[kccqzy]

The New York Times is actually part of the reason why Google’s reputation went downhill. Somewhere around 2010–2015, the NYT and other traditional newspapers finally woke up and realized that their traditional job of disseminating information to the masses had been supplanted by a new generation of tech companies including Google and Meta. So the NYT and other newspapers soured their opinions around the time. If you read the NYT, just like many intellectuals do for priding themselves for reading a serious publication, your opinions of Google would have drastically changed around that timeframe too.

However among my circle of friends (who are in general not readers of the NYT), the main reason Google became hated was shutting down products (starting from Reader, culminating in Inbox) and launching duplicative products (how many chat apps did Google have). The hate had absolutely nothing to do with surveillance capitalism. If anything people hated Meta for that; Google’s role in surveillance capitalism was basically nil compared to Meta.

[dansquizsoft]

Off-topic somewhat, but NYT once tried to convince their readers to call Elizabeth Holmes "Liz" and not send her to jail after her fraud conviction. The implication being that it was a highly paid puff piece. They lost a lot of credibility with me that day.

[khurs]

What the media stay silent on is often worse than what they publish.

Media is materially controlled by the state in each county, some hide it very well.

[hn_throwaway_99]

With all due respect, that's bullshit. Here is the article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes.... NYT is not "trying to convince their readers to call Elizabeth Holmes "Liz"". If anything, the author is quite clear that it is Elizabeth Holmes trying to convince you that she is just "Liz", and if anything I think the author does quite a good job outlining her serious crimes, and the fact that even people close to her find her to be duplicitous and that she shouldn't be trusted.

I think it's fair to ask whether Holmes would have been presented in such a soft light if she weren't a young, blonde, and still apparently rich by her husband, woman. But I think saying that the NYT is trying to convince their readers not to send her to jail is just a total mischaracterization of that article.

[dansquizsoft]

Well I'll be...

I've just read it in full and, while I think / agree it is probably still too generous and soft on her, you are quite right about it.

I'm thinking I must have been caught up in some of the commentary around it at the time it came out (I had recently read Carreyrou's book and had gone down a bit of a rabbit hole about her and Theranos), and when I did see it I read the headline and the first few paragraphs, looked at the image, and then closed the page in disgust.

Reading through the rest of it it does come across very differently, and was an interesting read. Thanks for replying about it.

[atomicfiredoll]

- Shutting down products.

- Shutting down accounts with almost no way to recover them and nobody to talk to.

- Going back on promises of unlimited storage when you buy their products, then constantly nagging you about storage space.

- The worsening quality of search results.

- Cramming incorrect AI answers into the top of their search results, or pushing it in other products.

- Using their control over Chrome to try and end ad blocking.

- The wholesale enshittification and lobotomization of YouTube.

- They have $1800 phones they're putting restrictions around being able to run your own code on.

- The fact that when you search an app in the Play store, the first result is an ad for some other app.

- Their UIs is just death by 10,000 papercuts in general.

- Their engagement in politics, not just lobbying but a donation of $1 million to the inauguration fund for a wildly unpopular president.

[Modern] Google is a big company, with a lot of users, and more than enough problems for those users to eventually stumble into at least one thing that leaves a bad taste in their mouth.