And let's also take a moment of silence for everyone who invested time and energy into creating stories only for Google to just not be bothered anymore and switch it off.

Maybe a moment of silence for people who read and write long form content and like to immerse rather than skim... ~ sigh ~

Maybe also one for blind and vision impaired people, this looks like just a sequence of videos.

If we changed these moments of silence into shots of tequila, we'd really get this party started!

It reads like you can host your own stories, but since it’s in a “story” format I’m having trouble following the details...

Or a moment of noise in solidarity with the engineers who got promoted for shipping the shiny new thing.

Bang !!

"It's been an incredible journey, and we would like to thank all those who have shared it with us."

I have the unfortunate inkling that this is here to stay. In hindsight it seems obvious that Google Search will implement the most successful and ubiquitous features of social media. I don't like it, but the pressure this will create for companies to compete in this space will be huge.

But does Google Search have an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp yet?

Well, GMail does read email, fulfilling jwz's law, so there's only one more law to go.

Maybe something like emacs, but AMP-based, and we'll have the worst of two worlds!

no but there is dart

But they can be happy for their manager, who'd get promoted for pushing this out. Maybe they all will even get some bonus!

I wonder if Google’s turnover is such that when this does inevitably get shuttered, those who worked on it are still at Google.

If stories posted here on HN are to be believed, and I overall do believe them, then they are probably mostly still at google, they are just onto a new project. Google seems to prioritize and reward project completion (aka "shipping") more than long-term project successfulness. Also it's more advantageous to do whatever it takes to get a leg up and get promoted than it is to care about the long-term viability of a project.

So to answer your question, probably still at google, just not associated with the "stories" team anymore. It's a game of hot potato where you don't want to be stuck on a team not shipping/innovating since those are the same teams that get spun down (though to be fair it sounds like they just get absorbed onto the "google blob" instead of being let go most of the time).

It's sad that people that are the most passionate are the ones who suffer the most (suffer in terms of not getting funds/time/etc to expand a product they care deeply for and for their troubles get shifted to some other team when Google loses interest in their "baby").

This definitely rings true in my experience, but I have to wonder what a better system would be for Google. Their leadership just isn't top down which means rewards have to hit some kind of decentralised target, launches being the most impactful.