Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Your view of PG and SV culture is following the standard sentiment curve. Just like the culture at large.

20 years ago we were the innovative pioneers shaking up the all-powerful old guard, and everybody loves to root for the underdog.

Now we’re the new seemingly all-powerful incumbents (look at the top 5 S&P 500 companies right now). Underdogs no longer.

You can see this very clearly in media coverage of Silicon Valley over the past 15 years. Look at Google. It’s gone from “Google is our savior and the greatest corporation to ever exist,” to “Google is an evil destructive power bent on world domination.”

Was either characterization ever true? Of course not. The truth has always been in the middle.

You’re seeing what has always been there...But viewing it with an overly critical lens this time, whereas last time you viewed everything overly optimistically.

You’re ignoring the good stuff now, when you used to ignore the bad stuff.

View on HN

I think you make a very good point, especially with the Google answer.

But I don’t know if that shift in sentiment is unwarranted. The Google of 2005 was nothing like the Google of 2020.

When Google was just a search company, they were purely innovators. Google indexed the internet better than anyone else.

But Google now is pretty bloated. Chrome, Android, Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube. The thing is, your gripes with one product affect your perception of all Google products. If you don’t like Chrome, your YouTube experience might be degraded, and you might resent Google’s increasing influence on web standards.

I’m not saying it’s bad that Google has made a lot of useful things work. But Google has lost its magic.

The same can be said of Facebook. Young people flocked to it a decade ago. It was new, it was magic. Now it’s bloated too (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus), and has its own set of unique issues.

It’s like how some people prefer bands that haven’t become mainstream yet. I prefer small companies because they are still on their toes trying to make better products. Google and Facebook don’t care about you as a user anymore, they’re too big to care.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft... they too have lost that magic with age and size.

They’ve become boring. Boring is a recipe for disruption.

But there wasn't that much bad stuff to ignore in the past - because it wasn't that bad. Google did not have that much influence or power, so their bad tendencies (assuming they have been the same throughout their lifetime) were just benign. There is no point in holding up a big magnifying glass on underdogs - things can't go horribly wrong. But it is completely justified to hold the powerful accountable, and that's what people are doing now.

But I think this further proves the point. Google had already grown a search monopoly 15 years ago while everybody was still fawning over them and thinking they were going to give us all free internet via flying balloons and self driving cars.

We just assumed they would use their powers for good and not evil, because we were judging them overly optimistically. We ignored the bad.

Now that they've been cemented as a dominant incumbent, we've seen the other side and judge them with a hyper-critical eye. We've forgotten the frustrations of life under the old guard. We take Google for granted, and ignore the good when discussing them now.

Of course, Google has always been both a useful product and dangerous given its power. Rationally, we knew all of this was true 15 years ago. But emotionally, we were unable to correctly evaluate the risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com