Comment by romanhn
7 months ago
Hyperbole is well and good in fiction and personal opinion pieces. I suppose my, and parent commenter's issue, is that we expected a certain type of writing, but got another. And that's fine. I don't have a dog in this fight, but to me it went beyond hyperbole and into personal attack territory. I called it juvenile because the descriptors lack nuance in the same way that "management bad, programmer good" arguments do. Having spent quite a bit of time on both sides, it's pretty clear that motivations, incentives, and constraints are not black and white, so I'm a bit more sensitive when I see people mocked without having full context.
> people mocked without having full context
This is a good point. This 3700 word article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search” about Prabhakar Raghavan does not contain context for why the author would dislike Prabhakar Raghavan or speak ill of him professionally.
To be clear, I meant the author does not have full context.
That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam sites and make ads and search results nearly indistinguishable.
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> it went beyond hyperbole and into personal attack territory.
> the descriptors lack nuance
> motivations, incentives, and constraints are not black and white
Hyperbole isn't a knife. Any more than a political cartoonist's brush. It is satire. Biting humor.
The more ridiculous the caricature, the less you are supposed to take the details literally.
The "culprit" is a lightening rod. Taking the heat for what is obviously the result of a lot of people's seemingly poor or unfortunate judgements. Google search was a thing of beauty. Now it is an ugly swamp I have personally stopped trying to wade through.
I notice you're not supplying that alleged "full context".
Obviously I don't have it. The author doesn't either and he is the one making the big claims. Regardless, I'm not arguing the extent to which Prabhakar Raghavan contributed to Google Search quality, I haven't even heard the name before this post. I'm not a fan of the writing style, that is all.
This makes sense. If you personally don’t like someone’s writing style it means that they do not have the factual basis to back up their claims even if they provide them. The exonerating context exists because the meanness online cannot be both correct and not to your stylistic preference
Then you're loudly making a non-claim that things in general can't be written. However, Zitron has literally supplied and linked his evidence.