[superasn]

This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know. People who are paid millions of dollars are making these decisions at Google so maybe that's how the game is played. I still think treating your customers like the way they're doing it now eventually never always works out.

[samwillis]

When you have a metric driven company, where peoples career progression and bonuses are tightly tied to revenue numbers in a database, you incentivise this sort of thinking on an employee level. The visibility of the impact isn't necessarily there at the top.

[jtriangle]

Not just a metric driven company, but one that's so large the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and neither of them could optimize their jobs for the other even if the incentives were for them to do so.

[gipp]

> This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know.

That's because it's completely inaccurate. It's just a meme propagated by HN and some others, with essentially zero correlation to how decision-making and prioritization actually happens over there.

The idea that clickbait is somehow good for Google's bottom line is absurd on its face, before we even tackle the idea that ads' interests are controlling search ranking

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> The idea that clickbait is somehow good for Google's bottom line is absurd on its face

I guess I am simply unable to see so I will ask: why do you think the idea as outlined in the GP is so illogical?