Whine, Complain, Repeat

I am a huge Google supporter. And I have a bone to pick with the tech community.

The past couple months, Google has been having a outage problem for different reasons, specifically Gmail, and people have been complaining about it, calling it Gfail. The various reasons are that the Google cloud is showing signs of strain, hackers are being jerks, Google isn't using enough of its resources to keep things afloat. Here's my huge, indignant complaint: why are you complaining so much?!?!

Being a huge Google supporter (Gmail, Gdocs, Google Sites, everything else...), I use all of their services without repaying by any monetary way; I allow them to display ads on the pages I use and view. In essence, whenever I have an internet connection, I use what they provide with absolutely no loss to myself, only gain. I am incredibly thankful for what Google provides. To top that off, Google is an amazingly effective and efficient product. Knowing and realizing that, I am slightly inconvenienced but understanding if Google has a couple outages that last an hour or two every once in awhile, barring permanent loss of my data and anything in the future I might pay Google for.

This complaint reaches out to people who not only complain about Google, but anybody who complains about free things on the internet that suffer outages that aren't common. Show a little gratefulness! Fortunately a lot of things on the internet are free since online services operate on ads. And if you weren't aware, it takes a lot of work to get anything running that's free. If you want to complain about something, then support it by paying for it. It's a matter of respect.

There is a certain etiquette to interacting with people and services online, and we need to make sure that we're being fair when we complain. Now I'm not saying at all that we shouldn't voice our complaints about Google or Facebook not working for a couple hours (suppressing frustration is never a good thing), but if you're not able to connect for two hours that doesn't qualify as a fail. This is something I'm guilty of in a lot of things when it comes to technology and the internet, but it still needs to be followed, so that we all achieve a balanced ecosystem in digital reality. So let's be nice to each other and supportive to the companies that give us free things that we eventually find ourselves addicted to :)