| I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it. I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa... --- Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too. The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too. That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back. |
Couple of points from someone who survived working for the Evil Empire when the entire technology world wanted to see "M$," "Micr0Squ1sh," "MacroSloth," and many other clever puns crushed under the weight of first the Department of Justice and later Netscape/Mozilla and Apple and Google.
First, you get used to it, especially faster once you realize it's not personal. The people making the comments are just seeing your company and what you do from the outside. They don't know your personal or professional reasons and, sometimes, rationalizations for those decisions. But you still really should come back and read the words and maybe even rebut them when you feel like it. Why? Because...
Second, there's a reason people are making these comments. Are they good reasons? Maybe. Are they your customers and do they, quite literally, hold the fate of your paycheck and continued good fortune and success in your hands? Damn right. Hiding from the negative feedback is just as much a "bubble" as negative feedback is on HN. You know what sucks worse than negative words on Hacker News? Negative words spoken at friendly social gatherings by people who aren't emotionally and financially invested in the technology industry because once those happens, your company is SCREWED.
You can't stop people having the feelings they do about your employer but you can ask why those feelings exist and what you can do to change them. Sometimes there's nothing but, often, there really is something.