The title is misleading. The whole presentation is critical of Google and FB. The conference was fine with the slides that criticized them for the way they do business with their partners. They asked for the removal of the slides that go into wider politics, like trying to blame FB/Google for political extremism and income inequality. Totally reasonable decision IMO.
Nah dude. Most of his criticisms, most Googlers would probably agree with him. It was probably because he called Google "unreliable". That's one of the few words that will actually hurt the monster. It's also not true. It's sort of like shouting "The Golden Gate Bridge is falling down!" on the radio.
How is it not true? They will terminate your account (like Amazon drops sellers), without any warning, and that's it.
There are stories about this right here on HN almost each day. (Yes this naturally only affects a small number of their accounts, but it's not negligible, and it's the exact opposite of a well managed and understood risk which would be needed for reliability.)
Did we forget the countless services Facebook and Google have dramatically altered or killed over the years that can never be forked or restarted elsewhere because they are proprietary?
The only services we should assume are reliable are the ones that directly generate profits. I expect neither company will shut down their ad selling systems but everything else I would not consider reliable.
I'm a little confused on the reason this talk was cancelled. It seems that nearly the entire talk is critical of Facebook/Google, but the organizer only complains about a handful of slides. It looks like they were fine with claims of FB/G stealing content, purposefully optimizing for addiction, etc. and it was just the "political misinformation" portion that caused offense. Is the organizer defensive of big tech, or do they have some other political agenda that was somehow threatened by his point (or the specific examples given in support)?
I have no clue why an organizer would try and edit (censor?) a speaker's presentation. They were invited for a reason, let them talk! The audience is perfectly capable of coming up with their own conclusion about whether the speaker's points are valid.
And if you think they're brazenly lying, then just uninvite them.
Because, as is the case here, you are inviting person A to speak about topic B, because your audience thinks they may have something interesting to say about topic B, and not because they want to hear about person A's thoughts on topic C.
Ask the speakers to submit an abstract beforehand, during call for speakers phase. And pick those which you like. Not after the talk has been confirmed.
This editorializing is the equivalent of oppressive regimes inviting a famous band but asking them not to play their "controversial" songs, and the banning them with the obligatory surprised pikachu face when they do. It's not government censorship but it's the chilling effect of G & FB having too much control already.
(Or if the problem was that the organizer found those claims unsubstantiated, they should have cancelled the talk, or could have simply put up a big warning before and after the talk saying that this is the speaker's opinion, not necessarily 100% shared by the organizers ...)
Re-reading the organizer's email, I can seee their point. Politics could turn to be a blackhole topic that absorb all discussion energy, and then no one would leave the talk thinking about the "evil big tech" topic any more...
If I were the author's friend I'd tell him this, he threatened to derail his own presentation including the screenshots of political news.
The 1% of websites taking 98% of traffic should be alarming, but the focus-stealing headline there is "Income Inequality". If he had not put that as a headline and just made a throwaway oral comment (writing it down got him in trouble, and as I said, steals the focus!), it might've been more effective.
That's a good point: it is easy to derail with politics, I agree. Though living in a politically polarized country I just ignore political examples. Yeah, the guy is lefty, righty, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative. Ok, so what can I learn from him about the topic at hand? I don't have to become gay just because he's using Gay Pride backgrounds :)
Not only is Twitter hard to follow, but these slides are poorly written. After a few reads I still don’t understand what he’s trying to say in #3 on the first slide. And after scrolling down the glance at the rest, I’m not sure I care. Seems like the author just wants attention.
My guess on "When you build brand equity elsewhere, the duopoly become better channels":
I think it means "Don't build your brand on a Facebook business page or Youtube Channel. Build it on your own site (or whatever), and promote it on Facebook and Youtube."
Absolutely one of the slides is offensive. If it illustrated left-side people in such cartoonish caricature, the presenter would surely get the point. It's amazing that in the day of 'microaggressions', such blindness could exist.
I read it the same way as you. I think the slides were deemed problematic because they are inflammatory towards right-leaners or some other group, not towards Google/Facebook powers that be. The acceptable slides are just as critical of G/FB.
That would make sense, though. The conference may be comfortable with slides that are critical of FB/Google from the perspective of doing business with them, but not be interested in a talk that goes into more abstract and inflammatory political issues that don't have a direct business focus.
Everything Rand was going to present is true. If you're building your marketing efforts around the benevolent algorithmic dictators of Google and Facebook...you're not really building a business. You're sharecropping and building a house of cards. One algorithm change from the overlords and your business dries up overnight.
The fact that organizers are self-censoring their talks to avoid offending Google and Facebook is evidence alone that these companies have way too much power.
My favorite part is where he points out the massive mistake of everybody who drove their customers to a Facebook page and told them to "like" it. Facebook then disinter-mediated these customer relationships and cut business page reach to near zero (0.09% as he shows in one of the slides). These businesses ended up growing Facebook's business more than their own.
Well wherever he's presenting at doesn't care that the presentation is critical of google/facebook, they care about google/facebook might react. As long as he doesn't reveal their identity they don't care about the streisand effect.
I know a lot of people make their money on here from these companies. Heck, I interviewed at one of them twice. But my gut says these two are no longer good companies to work for. If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should. Anywhere else is better than these two right now.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are now. Back when they started they represented the very best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious people with the promise of changing the world for the better. They did do that for a little while. The engineering capabilities were and still are world class, they are beacons our industry for that.
But unfortunately a lot has changed. They are absolutely monopolies now, everything in those slides is true. I know because I worked at a startup that relied on both of those companies for its growth. They abused us in the beginning, threatened us with bans and gave us strikes for arbitrary reasons, and then treated us like gold as we spent a lot more with them. On top of how they treat “partners” they now do far more damage to the fabric of society than they add value to it. Again, I recognize that at some point it wasn’t that way and without them tech wouldn’t be what it is now, but they are no longer that and we should all see it for what it is.
I don’t have a solution on how to fix this. I think it’s the business model that’s acidic and broken. I think only disruption can fix this but it’s unclear when and if that will come.
I feel kind of ridiculous for having this view point, but I have co workers who keep advocating for using facebook open source stuff. I kind of want to push back on these suggestions, not really for anything technical, I just no longer think facebook or google are even neutral companies. Something just doesn't really feel right about continuing to use facebook open source stuff. Maybe if it was developed by facebook but run by some neutral organization now would be fine. But having the company all over it doesn't feel right.
I think a lot of people are just into solving tech problems without considering much else.
There's a large part of open source that seems to just exist for large corporations and solving corporate problems for free.
> advocating for using facebook open source stuff.
IMO truly Open Source software that comes out of FB and GOOG are the silver lining - the output from them that you should consume guilt-free.
For a while IIRC FB had some onerous terms levied on their Open Source repos, I'm not sure if that's changed. But if they have sane licenses, we should embrace this work (while still rejecting their misdeeds).
I think there's potential for consequences just blindly using the stuff they give away. Its advertising for them. "The best and most innovative work here, look what they do!". Now Facebook is in all of our web frontends now with react, google is in all of our data centers with Kubernetes. Can you even be innovative and get traction anymore without corporate backing? I'm skeptical a project like Linux could take off in our current computing world. Sorry a little ranty but I don't see why we need to keep giving these companies even more share of the tech world, even if they give it away for free.
That's sort of a ridiculous standard. What counts as "corporate backing?" The Intel/AMD chips in your servers? AWS/GCP/Azure that hosts them? The cable companies that own the fiber your data moves over? Businesses don't, and never have, existed in a vacuum. Why draw the line at frameworks like React?
IDK why you think im drawing the line at frameworks? I'm just highlighting it in this situation. I cant rant about everything negative thing corporations do, Ill never be done. But those examples aren't remotely the same. Intel and AMD is a healthy rivalry to have, for awhile AMD wasn't even competitive. Those companies arent trying to reach into every segment of the world. Cable company monopolies have been beat to death, and are an obvious problem so Im unsure why your even bringing it up? But comcast isn't even comparable to the reach google or facebook has. Something like 1/3 of the world in on facebook, you really want to compare that to American cable companies?
And amazingly it is self inflicted by peer pressure, because it’s absolutely possible to build great things without React or Kubernetes. I don’t care because I have my own company now (and yet it’s an everyday to educate both clients and junior devs), but if I were still mainly a dev I would seriously hurt my resume. I don’t know if it’s conscious or not on their part, but the tech marketing achievement is both impressive and disappointing.
pg has a great article on AirBnB bootstrapping their business by doing things that don't scale. He says that they would go door to door and early on would take pictures of the rooms so that their on-boarding was easier. What I have come to realize is that all businesses do things that don't scale, and not just during the bootstrap process.
Open Source software scales perfectly, and therefore is worthless.
The naive public view of Google is that they are a Search company. The HN take is that Google is not a Search company, they are what they make their money in, which is Advertising. My claim in this comment is a company is whatever they do that doesn't scale. Google is a tracking company. They use that tracking to produce better search results, which they monetize by selling advertising.
It's the tracking that doesn't scale well. And Google knows this, and that's why their Search results punish slow loading pages. They want their tracker(which loads slowly) to be the only tracker. If all sites puts 25 different trackers all with their different stacks on a website, they would lose their 'doesn't scale' property. They then push this even further, by taking control of your browser with Chrome and your device with Android, which also doesn't scale. The market will never allow 100 browsers or 100 mobile operating systems. Developers Developers Developers after all.
So we can see that every company is what the things they do that don't scale. Once they have that, they constrain it and hold it within their walled garden, and from there they can bring in Open Source software. In essence Open Source Software allows the area of the garden to grow. Once OSS grows to being able to do anything that it can possibly do, we will still be constrained to the things that don't scale. These things will allow the companies to enforce monopoly rents within their walled gardens.
Facebook and Google contribute heavily to the Linux kernel. Much of the security work in the kernel is a direct result of them paying people to work on it. Good code should not be rejected because evil companies happened to be one of the financial backers.
To be clear, I hate both companies and avoid their proprietary offerings at almost all costs but when they happen to do something not evil, even for selfish reasons like good PR, I take it. I will also still be sure and remind everyone they are still evil every chance I get.
I hate Microsoft too but if I was in a poor country with malaria I would be thankful for the help from their founder.
"I kind of want to push back on these suggestions..."
What about programming languages? Go is open source and has benefitted enormously from support and funding from Google. That association has helped the language grow and attract developers. In fact, new(ish) languages with large corporate benefactors generally thrive compared to open source languages that have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources.
I think the popularity of some programming languages is buoyed by corporate sponsorship or the association with a company. This is not a bad thing, it just means the promise in other languages is harder to discern because they do not enjoy the same financial support, and thus struggle to attract new developers.
I'm in a similar position. There are several Google and FB open source projects that not only some of my co workers have advocated for, but that I would myself actually like to make some use of.
On the one hand, I think consuming their truly open source projects is a little bit of sticking it to the man -- you're getting for free something they spent money and time on.
But on the other hand, mindshare is a thing, and by using their products, even if truly open source, I am helping increase it.
For my own purposes, I have not used the Google or FB heritage of a given open source project to be an automatic disqualifier, but it is definitely a negative. If there are technically-comparable alternatives, I tend to lean towards those.
Another route is to lobby those projects to adopt an open governance model. This effectively puts the management of the project at arm's length from the corporate parent. It's a trade-off for them to get more engagement vs rescinding control. There are a number of hosting organisations that take this kind of thing on: Linux Foundation, Linaro, Eclipse.
"Anywhere else is better than these two right now."
Even SEO.
I used to think companies like DoubleClick and later SEO people like this Twitter author were the underbelly of the web. Then Google acquired DoubleClick. In case anyone had doubts about Google.
But what of SEO.
Seems to me they are just an unpleasant side effect.
This is a racket that will end one day. And not a day too soon.
> If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should.
I would never work for Google or Facebook (and they wouldn't hire me), but it's not fair to expect normal people to choose between their financial needs and an abstract notion of the greater good.
I find this idea puts the pressure on the individual for systemic problems. I am not responsible for what my employer does outside of my own output, and if I had a family to feed I would say: all my financial needs are desperate, fix your own damn world.
Upper middle class people from high GDP countries do have the choice. There are many opportunities where a talented individual will make more than enough.
But what about people from countries like India? Talented people will jump in in a heartbeat. And I have never ever known any person who has turned down Google or Facebook's offer with US/EU posting. Even people coming from _very_ privileged families.
Anything you do contributes to what your employer does, other wise what are you doing at work. Especially in a tech company. We absolutely should put pressure on these employees of companies. People working at google, facebook etc are not barely getting by. Theyre people fought over, being paid enormous amount of money.
We're not talking about people who have no other choice here, we're talking about software engineers. We are the most in-demand, remote friendly profession on the planet right now. The choice isn't between Facebook and starvation for us, the choice is between netting $250,000/yr at a very questionable company or $100,000/yr anywhere else.
If working for Facebook or Google is an option for you, you are not at risk of not meeting your financial needs.
> I find this idea puts the pressure on the individual for systemic problems.
Systemic problems don’t exist: they are the problems of individuals and their interactions observed at scale. Your next sentence highlights why systemic problems exist at all: deferral of responsibility.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are
now. Back when they started they represented the very
best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious
people with the promise of changing the world for the
better.
[zip]
But unfortunately a lot has changed.
So what do we learn from this? Maybe we should learn that tech should be judged on the basis of what it can be used for, including nefarious uses, and not only for past or current intents of the developers.
I would like to see past work history at either of these companies (Facebook and Google) be something that is critiqued and questioned during hiring. Being a past employee of Google or Facebook should make it harder for you to find another job, unless you can justify your participation in a monopolistic, damaging-to-society company. "The money was good" should not be a valid justification unless you were seriously pressed for money and other opportunities.
Alternatively, you could view as a positive signal their decision to leave and find new less ethically compromised opportunities at their own pace. I don't really understand how people choose to go work at these companies, but I appreciate when those who are already there realise they don't understand either.
Any time I take issue with someone's past employment at a company, I never hold that against them without an opportunity for them to address it. Their tenure at these companies is also a major factor in how I view it. Someone that started in the late 2010's and only stayed for a few months is going to mostly get a pass. Someone that joined in 2011 and stayed around for 7 years is going to get a lot more than a cursory glance.
That is, if you worked at Google or FB before, I will definitely ask about your time there, and what led you to leave. This is not necessarily something I would do for some other XYZ Software Co. on your resume.
"The money is good" isn't an excuse in any case because Google is no longer paying top of market, and Facebook is getting outbid by several other companies with better reputations on privacy and security.
Choosing to take less money by working at Google is an ego play. It's not the only place with scaling challenges, good working environment and high pay. There are dozens of others.
"Being a past employee of Google or Facebook should make it harder for you to find another job, unless you can justify your participation in a monopolistic, damaging-to-society company."
That would be lovely, but unfortunately 99% of people probably don't care.. especially if they themselves are owners of capitalist corporations (who are probably advertising their own products and services on Google and Facebook).
This Twitter thread is all about why you shouldn't spend your marketing dollars on Google and Facebook. And yet here you are railing against people working at Google and Facebook. Why?
If engineers at Facebook or Google decide to work somewhere else, they'll just hire more. There's an endless supply of people who want to make a buck. But if the marketing dollars disappear, these companies go under.
So why are you railing on the people working at these companies, instead of all the entrepreneurs around here sending ad dollars their way?
Why not attack from both ends? It isn’t mutually exclusive and talented software engineers are vacuumed up by these mega corps so having the cream of the crop devs leave will pressure mega Corp to fix things and make it a place these employees are demanding it be for them to stay.
You think Google is gonna start hiring mediocre talent rather than bend over backwards to stop hemorrhaging their loss of world class talent.
This is an effective strategy in forcing the hand of a mega Corp at scale.
This is just never going to happen. Only the tiniest most vocal percentage of people will act against their own self interest, in the benefit of society. Asking that of people will only ever backfire.
I think people are just taking out their aggressions on individuals. Individuals who they don't know, and who may have special circumstances. Or who might be doing good from within.
It's analogous to (though not as extreme as) railing on individual soldiers for the crimes of the military. It's mean, thoughtless, immature, and perhaps most importantly to you it's ineffective.
Edit: as a single data point... I work at Google. I'm just a regular person who wants respectable pay and a good work environment. I don't work on ads, and I'm not really convinced of whether Google as a whole is bad for the world. I'm interested in the arguments... they just don't seem very convincing to me. The vitriol seems way out of proportion compared to any harm from Google. I especially don't understand singling out Google, compared to other areas where harm seems a lot more egregious.
I also don't understand why people lump Google and Facebook together. They're incredibly different companies. I wouldn't work at Facebook unless I really had to, because it's obvious and clear how Facebook has been a disaster for society. The arguments against Google aren't nearly as strong or convincing.
I'm also not rich, despite being at Google for a number of years, and if I didn't work for Google my family and I would be forced to move.
They've always been ad machines, but once upon a time Google was the good guy of the ad world.
Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders. Google with its dainty little text-only ads neatly on the side of search results was a real breath of fresh air, and we all cheered when Chrome came along and started blocking many of the most annoying ad tactics.
"Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders."
Commercial sites were. But there was a time before corporations started treating the internet like the Gold Rush. Before that the internet was actually not full of ads, much less all the spyware the likes of Google and Facebook brought.
But Google and Facebook are just two big worms in an internet that's been rotten by corporate influence.
True. The internet was already ad-infested by the time Google came around. AltaVista, which was the dominant search engine before Google overthrew them was full of ads, and (ironically) Google's value proposition at the time was that it was ad-free and a lot faster than AltaVista (which was slowed down by all their ads).
It isn't just these companies. It's most of them. The number of "good" companies is minuscule. Leaving one of these companies for another slightly less evil (or maybe more evil - just less powerful) one won't result in any good being done. Modern capitalism is crooked, and these individuals can't "fix" the problem. Play the game, but work to fix it. Until it's fixed, your life depends on playing it.
It's a level of negativity bias which seems to be overwhelmingly widespread nowadays. Things are either pure or else evil.
I think it comes from taking the upsides for granted. So the downsides are seen as seen as unnecessary and resulting from some kind of conspiracy or luck (e.g., network effects), rather than a trade-off where a company earned its success by providing benefits people wanted in return.
I think the number one thing people should understand is that it's really important to own the relationship with your audience.
Tech companies like Google and Facebook want you to pay for reaching your audience.
This sounds like a good deal when it allows you to reach more people. Ads are great! Expand your business! With Google and Facebook you just pay a little and get more customers! It sounds like a win/win situation!
Except that tech companies found it would be even more profitable to make you pay for reaching your existing audience!
Finding new customers is a really hard problem, so they'll just sell access to your existing customers!
So they trick businesses into sharing their customer data with them, by offering analytics or other free services.
Once the tech company knows who your customers are, they can charge you to reach them! You can pay to reach the people in your Facebook groups or buy retargeting ads to reach people who visited your online shop. You don't get new customers, you just pay to reach people who you thought you already had a relationship with -- except that relationship is controlled by someone else.
And if you don't pay, well they'll just show your competitors ads!
If you built up a reputation with hard work by providing a great service, you can now start a bidding war with your competitors to reach your own customers!
Of course they also sell access to new customers. I'm not saying they don't.
But they also sell access to your existing customers, both to you and your competitors. That's what companies don't understand, and I'm sure marketers would be a bit more careful with the data they share with tech companies if they understood that.
It's a beautiful sign that these companies are becoming very powerful entities. We got used to existence of superpowers or dictatorships in the shape of a very strong or narrow-minded country governments. Now large companies prove to have similar influence to a likewise governments. We are used to watch out for monopolies, but those companies created something even more evil without being scrutinised - some kind of omnipoly, where they have power over many aspects of life by owning small-ish companies from different domains. They created a bubble where only their truth is true, and only their business is only allowed business.
What they just did with these slides? They had power to censor them. Who else has power to censor stuff? Superpowers and dictators. Similarities are starting show.
Are we already past that point where we could control these companies with law, policies and rules? They are so big and powerful, because we missed what they were doing. They were slowly and patiently building their power. Now they can tell governments what to do. Now there are governments in the world that seemingly have less resources than them to make them accountable.
Did they bought us all already? How much is left outside of their control or at least their knowledge?
I hope this is and will always be a scary fantasy. Otherwise we're going to experience some new and miserable developments in the near future.
I agree with 99% of what this guy is saying but I'd like to know why he thinks GDPR was a huge win for Google and Facebook.
As far as I'm aware, GDPR legally restricts when sites can collect and store your information. Is the argument that we need to let everyone spy on you so they can compete on who can sell your information to advertisers? Like, no, that's really wrong. We need to be legally boxing in the advertising industry as much as possible. If that means Google and Facebook have the accidental advantage of being the only companies with enough of a relationship to their customers to continue selling ad profiles, then so be it.
Regulatory capture. Google and Facebook can afford the administrative load to fully comply with the letter of the law, without being hindered, while smaller entities are meaningfully affected.
They really can just throw money at the problem to solve it, which otherwise hamstrings their competition. If you can plop a billion dollars down to move data to the right country, have lawyers to check your lawyers checking your lawyers, and can afford penalties when you trip up, you're already at an advantage over most of your competition—probably without having to sacrifice much in the process.
Google now has a really big and obnoxious popup modal. That's a clear disadvantage for them. Is it enough to dethrone them? Well not right now, but it's at least a sign of an opportunity.
If DDG can do similar results without the popup then hopefully people will migrate there.
(Of course G Search is brutally entrenched in a myriad ways, connected services, Android, Chrome, all the other browser defaults, etc.)
I'm having trouble understanding this. Organizer of what? What sort of thing is there that they look over the slides beforehand?
I've given talks to industry, and at industry conferences, and nobody has ever looked over my slides for content. Is my experience atypical? Maybe it is.
I do not understand why Twitter is the medium for which to share dense information. The UI is not meant for it. Post a URL to a PDF of the slides, instead?
I understand the annoyance but please let's not repeat this in every twitterthread. People choose how they post for whatever reason. It's the content that matters.
There's a site guideline about this:
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
Each slide is narrated with an option to like it or start a unique conversation or share that single slide to people who are interested in what you think is interesting. Each slide also gets its own analytics so he can see how well they individually perform (after all, he's in advertising). The medium is more than fine for what he's posting, it's an important message and Twitter is for better or worse how many important messages get around these days.
My hypothesis is that Twitter trained their users into having short bursts of attentive focus immediately following by amplifying and expressing their impulsive reaction, through retweets/likes/replies. I doubt the vast majority of Twitter users will leave the current context of series of dopamine hits to consume a long form dense content.
Content creators don’t have a choice but to modify their content to Twitter’s form factor or risk losing their audience.
In other news, railroads use your cargo as leverage to get you addicted to product delivery. They in fact use it in a variety of ways for and against you and other railroads and the government.
This pattern is true of pretty much every industry that carries freight, whether coal, llama socks, or information. It's true in capitalist, socialist, communist, and fascist societies.
I hope the code of conduct advances free exchange of views and opinions. I even don't understand how an audience can be uncomfortable hearing an opinion, listening to arguments? They don't have to act or agree. Otherwise if they only hear comfortable and reassuring things: how could they grow, change and advance their knowledge?
The whole point of code of conducts is to create psychological safety, but you're right that people need to hear uncomfortable things to grow. This is precisely why CoC are a bad idea - it stifles exchange of knowledge.
