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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Users take part and improve wikis, it's the whole model. If they don't take the adverts, they still can contribute. Googlebot isn't making edits, not even giving signal to the site about what is useful allowing the owners to hone the site.

Two ways in which issues who have adblock are better than bots.

Users will promote organically, which can win more credence than even a higher listing in SERPs. Depends if your wiki is part of building a community.

What bizarre and absurd line of reasoning. Users who care about their privacy and opt out of downloading ads and malware are 'denying creators revenue'?

Are you denying creators revenue by not reading reading/observing every ad that comes your way and making purchases based on them? Maybe you should read/comment on HN less and focus on consuming more ads instead?

What at an incredibly stupid thing to say.

Users, ad-block users, and scrapers all consume the publicly-available content whether you like it or not.

I expect the difference is that the scrapers are the most likely to regurgitate the content one way or the other.

The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads.

Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.

If there is any model on the internet that has proven you don't need to monetize through ads for a working business model, it's Wikipedia.

> So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?

Ad-block users didn't mine Pokémon Central for content, then remove them from search listings. Changing the specific criticism made to the generic "denying creators revenue" is a distortion, because they screwed over all people who wanted visitors, not just the people who wanted visitors to milk them for cash.

If I made a forum about trains because I wanted people to come to the forum to talk about trains, Google milked the forum for all of the accumulated information about trains, then made it impossible to attract new users to talk about trains.

well I didn't downvote but there is an obvious difference in thousands of uncoordinated people doing something whenever it benefits vs. a large organization with automated resources doing things at the kinds of speeds and volumes that automation allows.

You can run unblockable ads on your site.

You just have to not use third party integrations that run untrusted code on your visitors computers.

The edits are likely why you’re getting downvoted so much tbh.