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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.

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This seems akin to saying that humans shouldn't be personified because their brains are made of millions of neurons that are all doing different things. But the actions or motives of individual processing units are hardly relevant, especially at the scale of The Google. We don't need to speculate how non-malevolent individuals cause harmful side effects. It doesn't even matter what The Google "thinks". The system is what it does, and what it does is consistently operate in ways that are not for the mere benefit of users of the Web. The conceptual model that The Google hates (or is callously indifferent to) us makes far better predictions than a model presuming thousands of people make mistakes while trying to make the Web more accessible. It doesn't matter if the former model isn't a technically perfect reflection of reality. We are less likely to be victim to The Google when we act as if it is a hostile force. Diffusing the results of its actions across thousands of nameless humans increases the risk that one finds themself posting on HN or X about how The Google spontaneously locked them out of their entire life.

Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.

No, I think the company has plenty of responsibility. I just think it is more likely as someone who has been part of many engineering orgs that this is a latent bug affecting some people than some intentional change of policy.

Is this irony? Cause there’s no way anyone believes these “we want to make the world a better place” cliches anymore lol

> over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less

Right, that's why they pushed AMP and upranked AMP pages in their results. That's also why they decided to severely neuter/remove as blocking extensions for Chrome. That's also probably why google search results are getting worse by the month with more and more ads and spam being upranked to the top.

It's because google has a mission of making the web more accessible. Okay bud.

The over arching mission is to make profit.

And accessibility was meant for Google so they can collect all the data to make even more profit.

It's laughable to assume good intentions at this point, this predatory monopolist makes every decision against a free and open internet and in favor of monetization, authoritarianism, and enshittification.

sweet summer child,

> thousands of people who are all working on different things

those thousands of people aren't making the overall decisions

> with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible

google's mission has for a long time now been to deliver value to its shareholders; making the web more accessible is secondary, nice if aligned with increasing revenue

lol.

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