There are quite a few humans at Google, both in HN and at twitter. Sadly all of them that I talked with seemed like people that I would not want to interact with again.
Warning: contains snark. Not all googlers are bad but I am grumpy. There's now one you despise so much as the one you loved that betrayed you and all that.
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Busily making sure it
feels even more lame to try to give them feedback? Or wondering what thriving ecosystem they can destroy next after
- destroying rss,
- participating in destroying federated messaging,
- trying to kill all independent browser engines and replace it with a nerfed on that "sadly" can't block ads
Some ideas:
Maybe they can come up with a more opaque way to shut down peoples accounts?
Or maybe a more sneaky way to befriend the Chinese government?
> It is also annoying how all google employees on HN suddenly disappear on threads that talk about the new cool unethical thing that google decided to do.
We're here and do pay attention. Plenty of Googlers write comments criticizing the company here.
Like it or not, Google is a part of the Open Internet.
Example: AMP was created to protect the free flow of information which was being silo'd into apps. Consumers of news were abandoning the open (mobile) web due to the godawful performance and advertising issues. Google saw the existential threat of everything being locked down within Facebook and Reddit. Is this preferable?
How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely curious.
Dejanews was the seed material for Google Groups, any profit derived from that (ads) was from content posted to Usenet by people who never intended for it to be used for that.
From G side they gained users interacting with 50K+ topics and occasionally posting views, sentiment etc. (and likely all Deja News historic interactions)
In addition to the search history, email content, geo location etc. G have for many people
So I do think they have an obligation either a) to make the whole archive available for anyone or b) maintain it properly.
Properly means restoring the fast UI from around 2004.