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The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue.

I hope this is a bellwether for the rest of SV, the Bay Area, and the rest of the country.

The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public.

Ditto.

It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.

When "movements" start going around using authoritarian intimidation tactics to keep their own ranks in line, this is a sign that the movement is no longer guided by principles. It's devolved into yet another group which is in a power struggle against a different group.

There were plenty of "movements" within the Google-Intranet using tactics that are at least cognate to authoritarianism - namely bullying, harassment and intimidation - to pursue their politically-skewed goals and drive political opponents out. It's not something that's in serious dispute by now - the reporting, even in court-submitted documents like the James Damore complaint, is way too clear for that. And yes, of course this is severely dysfunctional for any sort of enterprise. We actually have laws on the books that are meant to prevent these things; though the enforcement is quite inconsistent.

SF Googler here.

It may certainly be the case that people are experiencing "outrage fatigue" and that many have evaluated the claims of retaliation and found them unconvincing, but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to support these conclusions. The original walkout simply got way more publicity from the start, fuelled by a massive news story about Andy Rubin. But the biggest thing was it was officially sanctioned and promoted by the company, as far as I was concerned. Nearly everyone got an email from their manager and manager's manager in support of the walkout. Screensavers were changed en-masse to promote the walkout. Lots of people got up and tagged along. However, I didn't get the sense there was much awareness at that time of the specific demands, let alone the internal website that promoted it. Most people were just "along for the ride".

On the other hand, this sit-in wasn't planned as far in advance and details were not firmed up until the absolute last minute. Flyer designs were only sent out the day before for the retaliation event, so there wasn't much time to build awareness and momentum. And there wasn't a major news story about one of the company's execs to fuel conversation, just a few personal stories that trickled out in niche mailing lists. It had a very different feel, and I think it's hard to attribute that to one factor when there are so many in play.

Interesting I did not realize that about the first one!

I can imagine a company thinking they could take the wind out of it by supporting it. An escalation of conflict was probably better for the protestors than the company at that point.

It wasn't officially supported by the company. Note that f7aeb9 said "as far as I am concerned".

Not officially, but the experience of someone there says they perceived them as unofficially supporting it, that managers and others did a variety of things to encourage it in a seemingly coordinated or at least consistent way, which is interesting.

And like I said, I can see why they would do this as a strategic move, I don't think it implies anything about the justness of the cause either way or the actual morality of the company either way, just a strategic move.

> Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

Because the protest is such a matter of indifference at Google that... you need to take extreme measures not to be identified talking about it?

In fairness, they wrote something that could end up in the media. Who wants that kind of attention?

Googler in Bay Area here, non-throwaway account. Don't know enough about the situation to comment on any of the details or form an opinion, but I can attest to the fact that I didn't really notice the sit-in, for better or worse.

Not to detract from or endorse anyone's opinion, I'm just bothered by the weird conspiracy vibe in this thread. I signed the Dragonfly letter so it feels like posting a small anecdote to Hacker News is relatively benign, but maybe I'm naive :)

(My opinions here, not my employers. You know the drill.)

But no media article will be able to identify the poster through their IP address. So unless you re-use your username, Tor or not shouldn't make any difference.

Sure, but Tor is overkill for any real or imagined threat in this case. So frankly, I don’t see the reason to single that aspect out.

Social media is hardly rational on topics like this.

I don't work for Google. My company has strict policies to discourage employees talking to the public about internal affairs. That was the case with my previous two employers too. Frankly, it makes sense from their POV to not have their dirty laundry made public. And I take similar precautions as a matter of self-preservation anyway. I don't want anything I write here to be used against me either by my current employer or any of my future employers.

Google could be keeping track of which of their internal IPs visited which HN pages, etc.

How would they do this? HN is served over https, which would make this a massive and deliberate undertaking. The only possibilities I know of would be an intercepting proxy (don't know whether Google uses this, I doubt it) or tracking the size of payloads (which would require infrastructure explicitly and only for this purpose).

Payload size would be very helpful, but they don't need that to shortlist candidates. Correlating the timestamps of when the comment appeared on HN and when the domain name was accessed from an internal IP may be enough, subject to luck. Considering that Google is already tracking (crawling) the entire web for its core business, adding a few tweaks should not make much of a difference to their system load.

There's no reason for them to even tell us that they're using Tor, except to raise the specter of some retaliatory bogeyman.

You know they've lost hearts when memegen ain't lit

The whole point of the sit-in is that people are retaliated against for participating. If you believe this is the case, that's a strong disincentive against participating in the sit-in.

So in your opinion, whats a good outcome here?

Even 5 years ago if you had said there would be a protest kind of thing with even 50-150 people per Google office protesting... that would have seemed like an unlikely thing.

It's still news worthy enough that's on techcrunch.