[4bpp]

Shouldn't Google (Glass) get the credit for the idea?

The way Facebook gets singled out for "creepiness" in a world full of bad actors is pretty ridiculous, and actually makes it easier for the others to keep flying under the radar.

[Gigachad]

Google glass was widely hated for this with the term “glasshole” floating around the news at the time. But it was also never sold as a consumer product so most people never even saw one.

[bartread]

You’ve just reminded me of something.

One of the div heads where I was working bought a (pair of?) Google Glass to figure out if there was anything useful we could do with them or develop for them.

He was trying them out and a colleague of mine wandered over to him and said something like, “ok Google, image search, pictures of dicks.”

Never has anyone whipped something off their face so fast. However, sadly, despite I believe it should have worked like a charm, for reasons that are now obscure to me no gallery of phalluses was displayed.

[Hatrix]

The only thing Google Glass was good for is checking e-mail. It would overheat and shutoff if you tried to record more than a few seconds of video or anything with real-time graphics.

[bartread]

Does it get singled out though? TikTok gets no end of flak. YouTube, as many parents will be aware, is full to the brim with creepy content. Kik has been widely reviled as a cesspool for CP sharing. And these are just a few examples.

Facebook gets a lot of (deserved) flak, but it’s hardly singled out.

[AnonC]

Alongside Google Glass around the same time (in 2013) was Samsung’s creepy watch with a camera and a creepy ad for that. [1]

[1]: https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/23/samsung-smartwatch-date...

[bitlax]

Google is also creepy.

[4bpp]

And yet, nobody feels that so viscerally that they feel compelled to write these schoolyard-level insults directed at its leadership every time it comes up in a HN thread.

[bla3]

There was a ton of backlash when Glass launched. Search for "glassholes" to find articles on that topic from back then.

[4bpp]

I remember that quite well. However, the backlash was very specific; as far as I remember it was never directed at the company as a whole, let alone the person of, say, Eric Schmidt.

[more_corn]

Eric Schmidt didn’t present as a creepy weirdo. He also didn’t make the company a reflection of himself. That kept the glasshole backlash compartmentalized.

Strange things happen when a leader merges the company brand and with his personal brand. It can strengthen the company brand (in the case of a plucky can-do technologist) but the company brand starts to get colored by the personality of the person (in the case of a person who goes off the deep end and starts saying weird and inflammatory stuff).

[Yossarrian22]

Because Meta was and is whatever Zuckerberg wants it to be, due to his control of the majority of voting shares. It’s a direct reflection of his soul

[tim333]

There's something about Zuckerberg that annoys people - see the Onion back when facebook started https://theonion.com/the-smug-little-shit-behind-the-latest-...

[Gud]

To be fair, I feel compelled to do just that.

[bitlax]

Probably the "dumb fucks" comment.