An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion • Hacker News Board

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#101

Post by csee » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #7

willvarfar wrote: post #5

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…

I wonder if the behavior of the largest tech companies is a cause or an effect of their size. Is unethical behavior pushing companies to the top of the food chain? Or is it that other companies feel more ethical simply because they don't have as many chances to engage in unethical behavior? If it's the latter, all the push to split the companies is for nothing and we should just consider "ethics at scale" to be an un…

I think it's just that there's more scrutiny and the cases we hear about are more in the news. Smaller companies, and especially individuals who run businesses, do plenty of dodgy crap that nobody hears about and it never makes the news.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#102

Post by mrweasel » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

iamevn wrote: post #76

mrweasel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only two of those I’m pretty sure could survive on their own is search and YouTube. Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.

I worked on GCP until recently. I remember celebrating (in-office) our product within GCP surpassing one million dollars of revenue per day. GCP would be fine.

Revenue can be made easily enough, profit is harder. The latest number I saw online suggest that GCP lose more than one billion dollar per year.

Edit: losing $1.2B on a revenue of just under $4B. That only work because ads are paying for the construction of datacenter and infrastructur.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#103

Post by tdeck » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #94

willvarfar wrote: post #5

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…

It's almost like there is nothing special about Microsoft. The thing Google and Microsoft have in common is they are large organisations of humans. So maybe the answer is to work for yourself or a small organisation.

Specifically they are large hierarchical organizations designed to extract wealth from value created by employees, within a context of constant competition with other such organizations. The specific incentives matter a lot when examining these effects and it's important to not just chalk it all up to human nature.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#104

Post by zffr » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

mattowen_uk wrote: post #71

mikeytown2 wrote: post #2

Thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451619916994396164.html

Thank you! Why DO people insist on posting essays as 1,001 tweets!? The mind boggles.

I think because Twitter is where their audience is. As annoying as it is to read on Twitter, posting it as multiple tweets also allows people to like/retweet individual and multiple parts of the essay which probably increases the essay’s overall reach/engagement.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#105

Post by playpause » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #59

willvarfar wrote: post #5

I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…

Being a xoogler used to be something to put in your profile bio, and basically an instant hire if in your CV. Now it almost carries a stigma.

I think this is over-imaginative. It’s still an instant hire almost anywhere. People still talk about ex-googlers like they’re celebrities when they join your company. They can write a book and the first thing the publisher will say on the back is “Since working at Google…”. I’m not saying this won’t ever change, but it will take a while.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#106

Post by londons_explore » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

p49k wrote: post #92

londons_explore wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would know... Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90". You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is a…

You only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it impossible to have enough information to know if the auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).

> Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner

Citation needed.

See https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download...

The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message contains this info for all first price auctions.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#107

Post by throwaway29303 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

  Online advertising is enormous. Google's Exchange process processes 11bn online ad spaces / day.

We can now understand the motivation behind Google's wish to move the whole internet ecosystem (QUIC, BBR, AMP et al) into a huge optimized and abstracted Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system.

From the outside people will see this as something new, shiny and as an improvement (which it is!) but at the same time they'd profit off of it.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#108

Post by zo1 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #91

ttiurani wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about shareholder value added. A public company or a VC-backed private company can focus on making creative nice widgets and services for only a limited time before growth inevitably stalls. After that (unless the management can and wants to screw over their owners) they will need to look elsewhere for more profits.

It's about capitalism, which rots the spirit of everything it touches. Money is the most dangerous behaviour-altering drug. It shouldn't be a surprise that a system which rewards sociopathy and discourages kindness and empathy keeps generating sociopathic behaviours.

Capitalism has always been about greed, and I say that as a profound advocate of it. Its very convenient to blame capitalism now for stuff we don't like when I'd argue we knew all along about greed being a core part of capitalism. Convenient in that it somehow absolves government out of it, and hides how we as the supposed democratic participants have been utterly powerless to direct the state towards reigning in these supposedly greedy/evil capitalist companies.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#109

Post by jerrygoyal » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #39

richardfey wrote: post #32

The biggest findings in this thread are (for me) these two: - gTrade and Bernanke program - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive

> - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive Hasn't this been clear since long time ago? For as long as I can remember, the message on the backup screen for Whatsapp on iOS has said that backups are not encrypted.

I don't remember it was the case on Android at least.

Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion

#110

Post by jerrygoyal » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 9:47 AM UTC

bserge wrote: post #11

GMail's mark as spam feature has become "report spam". Meaning, you just report something as spam to Google. They decide what it actually is. And indeed, it works perfectly. I've marked Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/Freelancer/YouTube as spam and they always come back to the Inbox.

there's an option to "Block" instead.. works perfectly.