fm6's Journal: Love and Hate

Here's my recent post about Google and their permanent betas. The mods follow a common pattern: quickly modded up, then eventually modded back down with the usual cowardly "overrated".

I don't give a shit about the mods. (And as usual, I ask people not to waste their mod points "fixing" the situation.) But something else does bother me. A dozen or so people responded, and not a single one of them seems able to grasp the idea that I admire Google, but am still critical of their screwups. Apparently you're only allowed to love or hate.

Permanent beta

[StrawberryFrog]

Today at Open tech [ukuug.org] we had Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! saying how flickr's permanent beta is good - you get to adapt to feedback perpetually. I like the development model, but I wouldn't like to call that beta.

Google News

[turg]

From what I've read, Google News is in indefinite beta because they can't figure out a way to make money from it. If they start putting ads on the page, the quotes from the news articles might not be fair use anymore.

Consider the audience

[duffbeer703]

The Slashdot audience is dominated by geek males 18-24, and a few older ones who've been reading for years.

Criticizing Linux, Apple, Google, etc is like criticizing the social security system at lunchtime in a nursing home -- its just not going to be warmly received.