Google: Whatever happened to ‘Don’t be evil’? | Hacker News Reader

Google: Whatever happened to ‘Don’t be evil’?

spiked-online.com

19 pointsRickJWagner19 comments

I'm surprised that "don't be evil" lasted as long as it did. It was a flame magnet: For any x that anyone misliked, they could pretend that "don't be evil" was intended to be a promise not to do x, and flame Google.

Anyone public figure learns to avoid statements that are easy to use against the person who said them. "Don't be evil" strikes me as a perfect example of such a statement.

That was the point. Google wanted to hold itself to a higher standard, because by being held to a higher standard, the product and the organization improved more than if they didn't have that standard. And the Internet environment of the 00s was such that consumers would make their own judgment about products, so if a PR kerfuffle happened, it was basically free advertising because people would go check out the product to see what all the fuss was about, and then find the product actually improved their lives, and then stick around as repeat users.

It started to change around 2011, for a few reasons: a.) Google ran out of headroom to improve their core products, so increasingly changes were met with "Eh, whatever" rather than "This is really cool!" and b.) perception started to dominate reality, so what the press said about a product became more important than people's actual experience using the product. Those are related: when a product is unquestionably good, you ignore what everyone else says about it, but when it's questionably good other peoples' opinions matters a lot more. But the combined effect was that it became more effective to pursue short-term wins that generate a positive press cycle (and to avoid negative press cycles) than to pursue risky new product cycles that speak for themselves. When perception dominates reality, managing that perception becomes more important than improving reality.

I agree that Google wanted to hold itself to a higher standard, and IMO still does. It's a company that's turned itself CO₂ neutral retroactively, back to its founding, for example. Lots of companies have gone neutral in the present, Google bought offsets for its past emissions too.

The problem with the the motto is that made it easy to hold Google to any arbitrary standard and make that sound reasonable.

They realized they were in it to make money. Or as a public company they had to make money. It’s easy to say things but hard to pay for them.

… which would imply public companies need to be evil, at least some of the time?

The love of money is the root of all evil. So of public companies are meant to chase money above all else, they're kinda required to be evil, aren't they? (From a Christian perspective at least.)

>they had to make money

They had to make more money than they made last year. In other words, public companies that don't grow die. So public companies, opting for less profitable non-evil ways will be capitalized out by companies that does not have that reservation.

In other words, currently, the world IS an evil place and will grow more evil with each passing day...

>spiked-online.com

I immediately thought there will surely be some hand-wringing about covid denial and climate change denial in this piece, and indeed:

>This became especially clear during the pandemic, when online platforms engaged in the censorship of those voices, no matter how well-credentialed, who dared to question the official policy on Covid. Tech firms have been engaged in attempts this year to create a ‘disinformation board’ that would work to limit dissent from federally supported orthodoxy.

>But this is just the beginning. Last year, Google announced a ‘crackdown’ on climate-change sceptics – including well-known scientists.

I’m speaking to Quark from Deep Space Nine on the phone and he has one word: profits

Funny how all these articles are based on one badly researched blog post from back then. Don't be evil is not gone - it never was. They merely moved it to the end of their code of conduct [1]. It's insane how none of these authors could be bothered to do 30 seconds of fact checking before spewing out the same based bullshit just because it fits their narrative.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

I seem to recall that it was removed, then reluctantly added back, and the then-new CEO said "Don't be evil." was childish.

(which sentiment I'm biased to interpret as "I want to be allowed to be evil, so I'm going to belittle and/or remove anything that gets in my way.".)

It was never removed. It was only ever moved to the end. Some blogger only read the first line and thought it was gone, so he made a huge fuzz about it and people/newspapers who didn't verify jumped on. But everyone who checked immediately called him out. You can verify it yourself by checking the internet archive around the dates of the alleged removal:

April 21st, 2018: at top [1]

May 1st, 2018 (next save): at bottom [2]

The blogger outrage only started in late May.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/i...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180504211806/https://abc.xyz/i...

As I recall, this was brought into focus when expanding search into China. The end result was 'let's be less evil' than the alternative.

Then eventually evolved to demoting it into obscurity.

Sorry. I don't trust alt-right publishers.

They optimized it by removing 3 characters, and accidentally became far more profitable.

They became evil?

how is Google evil?

did you read the article?

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