| ▲ | kokanee 6 days ago |
| Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand. My ranking from most evil to least would be: 1. Google 2. Meta 3. Microsoft 4. Amazon 5. Apple 6. Netflix |
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| ▲ | johannes1234321 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler) |
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| ▲ | pengaru 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... | |
| ▲ | cess11 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites. Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights. |
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| ▲ | bratsche 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something. I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else? |
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| ▲ | 20after4 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick | |
| ▲ | terminalshort 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too. | | |
| ▲ | skinkestek 5 days ago | parent [-] | | They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem.
They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down. And so on. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You are making exactly the mistake I am pointing out in my comment. Outside of the HN bubble nobody cares at all about a "thriving browser ecosystem." They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And this is where Google's dominance has a tangible benefit. The amount of resources that Google can apply to Chrome development is massive compared to what could be done in the highly competitive market that existed before it. You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly. | | |
| ▲ | skinkestek 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And now Google is slowly but surely moving to shut down ad blocking. Some of us just saw it coming a mile away. |
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| ▲ | geocar 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Google seemed so great in the beginning. It's almost like they were good at marketing. |
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| ▲ | marcus_holmes 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can we add Palantir at the top? |
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| ▲ | techjamie 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple. |
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| ▲ | 20after4 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has. |
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| ▲ | timuckun 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Does google collect more information than Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir etc? I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data. |
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| ▲ | fsflover 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Does google collect more information than Apple https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 | |
| ▲ | spacedcowboy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices. Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private. |
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| ▲ | physix 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What's so evil about Netflix? They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-) |
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| ▲ | kaladin-jasnah 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services. | |
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Cancelling popular shows in the second season because it makes marginally more money to do that |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform. |
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| ▲ | wahnfrieden 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions |
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| ▲ | dade_ 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| lol. Amerika Freedom ™ |
