[usr1106]

Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to.

However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges for this planet are sustainability. The goal of advertising is to waste resources. I can type this on a low end phone that soon turns 10. It works perfectly, except that no recent Android version is supported. Google is in the business that cores and memory have been doubled several times since then, for no benefit to mankind. And phones are far from the only category, advertisement is about selling a lot of stuff that does not bring any true improvement in quality of life. Video is one of the worst energy wasters in computing. 90% of Youtube is useless crap, not worth destroying the planet. Nobody would pay a realistic price for it. They are an ugly oligopolist. The list could go on and on...

[sva_]

At least newer Android phones have something like 7 years of updates, so there is some progress.

The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Which application works better on newer phones? Can't see any difference, except maybe games and new AI crap that nobody needs.

[wizzwizz4]

I can do fewer things with my computer than I could when computers were slower. Software has more than destroyed the gains of hardware. (The only exception is numerical simulation, which I need occasionally for academic research, but not in my day-to-day life.)

Video games, supposedly the Killer App for high-end computing hardware, are among the worst offenders: your average modern 2D side-scrolling platformer (Mario clone) locks up my computer (to say nothing of AAA games). Web browsers are the second-worst offenders. Chat clients (secretly web browsers) are third: they barely work, and interoperability has gone the way of the dodo. Operating systems are fourth: they (mostly) still let you use older versions of software, but they have mostly just grown new problems (e.g. built-in adware in Windows; GNOME… well, GNOME) without fixing long-standing ones (e.g. slow domain login in Windows; most systemd misfeatures).

[hakhan0301]

lol; Of all the evils, these are pretty tame. I know people hate Google, but this feels like we've gone on a witch hunt.

[ben_w]

Similar, but less emotively. I'm disappointed in them but I'm not a hater.

> 90% of Youtube is useless crap

That is the way of all things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

But the best of YouTube, people are clearly willing to pay for that.

[9dev]

The point, though, is the 90% are having a disastrous impact on the environment, despite being fundamentally irrelevant and thus wasteful.

[ben_w]

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.

The people tend to disagree.

[9dev]

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

[ben_w]

Sounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".

[usr1106]

I would be willing to pay based on usage. But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.

[andsoitis]

> But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.

I don’t know how you can decry video streaming and advertising as destroying the planet and thus hating one of the companies that provide these services YET you use it.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

Google is a monopoly. Of course you can complain over such a company even if you use their products.

[aikinai]

Google is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.

[denkmoon]

That certainly isn't true of youtube. It, exclusively, holds a lot of videos. It's not like I can just watch random youtuber on vimeo or some kind of gnutube.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

No idea what you mean by "that kind of monopoly". Google is a company which performs illegal acts to preserve its monopoly. Of course that will limit the viability of competitive products and services. That's why it's illega.

[rglullis]

They do not have a monopoly on video streaming, and if they did piracy would be the morally acceptable option.

[usr1106]

I use well below 1 hour of YouTube per month, many months zero. And I never click any ads (nor are the products they advertise relevant for me, they cannot track me and I am far from the average consumer) So if it were only users like me Google would have been long out of business. Obviously I have an ecological footprint, I try to keep it small, but without being a collector and hunter living in a cave.

[CuriouslyC]

If youtube creators posted torrets of their videos I would almost never go to youtube.