from Hacker News

I attended Google's creator conversation event, and it turned into a funeral

by wawayanda on 10/31/24, 12:43 AM with 115 comments

  • by mtnGoat on 10/31/24, 4:33 AM

    I've been invited so two similar events over the past couple decades and one company I worked for had standing weekly meetings with Google. All I can say is my experience is pretty much they same, they lure you in wanting info and to help you, but don't give any answers and just keep wanting more info. In the end they didn't unblock us and in my opinion built a lot of what we shared into their systems. It was a knowledge theft exercise in my opinion, was NOT in any way meant to help anyone but Google.

  • by Animats on 10/31/24, 2:56 AM

    "It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google’s."

    What Google seems to be doing is banning aggregation sites. There was a previous posting today by someone who was complaining about low ranking for his book review and link farm site. Google wants to be the only aggregator. Why fan out queries to another level of aggregator?

    A list of the 20 sites he's talking about would help. How many of those are aggregation sites?

  • by danpalmer on 10/31/24, 5:13 AM

    > took place on October 29

    > The day before, he led the group on a tour

    > The building was empty

    Monday, October 28th, was a work from home day.

  • by Apocryphon on 10/31/24, 3:02 AM

    What exactly are these websites, why do their webmasters have a special relationship as "Google Web Creators," and how is it so many of them were coincidentally shadowbanned? This article is interesting about the state of Google as seen by a visit to the campus and at a dismal event, but I still don't have a clear idea who the people let down by Google are.

  • by oraphalous on 10/31/24, 1:36 AM

    The whole world seems dedicated to the goal of extracting value rather than creating it.

  • by pikseladam on 10/31/24, 12:01 PM

    I visited this website, and Chrome ended up blocking around 2,500 third-party cookies. Websites like this should face consequences for such behavior—it’s like dealing with a live malware site.

  • by encoderer on 10/31/24, 5:05 AM

    > page has 22 ads

    > calls chief search scientist “elderly”

    > concludes google is dying

    Author if you’re reading this the answer lies within.

  • by smsm42 on 11/1/24, 4:48 AM

    Two things I don't get here.

    First: if I am not happy with my site's placement in google (I don't care, but if I did), and I complain, nobody would even acknowledge my existence. I have no idea how I could even talk to a live human working for Google. People who get invited to "conversation" are obviously very special. In what way? What did they do to deserve that?

    Second: certain people built their business on certain aspects of behavior of certain technology that does not belong to them and they have zero control over. These aspects changed, and their business is suffering. I understand their frustration. But why do they expect that the technology owner would do anything to help them? They aren't their paying clients. The technology owner's interests are in no way aligned with theirs. Why do they think anything would be done?

    Oh, and also - why do they think anything can be done? I mean Google's codebase by now is decades of code stacked on top of older code. Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. I mean some people probably know how some parts work, but overall likely nobody knows why the ranking is such and not other. And each change shuffles things around and some pages go up and some go down. Why should anybody in Google prioritize the complaints of those who went down, and even if they did - it only would result in replacing one group of complainers with a similar group of complainers with identical complaints. It is obvious that there's no perfect ranking that would satisfy everyone, and likely at the complexity it is every change leads to unpredictable chain of rearrangements. Googlers can politely listen to those who got unlucky but they likely can't promise them anything more than that.

  • by oglop on 10/31/24, 6:27 PM

    Feel bad for the author. This was clearly an information pump. They just wanted info from them. That’s it. Of course google lies. Of course they steal. It’s Google and it’s not 2007 anymore. Don’t trust them. Don’t engage with them. They just steal and harvest from others. They couldn’t even keep a simple chat app running. It’s a trash company filled with trash people who will talk down their nose at you while destroying the fabric of society. Pretty par for the course these days for anything tech though. I work in tech and can say we are awful, vampiric, and pretty much useless people who get off on having power over people through knowledge. If you approach most software engineers with that understanding they are much easier to deal with, but that doesn’t make them and the industry any less parasitic. I hate my career choices.

  • by mensetmanusman on 10/31/24, 2:50 AM

    Will google ever recover the culture, or did management kill it?

    Maybe that’s the purpose of our economic system? No inefficient fun?

  • by soniman on 11/1/24, 12:48 PM

    They're complaining because they run human written sites but they've been deranked because Google can no longer tell human content from AI. Google is now privileging sites like Forbes, USA Today and Reddit. Google wants to rank their sites but it can't distinguish their content from the ocean of AI content. They have a legitimate gripe, that Google is no longer favoring niche content sites.

  • by cowboylowrez on 10/31/24, 2:07 PM

    Google should play fair but if its not required by law I can understand if they don't, if there are business benefits to being unfair and no requirement to be fair, why would Google change?

  • by pzo on 10/31/24, 5:27 AM

    Google business model is mostly ads (~80% revenue) and majority of their ads are from google search (~60% of revenue). This allowed them to subsidise many other projects in the past.

    These days they have a lot of competition in ads scene (meta, tiktok, x, reddit, amazon) and also other are gunning at google search: perplexity, searchGPT, bing. Apple choosing OpenAI for Apple Intelligence. Amazon teaming with Anthropic for Alexa. On top of that antitrust in EU and USA.

    That's the reason google is killing lots of projects or loosing on many fronts these days or they aggressively try to monetise other projects (Youtube, Manifest V3.0). If they don't win in this AI race or diversify revenue/business model enshitification will continue.

  • by CamelCaseName on 10/31/24, 4:55 AM

    > It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google’s.

    Yeah, this is a nice thought, but Google is still a ~$3T business and probably will be for at least the next decade or two.

    There's no karma or justice in the world, only cutthroat businessmen. And Google hires as many of those as they can.

  • by wpietri on 10/31/24, 2:53 AM

    Wow, this is impressively brutal. I don't know anything about search or ranking these days, but the way insist on putting an AI summary at the top of every page definitely is good evidence for the theory that Google doesn't give a damn about the people doing all the actual work that makes a search engine valuable.

  • by dare944 on 10/31/24, 4:06 AM

    "Empty too, was the rest of Google’s behemoth campus. Their numerous buildings are surrounded by beautiful, park-like pathways with no one to enjoy them but the groundskeepers. They follow the paths with their lawnmowers, weaving between softly shaded employee parking lots, with no one to park in them."

    Without comment on the rest of the article, I can personally confirm that this particular statement is disinformation. I was there, in person, at the Google Mountain View campus, on October 29, 2024 visiting as a representative of an external partner (and as a long ago former employee). I did not attend this event, but I was nearby the entire day. Throughout the day the building I was in was very busy, with many people coming and going and working at desks. At lunchtime, we walked to the Google cafe a few buildings away which was brimming with people, to the point where our group of three struggled to find a table to eat at.

    Of course there may have been buildings on campus which were empty or sparsely utilized. But the area I was in (western end of Charleston Rd) was anything but empty. In the future, the author should try to stick to the truth when making their point.

  • by neilv on 10/31/24, 3:58 AM

    I don't know how accurate this writeup is, but the characterization of behavior was eerily familiar.

    If they'd been talking about a certain other place that I know, I would've wanted to shout "Exactly!", and would've implicitly believed that's what they saw.

    There's a type who exhibits a combination of arrogance and self-interested fixation. There's no malice, and they aren't sociopaths, and they don't think of themselves as jerks. But they have a sense of superiority and entitlement, and can be aggressively, er, norms-bending, to get what they want.

    Some environments seem to either attract them, or to nurture them. It's something unclear to me about the individual environment, not the external kind of organization (e.g., one high-prestige organization has a lot of it, but another high-prestige organization of the same kind doesn't).

    I could attribute it to "culture", because I don't have any more specific theory, and play by ear how to try to filter or nurture it out of a collective. But I suspect there's a critical mass of that type gaining positions of influence in the organization, at which point the culture becomes irreversible, since there's too much arrogance to see it as a problem. At that point, I'd guess the rest of the people should be looking at their options for leaving, and also try not to think or behave like that type themselves.

  • by iamnotsure on 10/31/24, 7:05 AM

    Google procures to poison guests with dead animals and alcohol.

  • by slowhadoken on 10/31/24, 5:15 AM

    Lmfao

  • by synack on 10/31/24, 1:50 AM

    Maybe don’t put ads between every paragraph on your blog.

  • by seethedeaduu on 10/31/24, 7:51 AM

  • by bdjsiqoocwk on 10/31/24, 6:49 AM

    I'm telling you, many google employees are in a cult. They deny evidence in full confidence because thats what they're told say their work place.