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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

Google's april fools jokes were great at first when it was a new and growing company with it's don't be evil motto. Now it feels like the old dude at the club trying to stay relevant and cool.

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It's not just that they're not cool, it's just that when you have billions of users, even if only 0.00001% takes the joke seriously it can lead to personal tragedy such as people losing their jobs.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/01/gmails-mic...

To be fair, that's a horrible idea for an April fool's prank. Ideally, they shouldn't do any actual real harm. Like actually having that button work as they described was just stupid. Maybe if it didn't actually let you press the button or did something different but still sent your email...but to actually make it do that...someone should have realized something bad was going to happen.

That's the most unfunny over-elaborate April fools idea I've heard. The fact that nobody thought it could backfire and the passive aggressive nature of the idea speaks loudly of how out of touch with reality Google engineers are.

Please don’t link directly to sites with unskippable paywalls.

https://archive.is/3TPqE

archive.org doesn't block you based on which dns resolver you use: https://web.archive.org/web/20190914012706/https://www.teleg...

For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493240

The user says it's bizarre, but it's probably related to cloudflare engaging in censorship on the web.

Cloudflare has made a statement, archive.is has not refuted it or left any comment as far as I know. I'm going to side with cloudflare here.

archive.is specifically blocks requests that come from Cloudflare's datacenters.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21155056

The paywall on that site is skippable by disabling Javascript and refreshing the page

April 1 is an annual holiday for me. I unplug from the internet* and try to avoid hearing of these jokes completely. They used to be funny, but now companies are just trying too hard. It’s a great excuse for a detox.

* I still use the Internet for my job, but Apple isn’t pulling any pranks on their developer documentation.

I still think they're funny but given this climate this is a good decision

The fact that they treat it as something that's to be scheduled and canceled is pretty indicative of this.

By far my favourite one was Google Smell (or whatever was its "official" name). I had people in the office asking me if their computer/screen was broken or incompatible because they couldn't smell anything.

Google Nose

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