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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

Why did these contractors do that?

It's not like they sweared on forums or watched porn. Vandalizing OSM is an effort-intensive task. You dont't do that because of lack of control. You do that because you were told to, or motivated to in any other way.

I don't see how they could do that accidentally; therefore we should seek why they did that; who knew what they were doing; and how it could happen at all.

What were their job? What were they brought in for?

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Say I bring you in to help promote certain properties versus rivals X, Y and Z. Now pretend you lack a good sense of ethics. Think of a few obvious ways to help my product beat these other products. I'm sure you can come up with something plausible that's similarly lousy.

A company I worked for once hired a guy to help them build up a social media profile and agreed on a pay scheme similar to "$X for every 100 followers/friends". He followed every follow-back spammer he could find and got paid rather well for gaining about 20 actual readers. I guarantee you this was not what the company wanted, but it's easy to create perverse incentives if you're not careful.

But this is just the illustration of a high level management issue on a simpler level. As soon as there are some ultimate measurement tools in place the context is neglected an people focus on gaming up the numbers.

That's certainly plausible, but given everything we hear and know about Google screens its employees, is it indicative of a problem that their contractors pull off stuff like this, even if it wasn't condoned by Real Google Employees? If you hold your employees to high standards, why not hold your contractors to the same standards?

i think that's what the original commenter said.

did google hired them to 'overcome OSM in that region?' or to 'improve google maps?'

I couldn't disagree more. Plenty of people act like assholes all on their own without any encouragement.

I couldn't repeat more a thing that you should have read while browsing thread: It's a very peculiar kind of vandalism: sneaky, personally unrewarding and affecting a niche service. Trolls like to do bold, rewarding and big moves.

NO.

The trolls that you notice do big bold things; the bad trolls are the ones you notice.

Good trolling is a dead art; the single post that started a 400 message flame filled cross-posted thread that caused everyone to kill-file everyone else? You just don't get that anymore.

It is very easy to run into forum and post guro and yell obscenities.

Making long lasting subtle changes is hard. But that is why it's fun, for a small number of trolls.

(I should state that I don't think this is the case with the contractor; I think they're just stupid and misguided, and that Google needs to start thinking about how they provide oversight for this kind of stuff.)

"Good Trolling" example here: www.promotinglinux.com

Someone went through the trouble of creating an entire website for this. There's even trolling in the HTML code of the pages.

That's dedication to the art of trolling!

Reminiscent of adequacy.org

I don't think it's terribly peculiar. Spend some time on 4chan (or better yet, don't). Perhaps you only notice the trolls who did big, bold moves?

4chan (or more accurately, /b/) is irrelevant. it's just a forum for pre-teens and teens to shout obscenities at each other. rarely a good pun emerges. usually surrounded by porn and gore.

anonymous and other small groups do troll, real trolling, occasionally... and attributing it to 4chan's /b/ is just the cherry on top of the cake for said trolling.

I'm not sure, and I'm a Google fanboi, so don't just take my word, but this is just a theory: maybe the contractors had some kind of contract where they would get compensation for getting more users or for conversion. Something in that area.

That is a possibility but requires a short-term reward for all that activity. Hurting OSM that nor terribly many people use yet is unlikely to deliver.

So: what were their achievements tied to?

Suppose that you're sales person tasked with selling the new enterprise Google Maps service, and paid at least partially on commission. In a number of calls your leads mention how they're switching to OSM instead. You get the bright idea that you could SHOW your client how OSM is inferior because it contains incorrect information. Maybe you even incorporate it into your call routine: Look up where the lead works, edit OSM near their location, during the call point out to them how OSM is wrong.

This can certainly be true, but it also requires a process that, if exists, points that somebody should have known.

Could just be common vandalism. People do it with lots of things, (graffiti on the street, abusive blog comments, defacing wikipedia). Just because they did it, doesn't mean Google paid for it.

I don't know terrible many vandals who would enjoy breaking OSM (that not terrible many people use yet) of very distant lands by breaking it in subtle ways.

Vandals usually do bright, bold things. Deface, draw over, swear. What they did here speaks either sabotage or personal hatred. I guess there are particularly devious people, but why a sizable number of those would suddenly contract for google india?

This is simply not true. As someone who was very destructive growing up, I can tell you that it's fun to destroy things simply for the sake of destroying things. You may not understand it, but that's because you don't have that destructive tendency.

As I've mentioned in other comments, I've vandalized wikis before. I did it because it was funny to people standing around. It doesn't involve much imagination to see someone opening up OpenStreetMap, clicking "reverse direction of street", and then gathering up some nearby coworkers to show. "Hey guys, watch this! Reverse! Reverse!" "Hahah, 8th Avenue doesn't go that way! Hilarious!"

Would you do a hundred of such changes over a time span without telling anyone? Would you do that in a map of city located on the other side of planet?

That's psychologically improbable and becomes gravely improbable if there were more than one vandal.

Well, I'll tell you this. There's no corporate mandate at Google telling employees that it's OK to vandalize OpenStreetMap. In fact, we even sponsor OSM as a Google Summer of Code project:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code

If you want some "Google is evil" fodder, this is not it. Sorry.

I simply don't think you understand what people are willing to do. I know many people who would play Wikipedia Jenga - you edit Wikipedia with bigger and more ridiculous edits and the person who gets the article reverted is the "loser". It's not ridiculous to assume that they could be playing a similar game with OSM, especially if they viewed it as "competitor".

I don't believe Google is stupid enough to advocate vandalizing an opponent's products.

Given that there are 6 billion people in existance, it's quite possible that there are some complete ass holes.

a "sizable number" being two?

If there were just two of them, google should mention that fact and provide some background on why they did that. Of course it makes the issue much less severe.

It's in the first sentence of the linked article.

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