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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

#171

Post by carapace »

rangeofmotion wrote: post #39

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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 worked there for about two years. Afterward I described it as, "It felt like I was kidnapped by aliens and have just returned to Earth."

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.

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

#172

Post by kspacewalk »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #139

As a user, I fucking hate searching on mobile google now. I was trying to find some information on something, can't remember what, and all I got on the first 3 pages were amp links to news sites talking about the thing, but nothing to do with the info I was looking for. I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page. Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the inter…

I'm with you on some of those, but having one bar for URLs and search is a) great from the point of view of usability and, b) inevitable. There's just no real estate for two perfectly combinable text boxes on mobile devices.

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

#173

Post by chipotle_coyote »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #157
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Combined with other web metrics of the sort that non-privacy-invading analytics systems like GoAccess and OWA can deliver, there's more than enough information to determine the size of the audience, where they're located, when the most popular browsing times are, what devices they're using, and which articles are more successful than others.

It seems to me that you're arguing that publishers -- or in practice, ad networks -- are entitled to track the browsing habits of specific individuals, even if (theoretically) anonymized. If so, I rather strongly disagree.

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

#174

Post by a1369209993 »

crispinb wrote: post #162
bsimpson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I trust that they are well-intentioned people .. 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 soci…

> The corporatocracy is a pretty pure Darwinian machine for encouraging sociopathy.

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/

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

#175

Post by dependenttypes »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #119
robin_reala wrote: post #118

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.

If we end up missing out on anti-user options like the ones that you mentioned then RSS sounds great.

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

#176

Post by gothroach »

kspacewalk wrote: post #172
MrStonedOne wrote: post #139

As a user, I fucking hate searching on mobile google now. I was trying to find some information on something, can't remember what, and all I got on the first 3 pages were amp links to news sites talking about the thing, but nothing to do with the info I was looking for. I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page. Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the inter…

I'm with you on some of those, but having one bar for URLs and search is a) great from the point of view of usability and, b) inevitable. There's just no real estate for two perfectly combinable text boxes on mobile devices.

I don't know, I'm still firmly in the camp that the URL bar and search bar should be separate. When I'm typing in the URL bar, I expect it to attempt to resolve and request whatever I typed in. If I wanted to search, I'd search. This has caused annoyance with some single-word DNS names not working and performing a search instead. I'm still not entirely sure why some words will do DNS resolving and some don't.

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

#177

Post by robocat »

robin_reala wrote: post #118
thepangolino wrote: post #115

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.

There’s a better lightweight alternative format for news stories called pure HTML documents (without JavaScript).

Google could be a force for good by encouraging pure documents and down-ranking JavaScript crap.

Instead they chose AMP for lock-in.

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

#178

Post by robk »

buboard wrote: post #67
speeder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works right on chrome, and you have to sometimes pay attention to memory leaks on all their sites. I built myself a workstation with 32GB of overclocked ram... A few times I left it on overnight with a google site open (adwords or gmail), the machine became unresponsive, using all 32GB of RAM and then freezing after running out of swap... I only found out what was happening on a day I was particularly patient…

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…

We used to look at this sort of response time as a big negative in adsense front end eng land. Guess that's changed...

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

#179

Post by P_I_Staker »

BeetleB wrote: post #152
rangeofmotion wrote: post #39

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 informatio…

This is a very good response, most people who have worked in corporate America, know exactly what you're talking about.

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?"

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

#180

Post by AlexandrB »

deminature wrote: post #103
AlexandrB wrote: post #83

I like this. It reminds me of the pizza shop that gave 50% off to 1-star Yelp reviewers[1] or the ice cream truck that charges "influencers" double[2]. It's a statement of "I don't like your system, so I'm going to opt out of the whole thing even if it potentially harms me." [1] https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/ [2] https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/03/ice-cream-seller-charges-doub...

It's not going to potentially harm him, not being listed by Google is arguably equivalent to ceasing to exist. It's a nice gesture, but I cannot imagine how this is good idea in practice, regardless of how you view Google ethically.

If your blog is mostly a portfolio, there’s no reason for it to be “discoverable”. You can just link potential employers directly to it. Arguably it’ll be a net benefit because it might cut down on recruiter spam.

Alternatively, maybe this problem can be solved by bringing back web rings :P

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