One has to love and admire the use of Newspeak by big companies... How is this Mr Vincent an "advocate"? He's in charge of destroying extensions!
On his Twitter bio [1] he also says he likes "helping people" and "the open web". The cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear.
> I also don't want to hijack this without the project's permission. @gorhill & contributors, do you mind having this discussion here or would you prefer if we moved it elsewhere?
I haven't really been following this issue, but I did read the linked reply, so I may be missing some bigger context.
What they did was to introduce a break in the discussion. Most people subscribing to that GitHub issue, which was trending on HN [2], will not start monitoring Google Groups for any new discussion that may take place, which reduces the likelihood that there will be enough people pressuring them to give clear answers.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss...
In Google's corporate opinion, Google's ads must not be blocked. In everyone else's opinion, all ads must be blockable at a user's option.
That's not a difference that can be mediated.
So communicating what the team is doing to the outside world, not defending the utility of the extensions.
Realistically, Mr Vincent is not in charge of being an advocate for anything other than Google's corporate interests. But he is not in charge of destroying extensions either. He may well be in charge of destroying ad blockers though.
Stock options and bosses with different incentives are available at other employers as well.
> Stock options and bosses with different incentives are available at other employers as well.
Most other employers don’t have a near monopoly on the web browser market.
I don't think assuming bad faith with absolute certainty is a productive form of debate.
[Edit]: As a matter of fact, I don't believe that advertising is entirely replaceable as a funding mechanism for the open web at this point in time. That doesn't mean we have to accept all its excesses without resistance.
>Most other employers don’t have a near monopoly on the web browser market.
A near monopoly is not a prerequisite for an employee to make a lot of money somewhere else, especially not for someone in a PR role like "advocate".
It’s not a debate though, Google is removing these user friendly features and sprinkling some marketing speak over their actions. It’s right to call them out on that. Also, if your job is to be the face of that marketing speak, you should expect people to question what you say.
[edit] Funding and openness are tangential. A system need not be profitable to be open. Look at open source.
I don't think open source is a viable solution for all currently ad funded services. Some services cost a lot of money to run and many indirect funding sources come with their own downsides. Open source projects are often leveraged by some of the largest corporations for their own strategic purposes that don't necessarily help openness.
But my original point was simply that this is a non-trivial debate in which all sorts of opinions can be honestly held.
That's a minor issue. The bigger issue is the fact that, if adblockers become truly popular, websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS.
Remember Flash and 'Flash pages' back in the day? That, except worse.
they will just serve web assembly
While not wishing to speculate on specifics, there is medication in common circulation that can help with such inconvenient emotions.
True. They won't change their mind. The only signal they will listen to is to stop using Chrome.
Get a new job.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
It’s so transparent, I boggle at how anyone falls for it, or that companies still think it is a viable strategy.
I remember clearly an interview of a very famous IT billionaire going this way:
- What's the most annoying myth about you? - A myth migh be that I'm the most generous philantropist of all time. [...But] I havent' sacrified my time or economic well being the same way lots of unamed, amazing people do. So they're the worlds best philantropists.
This is the least subtle humble-brag of all time. "People says I'm so incredibly amazing. But they are wrong. There are out there more amazing people." is gotta be next to the job interview answer "my biggest weakness is that I work too much" in the BS book.
But the reactions to the interview are still, to this day, "this person is so humble", "he is such a good man", etc.
I don't think it really counts as a humblebrag to say "it's a myth that I'm X" when there are in fact a lot of people saying you're X.
He could, for sure, have gone further out of his way to avoid humblebragging: he could have said something like "I think a lot of people overstate how generous a philanthropist I am". But he was asked, specifically, what the most annoying myth about him was, and all the anti-humblebrag tactics I can think of right now avoid humblebragging by not stating a specific proposition at all -- so they fail to answer the question he was actually asked.
And he could, for sure, have picked something else, maybe something about his time at Microsoft. But these days he's much better known as a philanthropist than as a Microsoft founder or executive, and I bet the things people (truly or falsely) believe about his Microsoft career aren't the things he considers the most annoying myths.