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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

i thought my point was pretty clear.

google can (and has) done good things for the web and humanity. there are people working there that actively try to do things that are a net positive to society.

they do a lot of shit, too. and i have no qualms with calling that out. but categorical statements of google being incapable of anything good, at all, ever, are not well thought out positions. only people who have let their hatred blind them to reality would believe that in earnest.

comparing google to auschwitz is ridiculously insulting and insensitive to the families who suffered there.

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Double edged sword. They have & they've have not. They've fueling technology for war, yet they've enabled us to communicate further and wider than before. The "don't be evil" & "good things" end up tainted; or thrown to the graveyard. You can't apply those morals to a corporation like Google.

Anything that had an positive effect to the internet ended up in the graveyard years ago. Maybe in the early years, yes they expanded the capabilities of the internet, but in recent years? nah. It's all about the money.

>"Anything that had an positive effect to the internet ended up in the graveyard years ago."

the example in my first comment, project zero, is still active today.

I think the issue might be that some people don’t actually mean “every” when they say “every”, and don’t recognize when they are speaking hyperbolically?

Or, something like that?

Yes, That plus a tendency toward binary thinking, which is something many people on hn seem to heavily suffer from.

> the example in my first comment, project zero, is still active today.

So? Many smaller players actually contribute more.

It's not about a single contribution but about what is better - a lot of power in the hands of a large corp which can afford to obstruct with impunity and do the opposite of "do no evil" versus several smaller players who have to actually compete and are concerned about their image.

>So? Many smaller players actually contribute more.

the claim was that no one should expect google to do anything good for the web or humanity "EVER". the existence of even one good thing is to refute that point.

but your sibling comment is probably correct. people say "EVER" but dont mean it literally, or something. its very confusing to me.

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