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Comment by mtnGoat | Hacker News Reader

I've been invited so two similar events over the past couple decades and one company I worked for had standing weekly meetings with Google. All I can say is my experience is pretty much they same, they lure you in wanting info and to help you, but don't give any answers and just keep wanting more info. In the end they didn't unblock us and in my opinion built a lot of what we shared into their systems. It was a knowledge theft exercise in my opinion, was NOT in any way meant to help anyone but Google.

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When I handled a lot of ad spending for numerous companies, Google would schedule continuous meetings with junior sales people dedicated to figuring out which client relationships that they could interfere with to convince me to spend more money recklessly. This is a common experience in that particular industry with Google's salespeople in particular.

What's interesting about that is that if any of the (dozens? over a hundred?) salespeople that I interacted with could have provided a solid rationale for what they were suggesting in the context of what a particular client wanted to achieve, I could have been persuaded. None of them ever did at any time. It was always just a one-sided appeal to spend more money with no coherent plan for a return on spending.

in fact the standing weekly meetings were cancelled after we got to the point where the entire half hour was consumed with going over all the AIs their end had they we were still waiting for answers on. Since we never got any, we cancelled the meetings as wasteful.

This article doesn't give any specifics on the "shadow-banning." I am totally willing to believe in any douchebaggery anyone reports from Google, but I (as anyone should) require specifics to give any credence to the writer's claims.

This "article" fails to answer the first questions you'd have. For example, how did Google single you out for this invitation? The article asserts that it was all "shadow-banned" site owners, but then says the Google employee denied all shadow-banning. So how was the invitation phrased?

I'm not even going to waste time breaking down the rest of the empty bullshit in this article. It's unfortunate, because I'll bet every claim made against Google is true. But I'm not going to give a single one credence without specifics. If you're too lazy to provide those, you don't deserve support.

You could maybe consider directing these questions to the author of the article? Given the context, I'm sure he'd appreciate the feedback.

It's not uncommon for the authors of articles posted here to come to the comment forum.

Or for someone with similar experiences to describe what's really going on.

From a quick search it seems you get invited to these things by filling in a feedback form for Google.

As for shadowbanning, well, it doesn't take much to remember Google is a search platform and then to match that with his complaints about his site getting deranked.

Maybe that could have been made clearer, but surely if I could figure that out you could too.

Nobody should be expected to run around doing searches to support the assertions in a random article. Why would you serve as an unpaid tool?

Anybody on here can speculate as to what Google does to this or that Web site; but if you're going to write an article claiming it as fact, you need to support it.

It's a bummer that your time is free.

Your time seems to be free as well as engaging to demand "proof" wastes as much time. But yours is way more wasted as you created only a HN comment, not a proper blog article.

last two comments mentioned it... is "your time is free" a new pejorative for "loser" or something?

Create a blog post to respond to an apologist for unsupported, fact-impoverished writing?

That's a whole other level of time-devaluation.

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