Comment by bun_at_work
8 years ago
I'm not particularly interested in defending anyone here, but I am very concerned with how easy it is to lead online opinion by misrepresenting the facts.
The article is clickbait, the comment I responded to is misdirected outrage without a genuine effort to understand the context. This is a problem that is plaguing our society, and therefore gets me a bit worked up. It's so much easier to drop a snarky remark that is irrelevant to the conversation or doesn't actually refute any point than it is to engage with the context, but that's bad for society and the current conversation.
I generally associate Alphabet and Google because they are related. However, only through a parent relationship are Verily and Google related - and there is no "ad company" trying to "eliminate" mosquitos.
Are you an employee or have invested in any Alphabet associated companies? You comment very frequently on Google related threads.
Nope - I'm not an employee and don't own stock, but I have spent a good deal of time trying to understand how Google makes money, as well as how their company is structured.
I tried to understand Alphabet and Google because I use Google products and care about what they do with the data.
Given an understanding of how they work, I see a lot of misrepresentation of their business model and lack of understanding around it. So I try to help with that.
On HN in general, there is a ridiculous level of mistrust for Google. I think it's good for everyone to be critical, but to be critical, people need to actually think and understand what they are being critical of. Instead, they often skip past all the thinking and go straight to worst-case doomsday scenarios. In this case, that means only reading the clickbait title of an article and assuming Google has some nefarious plot to destroy the ecosystem worldwide.
That type of behavior is dangerous.
People should be critical of Google. There are real issues with advertising revue, how that industry is motivated and incentivized, damage that can be done by the industry and powerful players, etc etc. When people don't think about and engage with the topics they are discussing it causes more harm, because it distracts from real problems. People in this thread are looking at the article's headline and questioning why an advertising company would try to kill mosquitos worldwide, which is a far cry from what the article is actual talking about.
These problems arise in a number of topics, I just happen to see it a lot in Google related articles and say something because I know more about Google than other topics.
Awesome, thanks for clarifying.