It's easy to say "there has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitting "AI" ban accounts" as an armchair hackernews user.
But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big.
If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources.
If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in.
All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.
> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.
I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets.
> If you have one person [...] If you have 10000
All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies and training and 100 people working on development and 100 upper managers, that's still O(n).
> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.
If some of your customers are higher revenue, and some are lower revenue, I'm not sure if that's really a scaling problem. But even with that consideration, it's not an excuse for being unable to give proper support to paying google customers, or youtube accounts with 100k subscribers.
All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.
This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
> All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.
That doesn't mean it costs more than O(n).
Let's say you start off with 100 workers providing 100 units of support, and 20 workers of overhead.
Let's say doubling support means you need double the existing workers, plus double the existing overhead, plus 20 more workers to handle new kinds of overhead.
So 120 x 2 + 20 = 260 workers for 200 units of support.
Then 260 x 2 + 20 = 540 workers for 400 units of support.
The percentage of overhead grows every single time we double the number of workers.
And yet if you do the math, you see that the overhead never goes over 40%. And it was already 20% when we started, so that extra amount isn't hard to afford at all.
Despite growing every stage, it's still O(n). The dominating factor is linear.
Obviously those numbers are just an example. But the point is that you have to look at how much the costs increase. Even if it's theoretically faster than linear, if the overhead only grows a moderate amount as you grow from a thousand support workers to a billion support workers then it's not an excuse. It's within a small fudge factor of linear for all real-world numbers.
> This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
Only in the short term. In the long term, production ramps up until the price is pretty close, and on top of that economies of scale drop the price by a significant amount.
A lot of things get exponentially more complicated as the company or customer base scales up. You'll notice that the ones that benefit the company and the bottom line somehow manage to keep up. I take this as a sign that any such challenge can be successfully tackled providing you have a genuine interest in that. Things are as they are not because they are technically unsolvable but because this is the degree of interest each one posed for the company.
At some point you start getting lots of customers who purchase less but are more likely to require significant customer support resources for what they do purchase. At scale, things that might have looked O(n) at one volume of customers can change.
Even if you could double your customer support resources, it means a very different structure and needing to ensure you both hire in the same quality of employees up and down the escalation chain as well as adapt your organization to handle the vastly larger communication and problem resolution processes.
Noe of that is trivial and it's quite easy to take a great org and make it terrible by just adding a bunch of people.
Sorry, but you can't skip support because it's not cost effective, just like you can't skip financial regulations or data regs. You don't get to use the excuse of "Sorry we are too busy making billions, maybe we wouldn't have to cut corners if we weren't so successful."
The problem isn't scale. Scale is just how they made a lot of money. If you make a dollar a billion times you made a billion dollars.
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.
The vast majority of Google users will never need customer support, and those who do probably will mostly have easy problems.
There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
The channel in question has 100K+ subscribers and 17M+ views. That's probably a sizable amount of profit for Google from ads. It it really so unfathomable that google could tune their ban bot from "ban this video/channel/account immediately" to "signal a human to have a look and decide on what to do, maybe after talking to the channel creator"? That's just ridiculous to me.
> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.
It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.
Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
It's not trivial to game subscribers and views. Such gaming is a problem, and they are pretty surely not really close to perfect detection rates, but they aren't that bad either. And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me.
>Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Not impressed. Not every "content claim" leads to a takedown, or account strike. And not every content claim is the same. If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
> If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
Because the ad slots are sold at auction. If 20% of the views are bots then the price should go down and advertisers get 20% more ad views (and the same number of real ones) for the same dollar. Assuming the advertisers are rational and informed; if not then the explanation for why they do it is that they're irrational or uninformed.
> And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
One thing doesn't appear to have anything to do with the other.
They have a ban bot because people keep trying to sue them or threaten them with adverse legislation if they don't take stuff down fast enough.
> And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me
Because you're doing the opposite of what scammers do. You're using the one IP address with a terrible reputation. They use a million IP addresses with good reputations, e.g. from a botnet full of machines that were innocent users last month.
> If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
You would think so, except that a ton of the erroneous takedowns come from the biggest senders, because they use garbage automated methods to send them.
Meanwhile if they give privileged access to major companies then everybody else would be complaining that they're discriminating against small content creators by not honoring their takedowns like they do for Sony.
Alphabet could pay for proper customer service, though. It's not as if they're doing badly. Come on, 40b in revenue and nearly 7b profit last quarter [0]. Unfortunately it won't happen unless they're forced to.
Absolute numbers are useless. How much of that profit is from YouTube rather than search, and how much is that per-user? When the answer comes out to be something like $1/year, how much customer service does that buy?
Do you think charging users for support could be a feasible option? I'd pay $100 for a call with a representative who can call shots on Youtube's strike reviews.
It would solve the cost problem, but people would hate it. You'd have to pay even if you won because they have to pay the customer service rep either way.
And it would open up a new trolling vector. Now the troll files complaint after complaint and forces you to pay $100 over and over again.
What could work is to do loser pays. If someone wants to object to your video, they have to post $100, and so do you if you want to get it reinstated. Then whoever wins the dispute gets their money back. And extra points for having a builtin troll deterrent.
But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.