switch11

agreed 100%

When something is postured to 'benefit the every day people' you can bet it does the exact opposite

Among my friends and I there is NO ONE who is having a better dating life during the pandemic

so not sure what the heck this article is about

Where do people on Hacker News meet their future significant other or people they date?

Bars - gone

Cafes/Coffee Shops - mostly gone

Museums/Art Galleries - mostly closed

House Parties - gone

Friends of Friends - almost gone

Random Luck - almost completely gone

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Online dating - really sucks

I guess pandemic must be really good for people who specialize in online dating. For everyone else it sucks

Agreed 100% -> Frankly its a bit scary that people honestly (and I truly believe you to be honest) believe Google could be a "most ethical" company.

Among my friends there are so many that work for dodgy companies and believe they are doing something good

In Seattle my friends and I ran into a girl who worked for a spybar/spy install bar company and she was completely OK with it. She actually liked working there

Of course, now it turns out that Google, Facebook, Amazon do far worse stuff than spyware companies

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reminds me of an old quote - It is impossible to make a man realize something when his pay check depends on him not realizing it

First: Product Market Fit

Second: Monetization

Third: Growth

Culture isn't even in the Top 3 and might not even be in the Top 5

* One very important Caveat

In today's zero interest rate, Fed printing press environment

where money is DESPERATE for any kind of return

Growth will sometimes trump Monetization and even Product Market Fit

VCs will focus on Growth above all else because with Growth you can raise enough money to 'brute force' Product Market Fit

Culture, as opposed to what all the 'gurus' and 'politically correct people' say and pretend

is not as important as any of the above

You can see a lot of successful companies that don't necessarily have very good culture

Culture is something that will matter 10 to 20 years down the line once you're a big or very big company

If you don't have Product Market Fit, you won't survive

If you don't have good monetization/profitability you won't last very long (unless Product Market Fit and/or growth is massive)

If you don't have Growth, then you will always remain small/much smaller than you could be

One thing a lot of people in US/UK/Canada (have lived in all 3 countries) believe VERY STRONGLY IN and which people from China/India/Africa (worked with all; non work friends from all places) don't believe in AT ALL

is this Western Dream State of a company also being focused on saving pandas and bald eagles and world peace

It's almost as if in the West it's not enough to be successful you also have to

A) Pretend you never intended to be successful. It was a happy byproduct of wanting to make the world a better place

B) Start talking non stop about how much you will donate to charity

C) Start saying 'it was all luck' and 'not the better people won' etc

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This is also reflected in a different way

In the West people are super likely to be made a fool of by a company pretending to be virtuous

Google and Facebook are good examples

They work so hard to pretend all their unethical steps are 'mistakes' or 'one off instances'

people in the West just buy it hook, line and sinker

things like: Even after we turned off the setting to track location, Google was still tracking it

things like: Instagram had camera on all the time, it was just a bug and had nothing to do with ad targeting and spying

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For all the talk of China and INdia and South East Asia and Africa being corrupt

companies like this are very quickly identified to be scum and taken down, sometimes even by the Government

Basically, the people who control Europe and US are very, very good at making it seem all magical fantasy land

Snowden is a good example. He's basically being treated as if HE was the one doing all the spying and illegal surveillance

that escalated quickly

very well put -> We are all in this together -- building a better overall financial and computing systems.

This is arguably the best book I've ever read

Would very strongly recommend reading it when you have 1 week to half a year free/avaiable

It will really mess with your head and your perception of reality

It's some really high level stuff

you know something is wrong when Hacker News has better investment advice than all the 'experts' on Wall Street

anyways, very happy to see so many people get it

based on my own experience with Adsense

we probably are

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one other thing people should keep an eye on

Google inserting Adsense tags into organic traffic

people who were coming to your site anyways - Google pretending it's paid Adwords traffic

Yes, actually people would

Many of the people who use Instagram are ones who stopped using Facebook due to privacy issues and their grandpa and grandma showing up

They didn't know Facebook owns Instagram

Facebook is stuck in this loop where it has to keep buying competitors because its own users lose faith and leave

If Instagram didn't sell to Facebook, Facebook would be screwed

Currently, FB has Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger

By some special deal with the Government they are trying to nuke TikTok

If that doesn't work they are in trouble

Many of the newer companies that are growing won't sell to FB

(Tik Tok, Snapchat, Telegram, etc)

yeah, people like to believe Snowden didn't happen

Look back at everything he revealed

That's LITERALLY conspiracy Theory proven to be conspiracy reality

And that guy, Keith Alexander, is now on the board of Amazon

so giving large tech companies like Google, Amazon, FB the benefit of the doubt is insanity

This is very well put

Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company

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The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks

He wrote this in college

He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'

Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company

And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)

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Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected

So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections

yeah

wonder how many of the people claiming Pret a Manger is worse than 7-11 have actually ever eaten at Pret a Manger

Pret a Manger

1) Amazing food

2) Very nicely set up

3) Just read the blogs etc. that London women write about Pret a Manger. In their minds it's the kind of place where they can get good food and also find 'the man of their dreams'

4) very little real competition

5) most people have a decent amount of disposable income. You can eat utter rubbish at a fast food joint, or you can terrible tasting food from a convenience store, or you can eat at a good place like Pret a Manger

6) Quick

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They do a lot of things right

If your target audience has money, then providing them a high quality service and pricing it higher is good

It's also a big help if the pricing ensures that only upwardly mobile people can afford it

Go into a fish and chips in london and you have half of East London in there, innit?

go to Pret a Manger and it's people you wouldn't mind having a pint at the pub with

Facebook basically wants to build a low key version of the matrix

1 billion people on universal income, doing nothing except getting up, putting on Virtual Reality headsets, spending 8 hours in imaginary worlds, where Facebook tracks everything and keeps showing them products they can spend their Universal income on

then take a break for food

then spend another 6 hours in imaginary worlds

then go to sleep

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A Human Farm. Facebook with help of VR 'entertains' mindless corpses

Universal income keeps them going along, and whatever is left they spend on pointless products advertised to them in FB virtual reality

Excellent Comment

Let's consider a few more examples of abuse of market dominance

1) Retail Me Not

Google through Google Venture secretly invested in them and didn't disclose that

Then for next 3 years, Retail Me Not was #1 for EVERY SINGLE deal and coupon search term on Google

Is that an abuse of market dominance? Pretty Sure

Is it illegal? According to US Anti Trust Law - not sure. A lawyer can step in

2) A market we are in

The largest 2 players (us and another company) are #40 and #41 when people search for the biggest key word

Not #2, Not #10

At #40 and #41

Who is in the Top 10?

companies that advertise A LOT on Google, even though they are distant 4th and 6th in the market

Not only that, they do it in blatant ways

Last year, they pumped up organic traffic to one of our competitors THIRTY TIMES over night

So, the top two companies (another company and us) saw ZERO CHANGE

However, a company that is a distant 4th in the market suddenly got its organic search engine traffic increased 30 times

Pretty sure in 3 or 4 years it will be revealed that Google invested in them or did some tie up

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Google is basically using Search as a weapon