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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

111–120 of 215 posts

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're people who value the rewards reaped by working there more. The prestige from working at a business like this can make positive impacts far beyond the period of your employment there. Heck, just getting to in person interviews are statistically rare and an indication of exceptional ability.

When the morals of a company with a supposed high value of prestige becomes bankrupt (morally), when does the prestige of working there diminish? Ever?

Well, essentially, once Google either:

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.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#112

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: 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…

> 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.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#113
post #18

Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

That's nonsensical. Google already has their content.

If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every link aggregator that implements an AMP cache (including Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, etc.) will be able to instantly load your pages for users. If I start my own link aggregator, I don't need to have the clout of a Facebook, Apple, or Google to get publishers to enable instant loading from my site — I can cache the AMP pages they have already published.

It's the same as publishing bus routes according to Google Maps's standard feed format (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/) . I publish once in that format, and not only do my bus routes show up better in Google, but they also show up in all other mapping applications that ingest that format, without me having to do any integration with them.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#114

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

It's possible to get otherwise ethical people to write unethical code by telling them that "it's to make the Web faster" and "it's 'open'" (even if it isn't truly open technology). It also seems like parts of Google are starting to rot from group think.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#115
post #18

Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every…

AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one.

AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every…

AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one. AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.

> AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore.

Wrong. AMP is a solution to web pages not loading instantly, not a solution to web pages not being lightweight. If you want to prerender links above the fold without deanonymizing them to the publisher, you will come up with AMP pretty much exactly.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#117
post #32

I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: * Keeps punishing my site both in organic rank and AdWords rank (thus price) for not being mobile, despite my site being intended to be viewed by engineers with big scr…

Maybe you can reach out to specific youtubers to have them do their own ads in their broadcasts?

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every…

AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one. AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.

And worse, there’s already a lightweight alternative format for news stories called RSS.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one. AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.

And worse, there’s already a lightweight alternative format for news stories called RSS.

Which takes away even more control from the publisher (no analytics, A/B testing support, monetization options, etc.) and doesn't support prerendering above the fold. I can't imagine the backlash RSS would get if Google came up with that.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#120

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: 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…

    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".

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