When someone now says doing something was a mistake, I sure hope the statement is in stark contrast with their sentiments at the time they were doing it. Otherwise, why do it?
Google+ broke our trust
121–130 of 251 posts
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name one organization of 50,000 people that is collectively smart?
Large markets are very smart. Smart is not necessarily nice. Without nice, incremental returns to smart may be negative. Furthermore, the terminal goal of a market is to give some group exactly what it wants. Such groups are often large, and their wants are defined by how their members act -- usually when others are not looking. A market does not care what anyone says they want. It's a wonder the damn things aren't b…
I liked the original wording better. This is yet another failure of Congress, not google.
Sorry for posting libertarian downvote-bait.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#123> With Google+, it became clear that we were all little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data. What data is allegedly being sold, and who is Google selling it to?
I don't see anywhere where the article alleges that the data is for sale, but that it is saleable. One way of capitalizing on that, without selling the data, is to sell access to advertise on the basis of that data. The point is not to claim that Google is selling our data, but just another way of stating that we're the product, not the customer.
The point is to try to lump Google together with companies that literally do sell customer data, e.g., credit card providers, supermarkets, stores at the mall, magazine publishers... They literally sell your non-anonymized, non-aggregated data, period.
It's an unfair lumping because what Google does is a far cry from that.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is a big difference. As ubiquitous and powerful as Google is, the US government is vastly more powerful, and I think it's vastly more dangerous without accountability.
Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against priva…
Devil's advocate: they imprison a lot of their own citizens (more per capita than any other country) and play empire across the world.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hey, I can find videos of people angry at about anything that exists. Actually, you can't, and your post is a bit rediculous. For "features of websites that are widely used", how many of them are part of youtube crying videos? Probably ~0.0001% and it certainly could be useful to call one out.
See, this is why Google wanted real names on Youtube. We've all read Youtube comments. They are the single worst comments on the Internet. Typically racist, usually mean, often obscene. Google really, through all this, just wanted to make the comments better on YouTube, I think. They heard everyone bitching and figured this was a way to make things less caustic. It didn't help, though...
So, all this clever people working for Google thought about "making YouTube comments better" and all they came up was "kill anonymity!" and "name and shame! Time honored method to solve deviations from group think!"? Really? Oh well ..
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#126I jumped on board early when I received an invite. I despised FB and was looking for for something that might actually resemble the tribe.net model of freedom and anonymity. Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly. Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for so…
I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.
I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#127Re: Google+ broke our trust
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add Google Buzz, Orkut, Google Wave, Google Talk, Hangouts. Its like Google is trying everything and hoping something would stick.
You don't see Apple making that. They focus on few things and make them great.
My apple developer account name has @mac.com in it. Apple does plenty of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#129> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched
I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous.
It's one of those many weird cases where you sit there, hands on your desk, mouth agape looking at some Google property that was fucked over by the G+ project and just ask yourself "doesn't anybody at Google use this garbage?". Because the issues are so immediate and so obvious, it's impossible that nobody raised some red flags.
Which leaves two possibilities:
- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)
- Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.
The first scenario is hard to believe because it presumes mass and gross incompetence on behalf of most of the employees at Google. But I know googlers, I've been interviews by Google, I've had various interactions with people from Google, and most of them just seem like normal folks from a variety of backgrounds.
As more and more leaks out it sounds like the second scenario is where it's at, and the question is why? Was it just some dumb headed attempt to extract any money possible for the major shareholders by turning the brand into garbage? Or was it just an honest attempt at unifying the properties, just managed at an absolutely amateurish level?
It's all so senseless and stupid and now everything is broken.
The sad thing is, this is something I see all the time, one hopelessly broken pet project is carried by the good idea fairy to some senior manager, and they being a cascade of failures across the rest of the company on something they probably have convinced themselves is just a big gamble with lots of upside. By the time the damage is done and widely recognized, the exec is out the door on their golden parachute leaving the remaining veterans to pick up the pieces and unfuck things. Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. The only remediation is a long unfucking process and some possible minor impact on share price, meaning he can only buy 2 300' yachts instead of 2 350' yachts.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the underhanded thing that it did? If you put your real name AND sensitive info into a public system, especially one you do not understand, what do you trust will happen? What does Brin's confession of not being the best person to create a social network have to do with it?
From where do you get the idea that the author is complaining about anything being underhanded ? Brin's "confession" has something to do with it because he was instrumental to creating it in the first place, and someone with the power to correct many of the problems if he wanted to. Instead he's washed his hands of it, and left a segment of his users in the lurch.
The author is complaining about losing trust.