Comment by panarky
16 hours ago
Let's say you could calculate a good-evil score for every large corporation by netting the good they do against the evil they do.
I don't know if Google would be net-good or net-evil, but I'm pretty sure they would be far less evil than most of the other large corporations on that list.
Certainly less evil than Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, LVMH, McDonalds, etc.
But it's a paradox that on HN, Google gets far more hate than any of these.
Maybe HN is a weird combination of fatalistic and idealistic, where we assume any for-profit corporation with a do-gooder mission is lying about its mission to hide its essential evilness, while secretly hoping that maybe it really is possible to do good and do well at the same time.
For a while it seemed like Google's do-gooder mission was genuine. Unlike their less principled competition, Google refused to take money to influence search rankings. Google withdrew from mainland China rather than continue censoring search results there.
We secretly started to believe. But all the other compromises along the way felt like betrayals.
Google really is less evil, even today, but we hate them more because we dared to believe, and Google let us down.
I think the premise is wrong: I don't think Google is more hated than all of the organisations you list.
Within the tech world, I believe people generally dislike meta, Palantir, Oracle, and Microsoft more than Google.
Out in the real world, in the US at least I'd bet money that UnitedHealth must be more hated. And anyone with at least a modicum of rationality would probably dislike Big Oil and Big Junk Food more too?
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That said, I think this is an excellent cautionary lesson:
> We secretly started to believe... ...we hate them more because we dared to believe, and Google let us down.
> Certainly less evil than Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, LVMH, McDonalds, etc.
Certainly… according to who? I think some of these companies are, certainly, less evil than Google
> McDonalds
McDonalds should start allowing full 50% off order discounts in exchange for customers opting-in to receiving custom-printed wrappers with hyperpersonalized advertising printed on-demand just for them.
Could they afford to do it? IDK, advertising is effective and seems like a big business.
I think with their McDonalds App discounts for more normal pricing (last I checked), they're half way there?
My Facebook account with no connections was created exclusively to log in for the 20% discount. Facebook is probably getting more out of this arrangement than McDonalds.
I do like that McDonalds employees call me Valued Customer instead of the Facebook Name, after enabling one of the app privacy settings.
For example, Oracle does evil to its customers and partners and competitors. But Google does evil to every human who uses their products. In my book that’s much worse.
FTFY
Google has a lot of control over the internet. They also track and profile people even if they never created a Google account.
It's one thing to do that to people who are users, it's another thing to secretly turn people into users
> But it's a paradox that on HN, Google gets far more hate than any of these.
There is no paradox. This is Hacker News. It's a site of by and for people in the tech industry. Of course Google's activities (good and bad) get far more attention than those of Chase, or Coca-Cola.
I certainly wouldn't agree that Google "gets far more hate" on HN than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, or Palantir.
Ticketmaster. Just throwing that out there. Stubhub.
Google can do and has done a lot more harm than McDonalds or Coca-Cola.
They destroyed the open web (over and over - AMP, Manifest v2, etc. etc.), helped turned mobile computing into a rental / second-class citizen model, are ushering in identity tracking and attestation.
They pilfer the commons, unfairly monopolize, expand vertically and horizontally without bounds, make it impossible to compete, tax distribution every single way since they're the only set of rails, profit off of other people's copyrights and trademarks.
They even tried to hoard AI innovation, and it took employees leaving to set it free.