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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

So Facebook doesn't have something like memegen?

I worked at Google when it was created and "went viral". Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity

I think memegen made it a lot more acceptable to be cynical, which was probably good, because the company was definitely drinking a lot of its own Kool-aid

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Oh we definitely do -- the shitposting workplace group serves this purpose. Also the private nonmanagers group.

I think a private non-manager group is pretty neat. What happens when an IC gets promoted to manager? Do they get the boot from the group?

Yeah, there's a ceremony where the manager puts a piece of paper with their username in a goblet and drops in a match, and then the non-managers all collectively intone "gone. gone. gone." and turn their backs. It's kind of sad, but the manager is allowed to keep their ceremonial robe as a memento, and there's usually a box of free cookies, so /shrug

I believed this for a minute and it made me so happy

> Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity

Too lazy to check, but did memegen appear before or after the whole Google+ debacle? Because from the outside Google did seem to drink a lot of its own Kool-aid back then (before and during the first stages of the Google+ launch).

In a way, the current discussions around VR remind me of those times, lots and lots of smart people refusing to say that the emperor has no clothes, for one reason or another.

Memegen predates Google+. And there were lots of people loudly saying that the emperor has no clothes, but the VP in charge didn't care and many mandates forcing people to work on G+ were issued anyway.

You don't have to work on G+. No one is forcing you.

(Oh wait, yes they were.)

Oh yea, but funny enough a lot of the critiques were shared via the internal version of Google+ since people actually took the time to write things and it had a pretty good UX. I don't think it's a great comparison to Meta ... this is anecdotal, but it felt plausible enough as a product strategy and in a self contained org that I think most rank and file gave it breathing room and tried to be constructive (save for a few cases where they'd made some bad calls). Keep in mind it was a period of huge growth and experimentation across the company, so there was a lot to feel positive about even if you were skeptical of Google+, and it didn't feel like they'd bet the farm, in the same way it might at Meta.

Before. I made a Memegen meme about ten years ago comparing the sign in with G+ buttons to the classic Wikipedia Jimmy Wales begging-for-donations banners, and for many years it was one of the top 100 Memegen memes ever.

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