Comment by dageshi
1 day ago
There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan.
Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents.
Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet circa 2002ish and the solution to all problems with the modern internet is to make the internet go back to 2002.
The problem isn’t the necessary fluff that must be added, it’s how easy it becomes to keep on adding it after the necessity subsides.
Google was a more honorable company when the ads were on the right hand side only instead of tricking you in the main results. This is the enshitification people talk about. Decision with no reason other than pure profit at user expense. They were horrendously profitable when they made this dark pattern switch.
Profits today can’t be distinguished accurately between users who know it’s an ad and those who were tricked into thinking it was organic.
Not all enshitification is equal.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
thanks, captain google - the post I’m also responding to breaks a variety of site rules, weird how these types of people always jump in to post this exact thing and not take issue with the post being replied to at all. The fact this site is in denial about this problem is irrelevant to me - luckily that’s why there’s a downvoting/upvoting system. Note that I didn’t call him a shill, I am pointing out that the way the post was written looks like how a shill would post. Hope that is helpful to you.
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Shilling for what?
I simply observed how these threads always go. The faithful turn up to proudly proclaim how much they don't use google, how they cripple their browsing experience so they may remain pure, to experience the internet as it was intended before the original sin (ads) corrupted it.
“conform, and you will have no further problems from us” makes a lot more sense to me why google called their control plane “borg”
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