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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

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

#151
post #132

Go to Google, seach "Dear Google, I'm Blocking You From My Website" (with our without the quotes). You will find this very page and other link-sharing networks. Go to Duck duck go and search "Dear Google, I'm Blocking You From My Website". Without quotes the results are nonsense. With quotes you get 0 results.

That may be partially a timing thing. One hour after your post, this page (HN) turns up if you use quotes. Now, I agree that it would seem that a smart algorithm would automate the case of "if it shows up on HN, add the source link to the results too." Especially since Gabriel is on here IIRC.

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

#152

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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…

Disclaimer: I do not work at FAANG. Having said that, if you are sincere in trying to understand, consider the following:

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.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships, and given that RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.

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

#156

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…

What a bullshit, PR-speak comment. Let's compare this to digital piracy. Let's say I make a game and host it on my website. I am giving the game for free. Now maybe I have some ads in the game, maybe not. I want to get some exposure, so I ask a gaming site to link to my game (Google). At this point, everything is cool. I have a cool game, the gaming site has something to show people. Well, the gaming site is big busi…

> So please, tell me again how AMP is "democratizing technology".

Your whole rant ignored the fact that people other than Google get to use AMP pages. That's how.

> So what started as a partnership between content and distribution, where everyone is happy, has degraded into the distribution channel completely owning the audience and taking every bit of control from the creators of the content.

This was always the case. AMP doesn't change the fact that the search engine's ranking determines how well the publishers do.

> users ALSO can't opt out of this - they can't even get to my site to download the game anymore even if they want to.

That's a problem with the search engine's ranker, not with AMP. If a publisher publishes separate mobile and desktop pages but cripples the mobile page in a way that makes it useless, a good search engine should prefer to show the desktop page even to mobile users. The same should happen with AMP. If the search engine doesn't rank properly, users will choose a different search engine. For example, there is a broad range of queries where I prefer AMP results because they load instantly, and I want them to appear first. If there is some feature in a web page that I want that I know won't appear in an AMP page, I will skip the AMP results, and the search engine should update its ranking model accordingly.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships, and given that RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.

> Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships

Sponsorship is a poor substitute for subscriptions and ads.

> RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.

No, the aggregator that shows the RSS results has no standard way of reporting to the publisher who viewed which RSS entries.

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

#158
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be amazed how easy it is to rationalize such concerns away for $250k (or more) per year. The first sentence of the internal response of a Googler will be, "You don't understand."

. . . and the marketability and prestige of having Google on your resume.

Personally I would rather consider this to be a smudge on a resume, because for me it means, that that person worked for something, that is known to not be a force of good any longer, probably for money or wannabe fame "Hey, look, I worked at Google! Look how good I am!". Maybe it will work with HR people, but personally in my eyes Google on the resume disqualifies you from being hired.

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.

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

#160
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I AM using chrome! Let me try again: Opening adsense: 6 seconds to load a useless dashboards with 3 extra boxes "we thought you might find this card interesting" I want a sites report Clicking on "reports"... after 5 seconds the left menu loads, while the report on the right still loads... I click "sites" on the menu... The report on the right loads, but it is the default report, not the sites report. I have to click…

> Oh, they say my website has mobile access issues? But it is a bootstrap website optimized for mobile. Clicking on fix issue .... checking live version ... your site is mobile ready.. Same here. That a company with that amount of brainpower fails to deliver the very basic tools to partake in their market really baffles me.

From talking to a few ex-googlers, a lot of issues come from heavy incentives (and upwards momentum in employment level/compensation) tied to shipping a product/tool, while very little is tied to the maintenance/improvement of something existing.

When combined with the ease of lateral movement (jumping from one team to another) means that a product gets shipped, then a lot of the team members jump onto the next shiny thing while that product now gets stagnant/buggy since it now has a vastly reduced team.

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