Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

Google Fusion Tables and the Fusion Tables API will be turned down December 3, 2019

Anyone else put off by the ridiculous use of "turned down" here? "Turned off", maybe.

Yes, I think it's fascinating! It seems to be a new euphemism for "shutdown" that they've been using (perhaps first internally?) for the past year or two.

A few other examples:

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/announcing-turndown-...

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/Deprec...

https://plus.google.com/+LesiaSliusarenkoCM/posts/AiyjSfWJjA...

Raymond Chen's excellent blog The Old New Thing has spent much time cataloging the weird permutation of English that has grown up among people at Microsoft, which he calls "Microspeak": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/microspeak

I'm guessing "turned down" is an emergent example of a new dialect, "Googlespeak."

It's an improvement from "sunsetting" which was in vogue for a while.

It might be surprising to outsiders and perhaps it shouldn't spill out, but it's pretty normal lingo inside Google engineering. You turn up things (services, clusters, products) and later turn them down.

Double speak at a company that does no evil. Color me surprised. I prefer the verb kill. Google gives life to certain services and then kills them.

You are ascribing motives that don't exist. It's not double speak, if you're referring to 1984: it's just that "turning down" is the converse of "turning up". That's a fairly simple and straightforward explanation, no matter how unfortunate it turns out to be. Most of the time, it's used when an internal service moves: it turns up in X and turns down in Y. I'm not sure what your motives are, but I know that you're off mark here.

IME, it was common lingo in the telecom world a couple decades ago too. Typically in reference to physical circuits.

To expand on this a bit, it's likely that the etymology here is from SRE-land where they're dealing with turning up the resources for a service, and turn up is very similar to "spinning up", although inclusive of non-HDD resources.

There is a difference to me in turning down a service (you could turn it up again) and shutting down a service (not going to ever come back up (in the same incarnation.)) Even shuttering a service works.

It’s nothing like hotel “turn down service” which is typically a good thing. Sometimes you even get a mint.

Maybe the “mint” with “turned down” saas apps would be the ability to export your data?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com