ratings by brand:

Amazon: 91%

Google: 90%

YouTube: 90%

Netflix: 89%

Microsoft: 89%

Sonos: 86%

Apple: 81%

Slack: 78%

Instagram: 72%

Facebook: 71%

Twitter: 61%

The reality is that these are very popular companies.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gfN9bwxFARhIiyxEkQfkVKaf2yc=...

That's a vox media survey weight heavy towards vox readers.

Who are Vox readers? Rich under 35. It would make sense why this group identifies with major brands as a status symbol. I would love to see what people over 35 and/or make average income or less think.

"Vox Media's properties target educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old"

This is incorrect. The survey was conducted in December with 1,123 people, nationally representative of the US. The sample error is ± 3 percent at a 95 percent level of confidence.

This is so obvious it's painful. People obviously trust google, otherwise they wouldn't be switching their emails to google, doing all their private searching on google.

They willing give google EVERY bit of personal info about their lives (between emails, search history and phone / android).

When firefox defaulted to yahoo, most folks (70%+?) switched to google - on an OPEN SOURCE / freedom focused platform like firefox! Think of the normal population the preference for google is going to be even higher.

Vox isn't a reliable source for this sort of thing.

There are research companies and financial publications that do a more thorough, and reputable, job.

This was commissioned by The Verge and conducted by an outside polling firm. The survey was conducted in December with 1,123 people, nationally representative of the US. The sample error is ± 3 percent at a 95 percent level of confidence. Feel free to link another survey, this was just the most recent one I could find. There are similar results from surveys in 2017 and 2018.

The biggest anti-Google sentiment on this site is always that they keep shutting down services, but the entire reason they do so is that those services were never popular among "normal" users. Such users also care a lot less about online privacy and data sharing.

Yeah, "Tech Twitter" is just whoever follows the guy who made the survey and whoever follows them who saw the retweets. The idea that this survey is anything serious is ridiculous.

I think I was pretty clear that it is an informal survey. With that said, I don't see how that survey data is any more biased one way or another than Hacker News, which was my initial assertion. I didn't make a statement that Twitter is correct and Hacker News is wrong, just that whatever OP perceives to be reality here is far from the case elsewhere.

>93% are in tech industry.

no offense but is it surprising that the people who likely draw paychecks from those companies like them? The question is framed as "does tech company X do good for the world?"

Presumably if you're working in tech you're already self-selected to agree with that question or you're likely hypocritical enough to answer yes anyway. Seems like asking people in the oil industry if oil company X is good for the world

Did you actually look at the data? Quite a few of the big companies received very negative opinions, much more negative than I would have blindly guessed.

Vast majority of people on Hacker News also draw paychecks from these companies or similar and the sentiment is vastly different.

I don't know, I work in tech and I think FB,G,etc are pretty nasty. While they may have started out as a net-positve, I think the results are now a net-negative from advertising and/or social media centric companies. Apple maybe making us pay premiums for everything it sells, but I still think that's at least one or two tiers below the levels of evil from the others.

Common people have not the time to de-google, nor the interest. Privacy is only a techies concern.

Yes, this is mostly HN crowd or very specifically HN crowd last couple of years. Something happened at that time period, after that I have noticed HN became less insightful, less interesting and typical internet beating-the-dead-horse conversation. Every single day there would be at least few articles against Google. Even the articles that are not related to Google, people bring up Google and then start the whole beating-the-dead-horse charade again.

I noticed that around the time the old press started pushing out articles against Google because it was threatening their livelihood. That made sense. However, the general sentiment seems to have changed in the meantime. Have the HN demographics changed? Or just people's opinions? Or just they got older?

I do remember the highly technical discussions around Google product launches (especially in GCE space) but it's been pretty dry for a while now, most of the Google news these days seems to me to be trying to overstate first world problems and coming with first world solutions to them.

And another thing I noticed: similar to how on Slashdot there was a significant change in mentality and opinions around H1b programs and immigrants many years ago, I've started to see a change here too. What used to be a place where immigration was seen as a largely positive force it's slowing turning into a "it's OK sometimes but there's all these problems with it". Curious to see if it will turn into current day Slashdot opinion of "close borders, don't let any immigration for technical jobs". Is that also part of aging?

The objective reality exists and there are legitimate reasons for people wanting to have nothing to do with this company. Not everything is a bias.

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