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I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting:
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
I used both. When time came to Play cyberpunk, I went for Stadia.
It runs a lot better (streaming quality, glitches, start-up times) are incredible.
Using Stadia in general is a polished (yet basic) experience.
In contrast Nvidia very much felt like a hack. Log-in in my steam account, seeing weird window glitches.
I see a lot of comments negative on stadia here,based on bias rather then actual experience.
Stadia is nothing short of tech star even with its downsides compare to the rest of the market.
I can't speak about Nvidia, but we just hosted a ~25 person LAN party at work and decided to go with Stadia... never again. Some people couldn't even make an account because they didn't have a credit card (even though we planned to mostly play free titles). Literally every game needed 20-40 minutes before we finally got everyone in - we never pinpointed the root cause, but a combination of restarting Chrome (emptying cache), relogging into Stadia, rebooting PCs and re-hosting a match, we managed to play a few titles. In a couple cases, we just gave up trying to get more than a handful of people in the game. Some people couldn't ever get their keyboard or mouse working in some titles (myself included, one game in particular was fine for awhile, then suddenly my mouse stopped registering in-game - rebooting and having the host restart the server didn't help - googling my issue says I'm not alone).
Some of these titles I've played multiplayer via Steam without any of the related issues, granted Steam/Stadia is an apples/oranges comparison.
At the end I suggested we try Armagetron. 2.7MB download and runs on Mac/Win/Linux/Potatoes. I started up a private server and we were running a 16-player game without any issues in literally 5 minutes.
Does 4k matter? The way you state it makes it sound like it's a major issue (disclaimer: I've never seen a 4k game)
This is an honest question, since I don't game much (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) , and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely curious.
Would describe Stadia 4k to be inline with native 1080p, at least when playing stadia in a browser. Stadia 4k may look better using a chromecast ultra, but I haven't tried that.
And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means nothing to most people.
> It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate
Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement.
And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does.
Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
YouTube's bitrates are atrocious. I don't understand why they can't at least offer a higher bitrate to their paying Premium customers.
> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].
I'm not sure about Europe, but in the US it's very rare to see bitrates even a large fraction of that. (I don't see a minimum bitrate on the ATSC Wikipedia page, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's often lower than 6 Mbps.) Worse still, in a bunch of places the cable companies still deliver MPEG-2 video, which is going to look pretty atrocious at anything other than an extremely high bitrate. It's a big disadvantage compared to Youtube. Plus a whole bunch of programs are in 60 fps, which need a higher bitrate anyway.
I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.
Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.
Ah yes, I forgot that there are different standards depending on the country. To be quite honest, I haven't sat down and watched linear TV in years, but from what I can tell at relatives' homes the quality here is not bad.
Actually, out of curiosity I just looked up the bitrates for my local cable company. The quality seems to differ a lot: on average between 3 Mb/s MPEG-2 [1] and 12 Mb/s MPEG-4 [2]. So I guess my previous statement isn't really accurate and it depends on the channel.
That website appears to be quite interesting btw; it also tracks YouTube bitrates for live and non-live video and in different encodings! [3]
At least with game streaming services, I suspect advertising resolution serves the double purpose of being understandable to most consumers, while specifically obfuscating bitrate, which is the sacrificed statistic.
It depends on the game. Anything that has a lot of text or small icons - e.g. many strategies - benefits from high DPI in the same way desktop apps do.
The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough).
If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding), and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if you do make the port, they will be about 1% of your users. Or less. So, to summarize, mac support is expensive, difficult, and not profitable. Should we still do it? I tend to think you're better of spending your time on linux support.
Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense.
I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.
Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work
But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
> Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy
You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't.
Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something.
I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry:
1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.
2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...
4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:
An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.
That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.
Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).
And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
Yours is a thoughtful post and doesn't deserve a quick, dismissive response, so I want to hedge the following just by acknowledging that.
I'd say your problems 1-3 can be summarized by saying you don't think there's a market for it. I don't think I agree. The prospective market for it is probably console gamers who want to play PC games that aren't ported to their console.
Even CP2077 might be an example of this, because from what I've heard the performance is absolutely terrible on consoles, and if you haven't already spent heavily on an upgraded computer with a graphics card that's going to set you back $1K, you probably can't play it there either. So if you're the stereotypical console gamer, who doesn't care about perfect graphics and the lowest possible latencies, Stadia is going to sound like a pretty decent deal.
- CP2077 could be viewed as a one time inter-generational fluke, where a project was designed with the ambition of PS5, then half-heartedly fitted into a PS4. Once people get their next gen consoles, this use case probably goes away. Can you imagine a lot more of these CP2077-like scenarios that justify being a Stadia user?
- Stadia will be just as vulnerable to "exclusive content fragmentation" as consoles. Now that they've shuttered their internal studio, they will in fact, be constantly on the defensive in the war of exclusive content.
Yeah, I was only using Cyberpunk as an example of how a console player might play a game on Stadia that was released on their console if it performed better. (Or even equivalently, since Stadia has other advantages like easy travel.) But I think the much bigger draw will be for games that are PC exclusives or PC/XBOX, for Playstation folks.
I suppose it remains to be seen how successful Stadia will be at pull these titles to its platform. I think you're right to worry about fragmentation. If developers view Stadia as "just another platform" that they can just choose not to support when creating exclusives, it'll fail. If Stadia can get them to view it as a kind of drop-in that lets a much larger number of people (with, say, underpowered hardware) play their game, they'll be more likely to view it as a win.
One other plausible market: people for whom the upfront cost of a platform is still too high. It's a lot easier for most parents to justify buying Cyberpunk for Stadia for their kid for Christmas than it is a brand new $500 console, or God forbid the several thousand dollar PC you'd need to play it.
I hate doing this, but I feel like I need to pick at each of your described hurdles, because I think each of them make assumptions or assertions that don't hold up.
1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to build and revel in the machines that run the games I own. What isn't true is that those same people, people like me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.
2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games that people play on the many devices that already exist. It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those devices to play more games.
The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales. 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia means that people can play more games on their devices.
And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on my iPad that's a few generations old. That's very attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I'd even argue it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.
First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it even easier to play games on those devices that don't exist for those devices, or will at some future date, optimized to run on those mobile devices.
I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day before I could run it on my PC, and after the first several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.
3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser? You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You buy the games, and they cost the same as console games. So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern browsers, you don't need to buy a console.
4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to react to your button press or mouse movement. There are indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms. It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then show you what changed. But that's not the only constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good, it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the clock.
So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.
And that's on your PC. No networking.
What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi. With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS competitively? Probably.
Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.
But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.
>So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.
People can perceive delays smaller than their reaction window. For argument I'll say it's 50ms is the perceivability barrier, since we seem to throwing numbers around here. I can get 50 or 60 ms lag on my wifi often, and I would say that I have a pretty good connection. So therefore, the input lag potential with stadia is significant. 60 > 50.
I think the more important fact is that people can be affected by small amounts of latency, even if they can't react that quickly or perhaps even discern that latency is occurring.
The obvious example here is a precision platformer like Celeste, but you can say the same (with less and less applicability) to other games, starting with FPS.
In Celeste, there are a handful of frame-perfect inputs in the game. This means you have less than a 20 ms window to get your input in, or you're dead (the game's only failure state). How is this possible, if human reaction time is only ~100 ms at best? It's because there's a difference between reaction time and timing. Reaction time measures your time-to-react to an unpredictable stimulus. Timing is your reaction to a predictable stimulus. Most of the time in games you are reacting to a stimulus that is at least somewhat predictable.
So with a little training you can reliably make that frame perfect jump. But if Stadia adds 60 ms of latency, that means your character is over 3 frames ahead of where you think she is. You're going to miss that jump a lot until you can reprogram your brain to account for the latency, as much as possible. And even then you'll probably find it harder. Throw in a little variability to the latency, so you think the character is 3 frames behind but she's actually 4, and you're doomed.
Granted, not every game is a precision platformer, so there are diminishing returns for low latency in other types of game. But if you, say, enable cross-play between Stadia and non-Stadia in a shooter, the local players are probably going to have a huge advantage. Even making it work against an AI opponent would require some significant work to make the AI's reaction time keyed to Stadia's measurement of latency, not whatever you originally hard-coded into the game.
You reacting to something is not the same as reacting + seeing the rendered frame.
There's an entire chain of things that contribute to latency, and network latency is only one part of that chain.
From what I've experienced on a pretty normal, non-optimized wifi connection (meaning I just plugged a cheap TP Link router in and did nothing to its default settings), I don't notice the latency that Stadia contributes making any difference compared to whatever amount of latency I get on my capable PC.
That's not to say network latency doesn't matter. It matters a lot to pro CS:GO players, for example, (who have reaction times in the 130-300ms range, for what it's worth). Those players are will to pay for high poll rate mice to shave off a few milliseconds from input latency, or build $5k+ machines stuff with insanely fast CPUs and GPUs, with $2k+ monitors with 1ms latency.
But Stadia isn't for that kind of game play.
Like I said in another comment, the talk around streaming games is almost identical to people who scoffed at services like Netflix when they first started streaming. You had Laserdisc nerds freaking out about how the streaming would produce compression artifacts, and people like Mark Cuban saying that people were crazy to think streaming video was the way to go, (all while pitching his HD satellite service).
Having used Stadia as a "normal" person might, I'm certain that in the not too distant future, streaming based gaming services will be as mainstream as Netflix is today. Despite whatever compromises it has to make.
> What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms
I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no load) and 100ms (normal).
There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia is going to be a better experience than local.
My internet is also shared with other people, in a country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia), the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient device.
> I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
OT, but I'm curious, what kind of router do you have? That seems really bad. I tested this on my laptop (over WiFi, in a very heavy traffic apartment building) and see the following:
50 packets transmitted, 50 received, 0% packet loss, time 49115ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.751/1.436/5.000/0.812 ms
I don't say that to brag, I really think that's definitely expected for any LAN device.
I’m on my phone at the moments, so I’ll paste proper numbers when I’m back, but when I tried it last week it was like 18/370/60/1478/etc ms. Bear in mind, this was In the same room as the router.
That's really dreadful, I'm sorry you even have to deal with that. Can you replace the router? Even the cheapest bottom of the barrel router from your local big box store should be able to get a response to you in under 5 ms pretty reliably. (I'm assuming your WiFi / access point is built in to your router.)
What model of router is it? This really feels like a situation where something has to be broken, I can't imagine any router, no matter how cheap, has an expected ping rtt maxing out at around 2 seconds. Notably, your minimum rtt is under 2 ms, so it's definitely capable of getting a response to you faster than that, maybe it's just overloaded or something?
I never said Stadia would be better than local when it comes to latency, though I wouldn't blame you for assuming that's what I meant. Latency will be increased.
An argument I was trying to make is that for other reasons, and for a lot of games, Stadia is better than local when you take the entire experience into account. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of where the overall experience is subjectively better. My RTX 3070 based system renders the game and its bugs beautifully, far better than Stadia does. But is that $4500-worth of eye candy worth it compared to the $0.00-worth of totally acceptable Stadia? Lag-wise, I don't notice a difference.
I prefer playing the game on Stadia now because it's just so simple. I can use a controller or mouse and keyboard with my iPad and play from anywhere in my house. And not just my house - I've played it over a LTE connections several times without issue.
As far as latency goes - people tend to get hung up network latency when it's only a small part of the latency story. Granted, at 100ms, it becomes a bigger part of the story, but people either don't know about, or forget, that there's more:
There's peripheral latency, "system" latency (which includes CPU, render queue, and GPU), then display latency for single player games.
Stadia, or any streaming service, adds network latency. For me, with a pretty normal American internet connection provided by a craptastic provider (because it's the only choice I have), it works great.
For what it's worth, I've also played with some of the "local" streaming tech. No joke, Stadia performs better than streaming using Steam's local streaming app, by a long shot. There's the iPad app (the name escapes me at the moment) that lets me stream my XBox to the iPad, and it's better, but still way worst than Stadia.
One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad as you'd think
Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games
(This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)
>> Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games
Source please?
I have produced / designed / managed a few AAA games in my life and none of them had a 200ms latency between when you pressed a button and something happened on screen. That delay would be horrible for a fighting game or a driving game. How are you even defining "something happening on screen"?
Let's suppose you are right, that there is a longish latency between when your input is polled and when the game systems fully react. That happens to some extent in RTSs, because changes in the game state are synchronized. But in that case the delay isn't going to hide the network latency, it is going to be added on top of the network latency.
Not all games are that bad, especially these days. And your overall point is correct: adding even a little bit on top of that already horrendous latency is going to be noticeable by players.
Worst out of the 23 games listed in the first link has 8 frames of latency at 120 fps, which is about 66ms. Monitor input lag included.
200ms, while possible, is far from "most AAA+ games", as OP stated.
Sure, there's people that play on lowest-end consoles, on a crappy LCD TV with game mode disabled, but let's not consider that the norm for all players/all AAA+ games, and I'm going to need hard sources showing whether those worst case environments get even close to triple digit latencies.
They might be talking about engine delay (ie. frame times/framerate) but i've moreso seen delays of 100-150 milliseconds deemed acceptable by people playing console games on an old flat screen TV that doesn't have a low-latency mode available, and I haven't really experienced this on anything other than consoles since even cheap PC monitors tend to have <10ms display lag[0].
You probably know this 100ms = 10 FPS. What kind of display shows video at less than 10fps? Game engines aren't always synced to frame rates, particularly simulations. But a simulation that updates every 0.1s isn't great for fidelity.
A 30 fps game could go through a complete loop, updating everything: object positions, inputs in 33ms. At 60 fps assuming everything is synced to frame rate that would 16 ms.
I was asking for the commenter's source of information so I didn't have to guess what he or she meant. It's possible to make a game that doesn't respond a user's input in less than 200ms, but why would you? You don't need to be making a technical tour de force to respond in 16-33ms.
I was commenting on how the TV can add latency/'display lag', not that it only shows a frame every 100ms. TVs have gotten much better[0] but input lag can be high with cheap TVs sold 5-10 years ago.
Thank you for the example. You said most games had a 200 ms latency. I wasn't trying to attack you, I just doubted that figure, admitting I wasn't sure. You found one example of a game with 160ms latency, listed among a bunch that are much lower.
RDR 2 isn’t a racing game or a fighter. You could argue it isn’t really an action game.
Also, why do you believe the latency of a display or a controller isn't sequential to the delay on Stadia?
Yeah, sorry for getting tilted, man. It's just annoying when you try to give out some helpful info, and then you get dogpiled by people who have no idea what they're talking about spewing nonsense. Particularly the dude who doesn't understand the difference between latency and framerate, man oh man..
You can see right in the half-assedly-found top YouTube result 11 frames at 16.6ms delay each, so that's 180+ ms of delay, before ANYTHING happens AT ALL on the screen. Much less something noticeable. It'd be very straightforward to shave 100ms off the buffer bloat in one of these games, so Red Dead Redemption 5 the Stadia Exclusive could have the exact same responsiveness controller-to-screen as Red Dead Redemption 2 on a fast internet connection.
I said AAA games, I meant the super big-budget action RPGs that dominate the industry. Obviously well-tuned shooters, racers, and fighters aren't going to play well with an extra 100ms of lag. That said, even super well-implemented games in those genres have a few frames between a button press and the screen unless you're talking VR or something from the CRT era.
Anyway, I have better things to do than try to explain to the Dunning-Kruger Boys how latency works, especially since I hate Stadia anyway and your ignorance will help speed it toward its inevitable doom.
Wow, I didn't realize it was that high. I stand corrected.
I think most of the above still applies, but maybe expand "it'll be good enough for some people" to include some portion of average console-gamers (assuming the rest of the productization is done right, and assuming those console-gamers have fairly good internet)
The thing is that, even there, if you're putting it on a TV you're likely not going to want to plug in your Macbook or whatever. Which means, if you don't already have a console, you're going to be buying dedicated hardware regardless. Which significantly cuts into the "savings"/"no-purchase" angle, and steepens the question of "what's the point of this?"
One thought though: Microsoft could use this as a way to keep last-gen console owners engaged. At some future date when the Xbox Series Y or Z or whatever comes out, people with a Series S might still be able to play the latest games by streaming them. They're using dedicated hardware that plugs into a TV, but it's hardware they already bought which is essentially being repurposed.
Edit: Another thing is that the subscription model and the streaming model don't have to go hand-in-hand. I think game subscriptions are absolutely the future, but I think there will always be a market for devices that download and run those subscribed games locally.
At 30 fps a 200ms lag would be over 6 frames of delay between input and the action happening on screen. Can you point to any examples of AAA games that actually have this much input lag?
The confusing messaging around that question has been a big part of the problem
Regardless though, I think buying full-priced games that you don't actually own is the real non-starter. These aren't $0.99 songs on iTunes; these are $60 investments.
i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
>stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well
To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals.
When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.
For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.
There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?
Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).
Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
> Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause!
Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!
>The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review.
The last sentence is key: 'for human review'. Google feels humans are damage to be routed around. If there was a way to everything in ML they'd go for it, but if your solution requires human review it's a no-go.
my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing.
Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out.
Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.
Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When something needs updating the console will get a ping, download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things much easier.
they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d movement and the analog stick.
'here's popular game except worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users who don't know what latency means will instinctively recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a much more negligible factor.
This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result:
* Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
* Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you.
Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.
I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.
It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don't even exist.
You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
You know it’s funny that lots of the basic functions of business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable.
What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.
Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.
I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.
I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.
The problem with this sort of thing is that because it's interstate commerce, states usually do not have standing to regulate effectively.
The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory authority because of political challenges. Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!"), biased against marginalized minority or cultural groups ("My marginalized constituency of blind, alcoholic yak herders have a religious prohibition against reading contracts"), or a unfair mandate restraint of trade ("The Chamber of Meme Commerce believes that this rule will cost 10,000,000 jobs in the meme industry and kill puppies."), etc.
This was addressed in the UCC and is pretty simple actually as each state implements laws to saw who has jurisdiction and how to handle.
It also bypasses the federal government in that the code is established by some big council and implemented in (most) states.
That’s why when I live in Missouri and buy something from a vendor in New York, they still have to accept returns, issue refunds, provide for basic warranties, etc. and if I have problems I can easily get remediation in state courts.
There’s 50+ years of where this works ok. Not perfect and lots of room for improvement. But better than the current shitshow that exists like this article describes. If we had the minimum level of legal structure, it would be so helpful.
Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I have to support it through its commercial life. So if I hand out knives, for free, and they explode after 20 years, I must still support it. Even if they come with a form that users have to click that says “I will not sue PrependCo if these free knives explode.”
Google’s free (and even non-free) services are causing harm to people and aren’t being supported.
> Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I have to support it through its commercial life. So if I hand out knives, for free, and they explode after 20 years, I must still support it. Even if they come with a form that users have to click that says “I will not sue PrependCo if these free knives explode.”
Why does the UCC covers free knives, but not paid Google services?
All products have a warranty of merchantability defined by UCC. Basically goods need to be average/expected quality.
With services it’s a little different because there is no average unless the contract is missing performance terms. If you agree to a term of performance, then that is the obligation.
If it was sold to a resident in some state online currently that resident can sue in the local courts. The business is considered to operate in all states.
The alternative is all suits under ~$75k(?) don't get heard because they don't meet the requirements for federal court, which obviously can't be right.
> Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!")
This is just an awful example. There is not a free speech right to pay for your own speech by committing crimes, and nobody claims or would claim that there is. Similarly, you don't see the argument made that vendors enjoy the constitutional right to sell fake pills. What spammers want to do, and what anti-spammers want to stop them from doing, is to advertise real pills, and yes, there are extensive free speech implications there.
The EU recently proposed The Digital Services Act, which is a DCMA like legislation (with both copyright infringement and other illegal content like CP as targets).
Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the ground that the information provided by the recipients is illegal content or incompatible with its terms and conditions", which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.
They must provide details of what part of the Terms of Service they claim you violated: "where the decision is based on the alleged incompatibility of the information with the terms and conditions of the provider, a reference to the contractual ground relied on and explanations as to why the information is considered to be incompatible with that ground".
If the internal appeals process fails, the consumer can take the company to online binding arbitration (with the consumer's choice of accredited arbitrators certified by the member state). The company always pays its own costs in the process, and must reimburse the user's costs if the company loses.
Claiming that "an indefinite suspension" is just a type of temporary suspension and different from a ban will have you laughed out of any actual court.
Agreed. We generally allow companies to refuse service for nearly any reason, and in most cases this is a good policy. However, there are exceptions to that rule. One extreme are utilities which as both monopolies and essential services are required to do business with nearly any paying customer, and have strict rules processes about shutting of service for lack of payment. Residential rentals are another example. They don't hold a monopoly, but are an essential service, and as such they can generally choose who to do business with (although not quite as freely as your average business), but have strict legal processes they have to follow regarding evictions.
I think there are online business who are essential enough that some consumer protections are applicable. Very few reach the level of monopoly that utilities have in my mind, and even those it isn't clear to me that they are "natural" monopoly like utilities, and as such other antitrust approaches may be more beneficial.
However, I think there are a number of competitive, yet essential services online that deserve a legal protections regarding service termination. Identity providers absolutely fall in that category IMO - it is unacceptable for example for Facebook to lock your account in a manner that prevents you from not only using their services but every other third-party service which you authenticate using "Logon with Facebook". I think email is another that rises to this level. At a minimum email providers should be required to forward mail for a fixed period of time after choosing to stop doing business with a customer.
I think there also needs to be a law that, once you have accepted responsibility for storing someone else's data, that you can't delete it "on a whim" without offering some minimum retention period ok your data. As an example: a storage facility is allowed to stop doing business with me, but they legally can't just destroy all my stuff on a moment's notice... we have laws for minimum retention periods.
Also if you violate the storage facilities rules and they cancel the lease, they can't turn off the electricity at your house just because they happen to have the same parent company.
The Kafka solution to this will be our terms of service prohibit single spacing after periods and you are in violation. Therefore we can terminate your account at any time of our choosing.
Alternately we could prohibit posting in any language other than Latin and Klingon, or using the letter e, or accessing our services using any unapproved operating system (and our only approved OS is windows 3.11 with winsock drivers).
Anyway the point is now the company can ban you for any reason at all. Being the wrong religion, voting for the wrong candidate, being the wrong race, etc.
Not just "can", but "will". And given how effectively these companies are using their size and power (and m-word) to crush the competition, it's long past time for some anti-trust action.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
1. I'm not sure you understand what running water means. It's not water that flows down a river, it's water that comes from a tap. The whole point of running water is that a utility delivers it to your home, regardless of whether or not your town is in a rain forest, or the middle of a desert.
2. You'll die in three days without water. You'll probably be healthier if you spent three days without Facebook.
3. I can't collect water for myself where I live. I suppose I could walk down to the lake, and manually bring up a few buckets of water, but it won't be safe for me to drink. I suppose I can also go buy bottled water, at a ~million-percent markup. There is no economic alternative for me to get water, other than through the water pipes laid to my apartment, by my water utility. I am a completely captive customer for my utility. My water utility has monopoly control of special-purpose one-of-a-kind infrastructure that is used to deliver water to my apartment. That is why my utility is regulated.
4. Unlike with my tap water, there are plenty of functioning alternatives to... Whatever it is that Facebook does for me. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, my life would be mildly disrupted for a week or two, and then would go on with little change.
On the hierarchy of needs, we have air at the top, followed closely by water, shelter, and food, followed at some distance by electricity, and way down the street, that we can barely make out, by grabbing a pair of binoculars, we will see 'Facebook'.
Why not? The qualification being for public utility should be "is this basic infrastructure humans need to live now?". And the answer is yes. Facebook controls most of the big public speaking forums and google controls so much and in so many spaces that it would be foolish for me to even try listing.
I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.
> I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.
Water/Sewage and Trash are typically run by the city/county government, although it is common for the actual work to be handled by a contracted company.
Power, natural gas, phone, and most others is almost always a private company.
No traditional utility company does what Google has routinely shown to do as in the original post though. There's still a bill to pay and expectations of reasonable service (I assume if I just left my tap on and drew as just electricity as I could I'd eventually get some phone calls and massive bills) that allows these companies to be profitable.
Google isn't at the point it needs to be nationalized, but something needs to be done to limit the fallout that occurs when users are kicked off essential services with no recourse.
What's stopping the next Google from doing the same? Providing poor justification for bans and removal from platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are considered more essential.
Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason losing your Google account is so impactful is that it controls everything from access to apps on your phone to your email to your calendar to being able to chat with friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say, Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN comment.
No startup can compete with Google for those services because Google can artificially offer them for free, and for very high quality, because it's all funded by their advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would have to "do things that don't scale" and offer real customer support... which also costs money.)
It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google is surviving because they offer the best value to customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from the service being offered. And in the other direction, potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being tracked by) Google ads.
Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions of a market-based economy - that companies that provide more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to exist.
I have self-hosted E-mail for myself and my family for years, probably close to a decade now--I lost count. It's a learning curve at first but once it's dialed in and working, there's really nothing to touch. Occasionally, like once every two years or so, I find my spam filter process crashed and failed to relaunch or something, causing delivery delays.
That is a very, very limited scope for Google/Facebook. Almost to the point of me suspecting you are strawmanning it. In fact, google/facebook is so endemic to our infrastructure that you can literally delete you google account. Get it scrubbed from the internet, they will still track you. Identify you. And show you ads. If you try to block their services, some pages stop functioning. It is on the verge of impossible to escape them
The OP is about a personal Google account, with access to mail, etc. at stake, but it's also about a developer who was going to create content for their platform. Granted, Stadia is not exactly a make-or-break gatekeeper for publishing games, but that same dev account could well be used for Google Play Store, which controls about half of the mobile market. We've certainly seen plenty of those stories here -- app developer gets locked out, only recovers account / gets app un-banned by making enough noise to get attention.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
> The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And that's also why monopolies and giant corporations can and will always form in the current economic system. Crony capitalism is not a bug, it's a feature.
Oh yeah, far more easy than the government taking regulatory action is coordinating a massive consumer choice boycott.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
If all of the latest Facebook news can get my family to start questioning their usage/dependency on Facebook—I think it's fairly possible.
There have been a number of really great projects coming through HN and other sites recently that are aimed at solving some problem that people on Facebook have: photo sharing, event planning, etc.
You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet.
Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
I think this is a convenient narrative for an abusive pattern of behavior by Google. The company is infamous for having non-existent customer service. It's not a matter of their AI having too many false positives, it's that when there is a false positive you have literally no recourse even if you're a well known business partner.
Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the money to provide even basic level customer service? If it were really a matter of not being able to afford it, certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to answer for it.
Technically they do offer customer service if you pay them with their Google One product. I have phone numbers and human access very quickly, because I pay for it.
Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have access to my direct support line anymore.
How was them banning Terraria's accounts not a sudden decision? How about any of the other stories posted in this thread? They literally ban accounts on a whim, usually with no warnings issued.
You're being downvoted for unintentionally agreeing with the main point: Even if you are paying for support, you have no recourse if they decide to arbitrarily lock your account.
People are talking a bit past each other here, but inexplicable arbitrary machine learning false positives are anthropomorphized as whims of the algorithm. Without any explanation as to why the false positive occurred, the effect is indistinguishable from the whims of a person pulling a lever behind a curtain.
> If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will)
It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
I heard on a podcast recently that a trading system needs to keep logs of why a particular trade was executed for several years just in case the authority wants it. So it isn't too much effort to build a similar report or log of behaviour to explain why someone was banned.
Obviously this will also help the spammers who will use this information to get around the filters.
Some government decisions are indirectly forbidden from using black box "algorithms" because they are obligated by law to explain (on demand) the steps that the algorithm took to reach its decision. Maybe something like this should also apply to some private companies ?
For the record, they don't give away these explanations because such explanation would hint the spammer to what they should _not_ do next time, to avoid getting caught. Same as with anticheat software.
> they don't give away these explanations because such explanation would hint the spammer to what they should _not_ do next time
We've heard this excuse countless times, but it's simply not acceptable. The foundation of our legal system is that it's better to let a criminal go than to punish an innocent person. How many innocents have to get caught in the crossfire before we start protecting them?
This isnt criminal law. This is the right a private property owner (say the owner of a bar) has to kick you out. There are some limits on that (e.g. a restaurant can't kick black people out) but for the most part a business that doesnt want your business doesnt have to serve you, right or wrong.
Not yet, but that's my whole point, it needs to be: It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
You can't really compare getting kicked out of a bar with losing access to your gmail. There are no "algorithms" automatically kicking innocent people out of bars. Getting kicked out of a bar is a direct human interaction, which is exactly what I'm demanding.
The reason people are incensed about FAANGMP doing so is because, in their respective markets, they're monopolies.
No one would care if Google banning a developer meant they could list their app through a non-Play app store with decent exposure, or a non-App Store at all.
But that's not the reality we live in.
So it's more like if Walmart moved into my podunk town, put all the local shops out of business, and then banned me.
There is speculation that Google will ban sideloading in the near future, too. That is, it will extend its Advanced Protection model to mass-market Android. Then, sideloading will only be possible for that tiny minority of nerds like us who know how to use ADB and install an .apk over the command line.
> This is the right a private property owner (say the owner of a bar) has to kick you out.
Not exactly?
It's certainly not criminal law. Proof beyond reasonable doubt has no place here.
But it's also not exactly the relationship between a host and guest, where the guest has no rights save what the host grants. Website terms of service purport to be contracts, so there is a contractual rather than ex gratia basis for the relationship.
So, begin interpreting website terms of service as contracts of adhesion, and read in a duty for website operators to enforce those terms fairly, with a reasonable basis (on the balance of probabilities) for harmful decisions.
This isn't the current law, of course, but it's not hard to imagine the law reaching that place from here.
Well they can, just not for the sole reason of being black...
>>This isnt criminal law.
No it is Civil Tort law, but that does not mean your rights are completely removed, nor that principle does not apply
>>This is the right a private property owner (say the owner of a bar) has to kick you out. There are some limits on that
Absolutely, and those limits are normally set either by over riding civil / businessl law passed the government, or a contract entered into by 2 parties
The problem with Google and many other online platforms is their ToS (their contract) is sooooooo one side that IMO it should be considered an unconscionable contract thus void and unenforeable.
Also we have things like Truth in Advertising laws, many times these platforms Public messaging, and advertisement in no way match their terms of service
I am fully in support of the right of a private business to choose who they want to do business with. I am not however in favor of allowing business to use marketing manipulation, false advertisement, and unconscionable contracts in the form of ClickWrapped Terms of Service to abuse the public
the "mah private business" defense is a weak one, very weak, and it is telling that people defending the large companies with this defense often times do not support it in other contexts.
Google has every right to choose who it does business with, but it need to make those choices in transparent, and public manner.
the legal system deals with a finite number of people; the internet enables that finite number of people to act as a potentially infinite number of entities, without a great way of disaggregating them into people.
E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million different people, and each of those "people" requests an explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs). But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate users. So one way or another people who are real, legitimate and with good intentions somehow pay the cost of the harm that is being done on the internet. This is a hard problem.
Source: am thinking/working on this sort of stuff; not representing my employer, my opinions are my own etc. etc.
> This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs). But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate users.
A way to square this circle is to have rights engage at the point of payment.
A truly pseudonymous account with no monetization (going either way) has little intrinsic value, and less need for KYC-like identification.
On the other hand, an account with some sort of payment history (either giving money in the case of purchases or receiving money in the case of developers/website hosts placing advertising) faces a higher standard. There's a reasonable probability of real economic harm if the account is nuked arbitrarily, and at the same time any money flow is open to theft or money laundering concerns, triggering moral if not legal KYC obligations.
The latter should also help prevent the proliferation of straw bad actors, since providing payment imposes a direct cost, while the KYC rules open up the possibility of more direct action for flagrant breaches of contract / use of the platform for other abuses.
The "spammer" can only pretend to be 10 million different people because e-mail is free. Paying a tenth of a penny per e-mail has been one of those long-standing impossible anti-spam measures, but walled gardens can implement something like this at their whim.
> The "spammer" can only pretend to be 10 million different people because e-mail is free. Paying a tenth of a penny per e-mail has been one of those long-standing impossible anti-spam measures, but walled gardens can implement something like this at their whim.
Maybe. A few problems here:
1. payments come with privacy concerns, unless maybe you're talking about zero-knowledge-based blockchains, but we're a LONG way from such functionality being widespread
2. $0.001/email is actually very reasonable for an attacker; they'd probably gladly pay even up to $1 or more, depending on their exact needs, especially if that comes with an elevated privileges account
3. all of this is easily defeated by fanouts. E.g. if they sign up with bob@gmail.com and then are able to use bob+1@gmail.com, bob+2@gmail.com etc. to sign up for a different service, this defeats the purpose
> E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million different people, and each of those "people" requests an explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
Again, it's not a "request".
If spam detection and account suspension can be automated, then suspension notifications can also be automated.
I'm not sure I understand where the 10 million number is coming from. Are you suggesting that 1 spammer can create 10 million accounts on your system (which appears to be Facebook)?
Regardless, no spammer has the time to get on the phone and personally dispute 10 million account suspensions — disputes which are unlikely to succeed if there is good evidence — so I'm not sure how the system grinds to a halt.
This was specified in my original comment: "At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063313
Except for the part where someone has to answer phone calls, it could be automated if the account suspension itself is automated.
I'll also point out my later comment: "I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063399
And to forestall any replies that providing information to suspended accounts would help the spammers, I've already responded to that point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063660
Temporary account suspensions that you can quickly reverse on appeal are annoying but could be justified to fight abuse, as long as they don't happen too often. On the other hand, indefinite account suspensions that are impossible to reverse, such as the case of Andrew Spinks of Terraria, are simply indefensible, there's no justification whatsoever for that.
> I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
This is absolutely spot on, with the caveat that you do need to disaggregate from accounts to people, which is the hard problem. Having people call a phone number is definitely not going to work as a way of achieving this disaggregation. I'm pretty sure I could create a system to bring that call center to a halt with fairly minimal cost in less than a week of coding.
As an attacker, you can also hire people in call centers to make phone calls at scale for you.
> As an attacker, you can also hire people in call centers to make phone calls at scale for you.
I think we may be talking about different things? I was just talking about a scaling problem of providing legal notifications of account suspensions and providing a means on getting them unsuspended. I wasn't talking about DoS attacks.
Lots of companies have call centers, so I'm not sure what you're envisioning here, or what financial gain there would be for spammers to DoS the call center. After all, their accounts are already getting suspended by the algorithms, regardless of whether innocent consumers have any appeal to this, and DoSing the call center won't help spammers get their accounts unsuspended.
Out of curiosity, what's current thinking (broad strokes) on methods to address this?
My first guess would be third-party attestation of identity, with stored credential disposal on a short schedule? Essentially normal-user-verification-as-a-service?
When someone is in court on charges of child abuse, maybe we don't want them to know in case they (After serving their sentence) or their friends go for reprisals. Maybe the next child abuser might know their likely avenue of getting caught. Yet still we tell them the charges and evidence and give them a chance to defend themselves. Often in my country, given the damage such allegations could cause to both the victim and alleged (but not yet proven) perpetrator, we don't even reveal the identities of culprits until there's a guilty verdict.
If we can extend that courtesy to people accused of child abuse, surely we should extend it to people accused of internet spam?
You don't have to tell them how you detected them but you can tell them what they did wrong. A lot of times when these cases come up there is nothing in the reason you got banned that would help you avoid the ban. It's purely to avoid any kind of accountability (if they say you got banned for a reason that is plainly not true because their algorithms suck)
It would also give non-spammers a better understanding of why they were banned and teach them to be better humans. It’s this lack of empathy that’s leading to more and more anger online.
This is an age old problem in the criminal justice system. A solved problem.
After a lot of trials with various approaches, we settled on letting some criminals go free over convicting someone on weak evidence. Second we decided that trials should be open and evidence viewable by default.
Finally you generally have the option to give some security to stay out of jail during trial.
Closing a google account is a punishment worse than many criminal convictions. And will only get more important as we progress to an all digital existence.
> Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an actual living wage, give them full health benefits, and hire enough of them to prevent overload.
It includes support, but I'm not sure if that helps in cases where google thinks you have abused the service. I just use it because I like having my own domain, and so that I don't lose access to my email if google locks me out. The idea is that I can update my domain's MTX records and use another email service.
Support does not include if your account gets suspended or if you lose access.
We had a paid Google App account. One of our workers would only login from their computer. It died, and she tried to login from the new computer. It gave a unrecognized machine error, and we had to hire someone to resuscitate the old computer for her.
I know of a company that had the entire companies' accounts suspended without warning because one user did something that violated their terms, but they could not figure out what. The company lost three months of revenue from it and I am not sure if it caused bankruptcy. No help at all from G.
About a year ago, I started migrating to a vanity domain, currently hosted at Google, for this reason. If I get locked out of Google, I lose my history, but at least I can move to another provider and avoid being locked out of my life for the indefinite future.
Friendly reminder to anybody reading this with a Google account: it's not a perfect solution, but head over to Google Takeout and grab a dump of your account data while you're thinking of it. I did one last year, and at the same time reconfigured my phone camera roll to back up somewhere outside the Google ecosystem, so now all I'm missing is an up to date email mirror.
Meta: my comment above is being downvoted significantly. I'm not sure what I did to offend. There was a remark about the need for a paid option, and I pointed out that it already exists. I have no agenda here and was just sharing what I know.
I suspect it might be because the OP is about getting your account locked out, and several commenters have said that even paid accounts lose access to human support when they're locked out, so it's not actually a solution.
But surely it’s possible to use methods other than what currently seems to be the first and only solution: “your account has been banned, bye”.
For example, if an automated system thinks an account is sending spam, enforcing a (very low) outgoing email rate limit would be a much more reasonable first step.
Well their main argument against it is that if you don't tell scammers which rule exactly they are breaking they can't improve until the app is approved. But of course that hits normal customers too. It's the equivalent of arresting random people on the street and not telling them why - surely, innocent people will just get their lawyer to free them.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
It isn't the only solution to this problem. Not using their products is another one. However, in some sectors (e.g. smartphones) it is next to impossible to not use their products, especially because they are build on centralized schemes. But regulating those things is probably harder than a consumer rights bill. But the downside is probably, that a consumer rights bill would not just affect the few large corporations, but many smaller ones too.
> It's the same in France and I think most of EU as the highest french court ruled that forced arbitration was against EU law.
For consumers or businesses? Not being nitpicky here: I am not familiar with the French ruling, so I would genuinely want to know - as regulations tend to differ (businesses, even single sole trader ones, do not enjoy consumer protections). Not really relevant for the Terraria dev as it is his personal account that is banned, from the sound of it - but important.
As a consumer, every time the clause is not specifically negotiated, it is considered "abusive" and void (for businesses it may be different). If as a consumer you negotiate a contract with an arbitration clause it will be enforceable however if it is a generic clause in the terms& condition it will not.
For consumers. Businesses are considered to have both more (legal) resources to conduct deals as well as a need for more flexibility. However in this case this sounds like the account was personal, so even if it was used for business purposes, the deal was personal. In Europe (France here) typically the distinction is not in the use but in the contracting party.
A business is registered with tax authorities and has an identifying number, if you contract a service without such a number you're doing so personally so for such purposes you're a consumer and bound by consumer laws. Indeed, all registration forms for services ask you for that number and business address. Services that don't want to / can't be subject to consumer protection laws or are not allowed to sell to private individuals require that number and verify it. Services that allow both individuals and businesses ask for it and may treat you differently based on it.
Forced arbitration is against French law. Google cannot force you to go to a specific company for arbitration (that, conveniently enough, happens to always rule in their favor). It has to be explicitly negotiated between the two parties. This also holds true for companies. It has to be explicitly negotatied.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that U.S. courts have found that suing is a right that can't be waived by contract. Certainly an agreement to enter arbitration can be introduced as evidence against you in a a lawsuit, but any decent lawyer should be able to prevent an arbitration agreement from getting your lawsuit thrown out.
I think we’re in a post consumer lawsuit era. Almost every terms of service on earth requires arbitration, or else absolves the vendor of any liability whatsoever
Arbitration isn't so bad. It still costs the company every time they have to deal with a case.
Mass/automated arbitration claims can turn the tables, and lawsuits can be filled to challenge the neutrality of arbitrators.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term. These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
> The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
Why not both?
A consumer bill of rights and breaking up Google are not mutually exclusive. Consumer protection laws protect consumers from all companies big and small, present and future. Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
It's a bit strange to think a nebulous "consumer bill of rights" is going to protect you when the actual Bill of Rights is routinely violated. We have utility designations for instances where it makes sense, and even then you see customer abuses. Forcing companies to focus on competition and survival is the best way to make sure they treat their customers well. Abuses pop up when customers don't have the choice to take their business elsewhere.
> Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
The same regulator that has the power to break them up also has the power to prevent the next Google. Good pricing regulations have the power to prevent the next Google. These are solved problems, we just don't enforce the laws on the books or modernize them appropriately.
> It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
That's probably because it wasn't successful in the classical sense. Geroge Bush won the 2000 election and settled the case before it went to judgment. If it had, and Microsoft had been forced to break up, we may not be in the current situation.
> It's a bit strange to think a nebulous "consumer bill of rights" is going to protect you when the actual Bill of Rights is routinely violated.
The Bill of Rights were written over 200 years ago and could really use a rewrite for modern times, but passing constitutional amendments is much more difficult than passing laws. Moreover, the issues involved in the Bill of Rights are much more contentious, whereas pretty much everyone is annoyed by Google's complete lack of customer service.
I also find this statement to be somewhat at odds with your later statement: "These are solved problems, we just don't enforce the laws on the books or modernize them appropriately." How does your Bill of Rights analogy not also apply to your own argument about antitrust?
I would say that consumer protection laws that can be applied in an ongoing, daily basis are better than antitrust laws, because antitrust enforcement is a monumental task that at best can take years to achieve, only comes into play when problems have already gotten out of hand, and may not have the desired results, as you mentioned. Better to try to prevent some of the problems from occurring in the first place, with laws that apply to all companies without exception, instead of trying to just go after a few of the current biggest troublemakers.
And Google is far from the only company who pulls this crap, so at the very least we would need multiple successful antitrust actions.
Right to repair is a similar issue. So, breaking up Google and Facebook might help somewhat with the account suspension issue, but then we also have to break up Apple. And John Deere! And other companies. Or... we could pass right to repair laws. Antitrust feels a lot like Whac-A-Mole to me. Not that antitrust is bad, but you knock down one BigCo, and another arises. Why not more directly address the abuses caused by the BigCos?
The abuse is economic concentration, everything else is treating symptoms. Antitrust, price regulations, fair competition laws and the like are the remedy to that abuse. Obviously we would need to do more than one action - I'm talking about restructuring the economy. It's only whack-a-mole if you go one at a time. Knock-off a few big ones and the rest will settle to get the best deal possible.
I don't believe we are as impotent as your response would imply, and we are certainly capable of putting a stop to these abuses and enforcing laws that create fair, competitive markets. I agree it's a longer term project, but it's the only one that will actually solve the issues. It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on short term fixes.
> I don't believe we are as impotent as your response would imply
I don't believe we're impotent, which is why I'm suggesting new laws such as a consumer bill of rights and right to repair. I think that antitrust is actually too little too late in addressing problems. After all, you can't take anti-trust action against a company until it's already a trust. ;-)
> It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on short term fixes.
I think we disagree about which is the long term fix and which is the short term fix. I personally consider antitrust action against individual companies to be a short term fix, whereas permanent universal consumer protection laws are a long term fix.
> After all, you can't take anti-trust action against a company until it's already a trust. ;-)
That's not what the laws on the books say. It's a colloquial term, and nobody like a pedant.
> I personally consider antitrust action against individual companies to be a short term fix, whereas permanent universal consumer protection laws are a long term fix.
Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s. Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage economic concentration and the abuses of labor and society that always come with it. The American government has never succeeded at compliance regulation — it gets weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
Further, how would you make it "permanent"? Constitutional amendments are a non-starter right now, and Congress can't pass laws that have 80%+ popular support. You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-ups under the Clayton Act.
> That's not what the laws on the books say. It's a colloquial term, and nobody like a pedant.
It was merely a play on words, but the point was that antitrust only kicks in when significant market power is involved, some kind of restraint on competition, whereas other laws protect consumers from abuses by companies of all sizes, even the smallest "mom and pop shop" companies.
> Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s. Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage economic concentration and the abuses of labor and society that always come with it. The American government has never succeeded at compliance regulation — it gets weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
Again, I find it strange how you think one set of laws can't possibly be intelligently and usefully applied by the government, while at the same time thinking another set of laws can, i.e., antitrust.
> Further, how would you make it "permanent"?
What do you mean? Laws are permanent by default, unless the legislators write an expiration date into the law.
> You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-ups under the Clayton Act.
> Again, I find it strange how you think one set of laws can't possibly be intelligently and usefully applied by the government, while at the same time thinking another set of laws can, i.e., antitrust.
It's not strange if you look at historical priors. The US Government has frequently succeeded at regulation that involves rulemaking, investigation, and prosecuting abuses. The same government has failed to achieve its' goals any time it tried compliance based regulation. Sure, both are subject to regulatory capture, but I've only seen the one model succeed.
I'm generally against these types of "consumer protection" movements explicitly because they target the smallest "mom and pop shop" companies. Consumer protection costs wind up driving those smaller businesses out and promote corporate concentration. Once you have that, the corporations are writing the rules, and the laws stop protecting customers (see: Boeing 737MAX).
> Tell that to AT&T.
ATT, Verizon or T-Sprint? If they don't answer I can leave a messaging on their answering machine using free long distance, or send an email using a modem. Just a few things that resulted from that breakup...
And we're only back down to three because of a (going on) five decade streak of executives that favor laissez-faire economics, which kind of proves my point that it's a good solution. Look at how much effort it took to undo that breakup, and they still haven't gotten back to the Ma Bell days.
> we're only back down to three because of a (going on) five decade streak of executives that favor laissez-faire economics, which kind of proves my point that it's a good solution
I think that kind of disproves your point, but maybe we should just stop there. :-)
>It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights"...
Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool. Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election. Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should be compelled to share those messages.
So those evil politicians will do what? Force corporations to indiscriminately ban arbitrary people without possibility of appeal? Oh, wait a minute...
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that pont.
So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.
Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.
The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet platforms.
Partner is not a customer. They don't care about any human on their platform because their platform is not designed to care about humans, only exploit them.
If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".
You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?
(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
I think this is a balancing act of risks, and I wanted to bring up what I believe to be a success story when it comes to handling suspensions: Microsoft.
One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e. violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive less catastrophic, while still removing actual problematic users from the service. This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.
If you're implying that there's just no way to support their users then I'm going to disagree.
At Google's scale and profitability, saying you can't build an appeals process that supports your paying users is just ridiculous. And at this point the collateral damage to Stadia's already tenuous reputation is going to be a lot more than paying someone to vet him manually.
Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person.
From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free. And a 0.001% chance that you'll end up a statistic, and need to pay a nominal fee for an appeal.
Unfortunately, I don't think the above will ever happen, because it would be a PR nightmare. "Google wants to charge you money, just to appeal a ban!" It's still better than the status quo, where people have almost no recourse when they are banned. But it still sounds way better in the media, if you just pretend as though these things never happen. Hence the status quo - use automated systems to cheaply get to a 99.999% success rate, and spend as little money as possible on the remaining 0.001%
> So now banning people incorrectly is a revenue generator?
It need not be, as long as the fee is less than the cost. It could be symbolic (say $1). But the problem is that it would be seen as a revenue generator whether it is or not.
They don't even have to keep the fee of the query is legitimate. They can reimburse it or keep it in the user's wallet when they consider that this was either a false positive or a honest mistake. The cost would be minimal but would deter a lot of people trying to game the system.
And if companies don't want to do it, that should be easy to regulate though. Requiring a human centric appeal process even if it has a fee, and prohibiting blanket account bans (if you get banned on gmail it doesn't affect your android and play store accounts, for example)
There are other provisions that I consider important like not being able to reuse email addresses and requiring the forwarding of email for at least 6 months after any account termination (getting banned from your email address can have disastrous consequences)
The problem with unjustified bans due to some algorithm is also: These cases might not even be a close calls like: “oh yeah this person did something that is in the grey area of what our policies state. I will ban him but he might interpret things differently.”
No if you enforce your policies strictly by (machine learning) algorithms it could just be a matter of misinterpreting a different language, slang, irony or something else. Which makes these bans even more infuriating.
Counter-counter example, even if you do reach someone at Amazon they're not necessarily going to do anything useful.
I've had a problem with my Amazon account for years now, after Amazon billed me (on my seller account) for something they shouldn't have.
After I complained, they agreed to refund it. Except the refund never arrived.
Asked many times over the years "WTF?", and someone always promises to look into it after agreeing they can see the problem.
Never to be heard from again. Same pattern has happened every single time (many times). Obviously, something about it puts it in the "too hard" basket... :/
Needless to say, I don't use Amazon's services much at all any more unless required for job purposes. And I steer people away from AWS for the same reason too.
Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?
I agree: not true. The advantage of automation is you can do more for less which extends the reach in wealth and services available to the human race. Automation is a beautiful thing and gmail being too big to service with human support is not understanding that we'll never have enough intelligence power to police every square inch of existence + the net if we rely solely on human intelligence.
Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
Automation is a form of capital. In an economic system that has conditions for a runaway positive feedback loop of accumulation of capital, in the long term, it benefits primarily those who own the capital. Specifically, it allows them to collect more economic rent from it, and share less with the rest.
Taken to its logical conclusion, when everything is automated, the people who own the automation don't actually need the rest of the population at all - it becomes redundant. Of course, the "redundant" population might have different ideas about itself...
I don't think anyone is proposing that moderation rely solely on humans. The question is about machine learning with human backup/appeals vs. Google's approach of machine learning with no appeals.
Depends on how much of that wealth is captured and how it is distributed after it is captured.
If a huge amount of wealth is created and 90% of it is captured and the vast majority of it is distributed in share price/dividends then increasing inequality can really fuck up society even while GPD rises.
You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.
That's like saying a restaurant can't choose not to serve a billion people even though it only has enough capacity to seat and make food for 20: if you can't provide legitimate service for everyone, you need to not allow more people. The core problem here is that users keep signing up for Google services without being informed correctly ahead of time why that's idiotic, and the only fix for this is going to be regulatory: either Google needs to change how they handle banning people (there should be some law that if they accepted responsibility to store someone else's data that they have some minimum retention time for it letting you access it or something), come up with a working appeals process (and ensure that they have enough employees to handle the expected appeal load before either signing up new accounts or banning old ones), or they need to be forced to have a giant sticker on the box with a skull and crossbones on it which says that the moral equivalent of the surgeon general needs you to be informed of the serious risks that are associated with using this ridiculous service offering.
>If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.
Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.
I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.
> You can't even trust phone companies to do their job right and ensure the secure verification code is sent to the right phone! You provided some more secure ways for users to authenticate themselves,
For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was replying.
Any company that uses SMS for 2FA is offloading risk and security to an industry that never expected it, and explicitly seeks to not provide it.
A Telco _desperately_ wants to be able to get you back up and running (making calls and spending money) on a new phone using your existing number before you walk out of the shop. And even more, they want to be able to transfer you across as a customer from a competitor - and have your existing number work on their network.
"Sim Swapping" is a valuable feature for Telcos. They have significant negative incentives to make it difficult. They don't want to secure your PayPal account, and nobody (least of all PayPal) should expect them to do a good job of it, certainly not for free...
Yes, it's pretty simple. Create and enforce some consumer protection laws which require, for example, that any company larger than a certain size is required to establish support offices staffed by humans in every major town. And required to resolve every issue within X days either by fixing the problem or clearly documenting why not. If not, no arbitration allowed, so they are subject to lawsuits if the reason doesn't hold scrutiny.
Problem solved. Companies like goog, facebook et.al. can easily afford this and it'll stop this ridiculous behavior.
It also to some extent protects the companies. Spambots who create a million accounts can't replicate a million humans to show up at the support office, so it establishes a human:human relationship that's completely missing today.
This would all be perfectly okay and understandable if the AI were the first line of defense and there was any meaningful way at all to contact support and escalate things after that filter. (I mean besides making headlines in all the gaming-news articles.)
> But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of accounts...
Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
Yes there is a lot of money riding on that, but that is the cost of doing business.
Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to bear that cost even in light regulation countries.
A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part the result of not fully taking responsibility for the consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will, under social pressure that this post success represent, or by laws.
At some point percentage is insufficient, but it's because it's a rate. Permillionage/DPM doesn't fix it. It's the number of people affected that matters, so if you have it at 99.9% and grow 10x, you ought to improve it to 99.99% to not become eviler. If you just stay at 99.9% when you grow 10x, you're harming 10x the people.
I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper measure.
If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's too big to exist, and should be broken up.
It's hard for users to migrate to a competitive service when there's some form of lock-in, which is usually what happens in practice (often through other services offered by the same company).
This is by far the most ridiculous reasoning I’ve seen for a company being too big. Because too many users get restricted from the service unintentionally then the provider is too big?
Some regions floated right to explanation and right to human review for automated processes. I don't know if any passed, but if they did, it would definitely mean the service has to take it into account.
You have summed it up quite nicely, but I don't see why it's so ridiculous? If the social costs incurred by corporations past a certain size become unacceptable, why shouldn't we, as a society, limit their size? There's no natural right to form an LLC.
Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse you were thinking of?
If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.
In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.
We see that on HN too, where people who have been banned/hellbanned with ample warning are often complaining that it's because "hackernews groupthink" but when you look back at their comment history they call someone some redpilly insult in every comment they've ever made on the website.
It’s even worse than that because the bad actors are doing this at scale and will have automation to auto-appeal while normal people will sometimes shrug and decide it’s not worth it. So your appeals queue likely contains a higher flow of bad actors than the distribution of FPs.
It's interesting to me how Bloom Filters avoid the uncanny valley between probably correct and definitely correct. I don't know if this is a technological difference between problem domains or a purely ideology/mindset.
Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error, not an accomplishment.
Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks. Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation, repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.
Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should result in many more actions than are visible to the customer, and only a few classifications should result in a fully automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).
Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing.
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.
Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happen.
If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
> If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
> Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"?
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
Your mileage may very depending on a variety of factors. I got a free Stadia kit (controller + Chromecast Ultra) for being a YouTube Premium/Music subscriber, and decided I'd give a good and honest attempt at playing through a full game on Stadia.
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
I think the only way it makes sense is if you can't afford the upgrade to a new console or PC, and even then the issue is that my experience with Stadia's stability and lag make it not appropriate to play response-timing sensitive games.
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
Valve does treat game developers poorly, and it can’t be fixed because their no-internal-structure setup means nobody can actually change anything at the company. They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal. Kind of a problem when the newer younger people into anime aesthetic are also the ones making all the LGBT content.
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
> Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
I'm including their own employees under game developers. There's various stories about people having to leave after trying and failing to get the company to actually make a game or ship any products lately.
> They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below).
Dunno if the games contain that or not, all I can tell you is they don't have illegal content in the US. They certainly can ban whatever they want. The problem is they say they don't moderate the store, and they don't negotiate the not-moderation, so now you can't find out how to avoid it.
The developers are not criminals or trying to gross you out, but they do have weird fetishes and I think might be physically incapable of making something Westerners would be fine with without a lot of handholding. I mean, Jun Maeda seems to think he's doing a good job at writing women, but they all come out acting like they have an IQ of 10.
As an indie dev I disagree very heavily with this. Games like Hentai Nazi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183970/Hentai_Nazi/) are allowed to be on the store because they're generally very permissive, as long as you're following the laws that they have to follow because they're in America. If you're making games with sexual content and characters of questionable age (as many of these banned anime games do), then it's reasonable that some of them will get banned, since Valve has to obey the law.
Yes, those are ironically more likely to make it through because it makes it look like they’re following through on their promise to not moderate any store content. It’s all luck though, we don’t know what never made it in.
Actual foreign developers who don’t speak English don’t have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN devs and can’t fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when it wasn’t.
(Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some really out there actual sexual content because they’re weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for Steam/Nintendo platform so
Do you have evidence of this still happening? I know games getting rejected for no real reason was somewhat common back around the Greenlight era, but I haven't heard anything like that since they moved to the minimum moderation system and started allowing porn games.
Many smaller devs have pivoted to leverage alternative platforms like Itch, Epic Games Store, Game Pass, etc alongside Steam for monetization, and some have ditched Steam entirely based on complaints with Valve's developer relations and pricing. Valve seems unlikely to ever make any concessions to win back the hearts of smaller developers, but they did panic once Epic Games Store and other storefronts started capturing exclusives for large titles by offering big studios a reduced cut (20-25% in some cases) to keep them around.
Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market share when it has neither.
His post implies he's dropping support for all Google platforms, presumably including Android, where Terraria is consistently one of the top selling games. That seems like a much more difficult decision.
Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".
The Play Store Terraria is a different publisher. It's likely not his decision to make - and he shouldn't care considering that makes dealing with Google on that front is not his problem.
Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of units sold, double the price).
Play Store isn't struggling for content. Removing terraria from it has zero impact on Google's bottom line. Stadia on the other hand very much is - removal(or cancellation) of an extremely popular indie game from the platform just accelerates its inevitable demise, something that will very much hit google's bottom line.
Even if they haven't said it out loud, Google has already decided to cancel Stadia, so unfortunately cancelling a game for it will have zero impact on Google.
I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
> "If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money."
and
> "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
mean entirely different things. Of course people expect Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they've already decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant lie. Don't spread fake news.
No, the fake news is Google having any plans to make anything out of Stadia. They don't just decide the night before to shut a project down. Google has a long history of leaving projects to fallow for months to years before finally admitting to everyone that they hadn't been putting resources in and are finally shutting the project down. It's insidious because, if you don't know the playbook, you might think you can count on the service to stick around. Look at everything VR they did: some great products that sat around for a full year before Google finally admitted they weren't doing anything more with it. I fully expect Google has plans already to shut down Stadia, but haven't told anyone yet because... I don't know why. Why do they ever just let this shit go on forever? Sims kind of face-saving or senior-engineer-retention program.
Stadia hasn't gotten a dollar from me, and won't. I absolutely think it'll be gone by then, but that's not the same thing as "has already decided to cancel".
That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to the same Google account, will he still get money from apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from the play store if he cannot even log in?
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support *any of your platforms* moving forward.
Emphasis mine.
But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly doubt they will revert any existing support.
But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the Apple App Store?
Unfortunately this opens the door to unscrupulous devs publishing their own knock-off versions - or even repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work (resource/asset swaps, etc).
My impression from reports I've read about all the major App Stores is that they won't put much effort into processing violation notifications or takedown requests when the publisher or developer filing the complaint doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) - so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money they've made provided they've transferred it out of their payment account, I think?
The Stadia version is the one cancelled. I doubt Google doesn't have a tougher screening process for games for Stadia, since they are the ones running the game. It is highly improbable that a knockoff game will land on it.
Yep. Also the approval process on Stadia is very complex and you need to set up so.much.stuff. It's not like their playstore where you can release almost anything. Even if you have an already fully working game on Stadia, just the process of meeting all technical requirements and setting up the pages on the backend and all the hooks can take months. It's far too much effort for something that wouldn't even go through the submission process, or if it did it would be removed immediately.
Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.
> repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work
Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are already lots of actual Terraria clones by different names.
Amazon deals in counterfeit goods all the time and there's still been no substantial changes to how they deal with it either.
If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll likely gladly make a settlement with you that's considerably greater than the actual damages because they value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable Wall St. Journal headlines...
Another way of putting it: if a 3rd party published a Mario game on Playstation, do you think Nintendo would hold back just because they are not also there?
Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.
I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed people might get better support. The expected reply time for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes. Compare that to phone or email customer support on many platforms.
That's no longer the case. In my experience, most companies have stopped responding to complaints on Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to DM them and then sends you a holding message.
It's no different than pre-internet. Complaining publically has been around since TV, it's a staple of local news to have "exposes" on bad local businesses to shame them when they won't do right privately. Before that it was radio. Before that it was newspaper. Before that, it was just gossip.
Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia.
Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of:
* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
> * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.
Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)
Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in any form of communication with a business partner whose services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.
Communication is one thing, but not having any appeals process other than hoping a social media post goes viral enough for Google to take action is ridiculous.
Indeed - and they have made a little headway here...
* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.
* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.
* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
Doesn't seem an issue at all for almost every other company in the world.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
> But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify. Google have multiple billion accounts (Chrome has 2B users). I use "utterly trivial" here because "XYZ is likely" type events that might occur at xxx,xxx users translate to "sheer overwhelming force of statistics" when you get to x,xxx,xxx,xxx users - if you have 100,000 users and just 10 people successfully figure out how something works internally, scaling that to 1,000,000,000 users increases that pool of 10 people itself to 100,000. And a pool of 100,000 proactive and interested people is more than enough to create several thousand cottage industries, lots of competition, then one or two emerge at the top and become an exponential force, etc etc etc.
> Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it just notes the reason for the ban in the database, and then tells the user why the ban happened?
> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify
There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.
I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd.
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
> If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
If you want to get your own domain to take control of your identity, do NOT under any circumstances register it through a hosting package. Ideally keep it separate from everything, including your email provider.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
If recommendations are useful here, both EasyDNS (easydns.com) and Hover (hover.com) seem ok.
I've used both over the years, though the EasyDNS UI is a bit harder to work with. They seem more technically competent than Hover though, who are decent but not fantastic. ;)
OVH’s UI is awesome for the domain settings compared to all the providers I’ve seen (1and1, GoDaddy, Aws, DigitalOcean). Even at DO what has a fantastic UI, the settings of a domain are complicated.
If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
> It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
Price changes are a concern indeed. But I think if you get something form your country, or a .org, it should be mostly fine.
I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now. Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I believe), I've see no price hike over time.
That part is probably not a good bet, as life can go in unexpected directions.
Some country providers (eg .eu) only provide service to their citizens, so if you move country or otherwise become "not a citizen" they'll terminate your domain. As happened recently to the UK holders of .eu domains. :/
Probably better to pick a .net/.com/.org domain, for (hopefully) longer term stability.
.eu is not a country. .co.uk holders were unaffected by Brexit. meanwhile .org had price caps removed and was nearly sold off to private capital on the promise of "we promise that for the first decade we will only raise prices by 10%/yr". I'm not so sure that a legacy TLD is a better bet than a ccTLD with a similar record of stability when we get into these long term long tail events.
Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have worked out so well had you been making this decision in Ukraine a decade ago
.eu is classified as a ccTLD [0], not gTLD by IANA, so for the purpose of this discussion it is one - and the registrar for it (EURid) requires ciitzenship of one of the member states to hold .eu domain. EU citizens living the UK can have .eu names, but no-longer-EU-citizens of UK do not.
Things like .rocks, .guru, .club, and all those other recent gold-rush gTLDs have been a disaster from the spam standpoint*. It doesn't help that some registrars are complicit via allowing massive bulk name purchases, so I see zillions of somebody@{random-word-1}{random-word-2}.goldrush addresses, all with valid DKIM/DMARC.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
.io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be bullshit, since those islands have no permanent inhabitants).
That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such across much of what you do online, but whether that'll impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate with and how they treat spam.
> .io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be bullshit, since those islands have no permanent inhabitants).
That's not strictly true - British Indian Ocean Territory has permanent inhabitants, just not any native ones (never had had them, really - it was uninhabited until 1793). US military Diego Garcia base is there...
It's bullshit for other reasons, and expulsion of Chagossians to build the base is a tragedy - but not due it being empty territory (it's not).
Well they did until the British exiled them all to build a US naval base on Diego Garcia. And they would very much like to return home. The UK courts have ruled in favour of the Chagossians, but they are consistently ignored by the UK and US governments.
The sysadmins at these companies must be laid off right now. Same with Windows admins using .local for their AD domain name, now you shot yourself in the foot never being able to sign some services with globally trusted certificates.
This doesn't mean you've ever been able to get signed certificates for nonexistent TLDs. If a TLD were to stop existing i would excuse the administrators who set up their systems under that domain, but if you're setting anything up that isn't under an available TLD you're doing it wrong.
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10 USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to register each email domain, usually big discounts if you purchase for many years at once)
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
I actually have my @gmail.com address redirect to Fastmail, I have a filter on the Fastmail inbox that shows me mail sent to the gmail address.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three:
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
It's supposedly about respecting the opportunity Googlers have to work at a big company with resources to change the industry. Like, I get it, but tone deaf...
Not quite. It's about respecting the opportunity of Google to make money.
Nobody cares about "changing the industry" if it doesn't "move the needle". And in the end, the needle is neither the number of users, nor the positive impact of the project.
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
The majority of the code is talking about personal values (working backwards up the list, I'm counting independence, class, worldly knowledge, being a stand-up guy, being observational, honourable, amenable, strategic, rational). The parts that deal with being part of a group are not that unusual either - everyone is part of a group and that isn't a problem. Employers all want to be a little like a family.
If you want to argue that Google is promoting these values amongst it's employees that is fine; but that is a great idea on Google's part. It isn't strengthening your argument.
Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'. Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are our big brother.
The Mafia /g has teams that all do the same thing. Google has teams doing different things: here, in one corner, a team makes something benign or maybe even positive, over there, other "googlers" are doing suspect things, like putting together the [AI] surveillance infrastructure. They are all "googlers" but only some used to have TSCs. So "respect each other".
Now as far as "the user", well the joke is apparently on GP, as everybody and their dog knows that 'on the internet, if the product is free, you are the product and not the user!'. Even dogs on internet know this, but alas, HN has forgotten. So, "respect the user" means respect the folks who are paying us to track everybody and their dog on the internet.
Respect "the opportunity". Translation: This is a "Golden Time' for the few to lord it over the many! So the respect the user, and respect each other, and the rest should be grateful for having 'the permission' to use our platform.
> TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of conduct.
Towards other Mafia people.
Which is a key point. People who aren't in the Family have different opinions of people on the other side of the tommy gun barrel and its humane usage.
A good slogan should say something. If the inverse of your slogan is invalid or the same as your slogan, then your (original) slogan is probably not saying anything.
If you aren't giving something else up, then you aren't saying anything. It's just platitudes.
"Do not be evil" is basically meaningless as a lot of evil is done with the intention of doing good. With that level of ambiguity, it is entirely down to individual interpretation.
> The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
It was a funny cute thing when they came up with it cause they were a landmark company built on the web, breaking new grounds in terms of how businesses will be run in the future, sticking it to the establishment, etc etc etc
Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at that in the most basic ways and they're not held accountable for it because "they're a private company, they can do what they want!"
Except when a theme park ride malfunctions, maims and kills most of a family in a gruesome fashion. Of course then you cannot sue because you've agreed/signed an arbitration clause in the terms of service.
I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.
I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
Many/most people don't see the government as a threat. And since you own your own domain you can migrate to another email provider any time you want if you experience they're doing fishy things.
I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number of domains to your account without extra costs.
> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
Unfortunatly icloud does not work well unless you are all in on their ecosystem.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's services a few times a year.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way. Gmail is not the problem as far as I'm concerned. Nor Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like there is a substitute.
I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be happier.
Not if your account gets suspended in this way - there are some testimonies from people that said it locks you out of support and you get stonewalled too.
If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.
I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.
It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations.
Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high.
But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.
In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free).
To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.
Amazon has tremendous numbers of contractors and employees who handle customer issues, seller issues, and partner issues.
Google, on the other hand, pretends to be a good provider of lots of software services, but if anything ever goes wrong with any of them, you are screwed, including if it's a premium service that you pay for. This is why you should never allow Google to control anything that is important to a business of yours or to your personal life.
Google has tons of sales reps on the ad side who will be happy to give you a rationale on why you should spend money more aggressively on their platform, but even they will sometimes be useless at fixing problems unless you are a truly massive customer for them. If you ever need to talk to a sales rep, you can get a Google ad person on the phone in minutes, but they will tell you to bid more aggressively and to buy more display ads.
If your problem with Google is that you aren't spending enough money on display ads, they're Johnny on the spot; they've got 9 trillion hammers that they want to sell you for that particular nail. Need help with anything else substantial related to a Google service? We have a robot you can e-mail for that, and that robot will ignore you.
Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get humans on Google side.
And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is struggling to make it among that sector.
It's in Google's culture, too. A few years ago when I was learning GCP for a role and wanted to know if they had an AWS Firehose equivalent, I asked on their Slack and the response I got from a GCP rep was "just make a process in Dataflow." Doing that would have cost far, far more than Firehose costs, not to mention the dev/troubleshooting time.
I think the point is obvious, that AWS is far more customer-centric than GCP. Google's gotten better at this but at the time, it seemed to me that GCP was more an amalgam of individual projects developed separately while AWS approached it more from the user's perspective, and that showed in the toolsets available.
I am really trying not to sound like a GCP fanboy, however:
I have never heard anyone say that the AWS toolset was anything but "an amalgam of individual projects developed separately." It is obvious from their UI that the different tools are run by different teams that have very different opinions on how things should be done. Just look at the various iterations of deployment management. ECS vs Lambda vs EKS vs classic EC2. All the UIs have different design standards and assumptions. It has gotten better over the years, but the AWS org chart is still peaking through the UI.
GCP is not much better. At least they had the advantage of starting later in the market cycle. They were able to see what worked and what didn't work at AWS and build a bit cleaner.
In the end we are talking about B2B systems targeting power user engineers. The control surfaces need to be powerful first, and easy to use is a distant second or third consideration.
They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.
If you have no problems, it's fine. The first time you need to call customer support, you start wondering if TMobile or somebody else would be a better provider.
> They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.
On that note - I have AT&T. I'm fine with AT&T, except that group MMS / messaging is broken with non-iPhone users. I've tried calling support, walking into a store, and now - simply given up. I tried two other carriers a few years ago, and had far worse problems, so I just suck it up and call people when we have to communicate. At least that part works.
This bit me after switching from Mint to Verizon. I thought it was the Verizon's fault for a long time, but Reset All Settings on my iPhone finally fixed it.
Yeah, the clients are different - Microsoft and IBM target enterprise clients and they know that if a client can't reach someone on the phone, they will lose their business. Google on the other hand is a business-to-consumer business trying now to be a business-to-business one, and still thinks that it can ignore the "older" generation and target the current generation who are more familiar with interacting with automated response systems. It's already biting them in the arse.
Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.
In the public sector in Europe we’ve long liked Microsoft because they actually sell support. When they decided to push 365 additions as enabled by default and no easy way to turn it off, we suddenly had a couple of thousand employees trying this new teams thing out. After a few hours on the phone with Seattle, it was possible to disable, and later Microsoft changed policy to let their enterprise customers decided what features are on. We have a lot of those stories, and it’s something people often overlook when they wonder why the public sector favours Microsoft. We have more than a quarter century of great relations.
When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support system that Google does, and they didn’t really want to comply with GDPR. We probably would’ve gone with Azure anyway because it’s the easy option for operations when you’re already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google attitude meant they weren’t even considered beyond the first look.
Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and the availability of their support, and we now have several supplier operated solutions in AWS.
Google is still on the “do not buy from this company” list.
But maybe they just aren’t interested. They are primarily an advertising company after all.
Not a big Microsoft fan in general, but I will say, I can agree with their support being great for commercial customers.
A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but another shop we worked with got hit by it.
Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours machines were back up and running again after Microsoft pushed an update.
I tried to contact nest to order a replacement plug/harness (for a 1 year old $150 smoke detector...) and after getting run around for 10+ emails I was finally told "sorry we can't supply that part" and you're shit out of luck.
The cumulative time if took them to read and answer all of those emails (and cost) was definitely double that of just shipping the $1 part.
There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review.
In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into it and found it to be automated violations (both the original and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would game the system if we did" yet a single person manually reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes.
I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar contract.
I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting method 3d objects.
Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly did not apply to what I was uploading.
I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not work. We're not important enough.
I'm no fan of Facebook by any measure, but I think when it comes to current political content and ads they are in a very tricky position.
If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
My original comment was that they seem to have rules that aren't public, and rejected content with explanations that don't make sense. Escalation to humans did nothing.
For what it's worth the ads do have more docs on what ads are accepted.
--
Going off the rails here but you brought it up (i am GP?), I'm actually pissed ads aren't back up!!!
It's hindering our business (enough to hurt), preventing fundraising, and really hurts smaller campaigns.
However from my (Dem) perspective I do think FB should act like TV stations and fact check.
One study in my city said 1 minute of fact check for every 160 minutes of ads (I think i remember that roughly correct).
I also especially had beef with the super weak 'projected winner' banner on posts with Biden/Trump post election. It compounded the lie. Projected gives a false sense of 'up in the air.'
They knew that Trump and MAGA media are using nonsense to lie to people. It ended up with insurrection at the capitol.
They should have called Biden the winner -> link to the facts. Most media went beyond projected after a few days.
They again should have also followed the rest of the media by adding another few words to combat the lies from MAGA once they continued and escalated: all lawsuits got thrown out with prejudice the election is not contested.
NyTimes et al use language like baseless, 'Mr. Trump's lie', unfounded. They now go further and use words like extreme, conspiracy, 'cult figure.'
Is there any context on what attempts have been made by this developer to reach Google and what the results have been? The tweet provides very little context other than the fact that it's been 3 weeks. What paths did they take to contact Google? Did they receive any answers?
I remember someone had a post here a couple years back:
- They bought google wireless.
- Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute.
- Google disabled their account because of non-payment
- Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer.
- They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way.
- Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment.
- Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment!
And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do.
Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
>... your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?
My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.
This is kinda what I do. I personally really enjoy Gmail and don't find any competitor can match it, especially since I use a catch-all domain and really value having Gmail's spam filtering in place. However I use my own domain and have all my email forwarded to Gmail. If I ever get locked out of my Gmail account I can just switch where my email is going and be good to go.
I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.
> I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.
> You can forward mail to your personal Gmail account.
1. You need to pay for a mail server, and then you lose the benefits of gmail's spam filters, and also you start having deliverability problems.
2. You lose the benefits of some of gmail's features as they don't classify forwarded emails the same.
Because as a person I have some rights under GDPR, as a business I don't really. Business accounts are even easier for them to shut, and using a business account for personal things sets off loads of red flags. You can't review products, you can use family features, your google home products get messed up, etc.
What I don't understand is why they lock you out of your data when they ban you. For IRL evictions, they'll give you notice to start moving your belongings or, worst-case, dump them on the curb. Sucks, but you still ostensibly have access to them. If Google bans you, they should provide avenues to permanently move data out of their services. Not providing this is tantamount to theft, since I sincerely doubt that the data is straight-up thrown out; it's still used for and tangled up in their ad and machine learning algos.
> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
I have a monthly calendar reminder to do a GDPR export (Google Takeout, Facebook, etc), and I just save it to a big HDD. I keep the instructions to order exports for each service in the "event description" to make it as quick and as little effort for me as possible.
I know it's boring... but I read the article this thread is about and it just re-inforces that I am doing the right thing.
Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually do need a human to solve something I encountered...
I attempted to be a Fi user. I was a Google Voice number, but apparently some small % of Google Voice numbers could not be ported into Fi at all. After a couple escalations the rep was very sorry but said their system was not able to handle my account unless I was willing to give up my Google Voice number. They suggested I create an alternate google account just for Fi, although Fi and Google Voice cannot front one another, so I end up with a separate phone number that nobody would know.
On the flip side, I reached out to Google Fi for a payment issue (my account was a French account originally which got converted to a US account and that created an issue) and I got through to a human. This was during the beta phase though so might have been different during that time.
At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use their domain registrar.
I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider.
Google treats all their customers, paid or not, like trash. If you ever have doubt of this go over to the Google Fi subreddit and see all the people that got screwed by Google Support.
There are many features that Google blocks if you have a GSuite accounts. You cannot use Stadia, post reviews in the google play store, use any of there family subscriptions as the paying account or as a family member and note application integration with google assistance. Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head.
I'm actually already on Google One for the storage - iirc when I bought it I was just buying a storage upgrade... maybe I got transferred in from storage upgrade to the Google One product? I don't remember if it was called One when I bought in.
Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically I could actually get service if my account was shuttered? Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my account?
I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the issue.
In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger.
With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs involved seems pretty unjustified.
I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be hard.
It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process?
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in politely asking.
Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a little better because some soul heard you.
That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.
> Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and suggest how to avoid those pitfalls.
Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect, because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their managers.
There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity.
Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale.
At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.
I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make a dent on their bottom line.
I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for promotion points")
>until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight
Don't hold your breath. Didn't Google/Youtube recently ban the sitting President of the United States who is also a billonaire and notoriously litigious?
Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world.
All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
They already did change the world, and they gave us a new household verb, placing them in maybe the top 10 most successful businesses of the last 100 years?
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by leadership by committee on promotions and raises.
Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a good bureaucracy.
> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.
They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages.
Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam.
Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
> How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level.
For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.
> There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is wasted trying to re-register their new email with every single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer, youtuber, etc.
The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more humans or not.
The problem is no different than their content moderation problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
It's not the criticism being levelled here, that Google has no support.
I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean, it's far better than AWS at that level.
The more fundamental issue here is a lack of trust. Google has lost it due to years of this stuff, and it will take a lot more than “we actually do have support on GCP” to rebuild it.
> I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
> We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.
I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP customer.
Support was hit and miss:
- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Well because otherwise they would never be able to compete with AWS. I hate Amazon, but AWS has the best customer support of any product I've ever used.
Why on earth would anyone want to rely on GCP if Google's executives have constantly been demonstrating that they do not give a shit?
Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.
Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.
This is a bizarrely biased view. There are no shortage of nightmare testimonials out there for Amazon customer service, unfairly banned accounts, and all of that.
Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.
That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?
Despite the picture you're trying to point, generally my perception is that Amazon (both AWS and the retail) is known for the quality of its support, Google is known for having awful support.
I'm certain GCP has separate support, otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete with AWS.
It’s a matter of trust and credibility. Google has lost it for engineers, Amazon hasn’t. Trying to come up with arguments against an emotional position is pointless.
This is exactly my point. Trust and distrust aren’t logical positions, they’re opinions based on emotions. You can’t come up with a slide deck to explain why you should trust Google any more than you could use numbers to convince your spouse to trust you.
Fundamentally, Google has spent its credibility with this crowd, and that’s not something that can be reasoned against. What Google needs to do is put the effort in to re-earn trust, which it clearly is not doing.
Personal experience has been the absolute opposite, and so has been what I've read. Please check hn history for no of times AWS customer service was said to be bad vs google
What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?
The answer is that you don't have it entirely dependent on your account. You have a business account with an account manager, and while any one dev who's linked to your account may get banned, your account shouldn't, or at the very least your account manager would be able to re-instate it because they know the relationship.
I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google decided my login location was too different. I know my password and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and endless login loop of ‘unable to verify’. I contacted support which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago. I’ve moved on now but I’ll never use a google product seriously ever again.
I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off.
The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
My ISP has literally a single public IP address they use for all subscribers. And, I have third-party cookies disabled in my browsers because they are almost never used for something legitimately good. Because of these two things, I'm constantly being punished with captchas, and sometimes downright bans ("your IP isn't good enough to post on this forum"), in places where I least expect. Yes, looking at you, Google and Cloudflare.
I asked them about IPv6 at some point, they said there are no plans to deploy it but "well you could buy a static IPv4 address if you don't like the NAT or want to run a server". It's a nice ISP otherwise, no "value-added" services, the speed is high (too high for many servers) and service disruptions are rare.
Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want their traffic easily traced because they're doing something malicious.
It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
Interesting article, thanks, and especially at the end of the article:
> (Some cloudflare people) have proposed a solution to the Tor Project that moves part of the process of distinguishing between automated and human traffic to the Tor browser itself. The Tor browser could allow users to do a sort of proof-of-work problem and then send a cryptographically secure but anonymous token to services like CloudFlare in order to verify that the request is not coming from an automated system.
> By moving the proof-of-work test to the client side, the Tor browser could send confirmation to every site visited so that users wouldn’t be asked to prove they are human repeatedly
(+ Link to the suggestion)
The onion site Https cert idea is also interesting
Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked.
I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider. Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide limited account functionality.
I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing).
One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.
But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
Please don't, the only thing worse than no response is a byzantine system that makes you think there's a path and becomes the biggest time sinkhole of your life.
Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life on the outside is just fine.
You can't just hand wave it away like that. Having regulation on a resolution process for account recovery is absolutely needed. You can't just tell people to move away from Google where their entire digital life is on it. At the very least, it should restrict your account to a read-only state and make it possible to download your data.
Got bad news for you about modern American political discourse. Just tune into one of the major right-leaning networks sometime, it's rough.
Just one random example of a high profile career lawmaker:
"The senator dismissed House Democrats proposals to boost paid sick leave and bolster safety net programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps as “wage controls and price controls and socialism.”" https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Ted-...
"Sen. Ted Cruz took aim Friday at socialism, which he blamed it for killing jobs in liberal cities.
“The blue states with high taxes, high regulation their people are fleeing because they don’t have jobs,” he said while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland’s National Harbor.
> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination
In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
> In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation.
When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
Can't check other countries since Google automatically adjusts the country version to your location but you can check yours here: https://policies.google.com/terms
//edit: but you're correct considering this doesn't contain any service-specific ToS.
A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn't consider "famous person" being the shocking part of this. The shocking part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is a business partner of Google's.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
If you're going to switch email providers to something like Fastmail, be smart about it and register a custom domain, and pay a little extra to hook it up to your new account (unless Fastmail lets you do it for free).
Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.
I recommend everyone does this; not just if you switch to fastmail. Having your email identity tied to a particular service provider is a terrible idea. Email will probably be with us until we die; and chances are very high you won't want that particular email service provider for 60 consecutive years.
I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case any more.
And also they have programmable filters (Sieve) and auto-expiry settings for folders (delete mails in this folder after N days unless also in another folder).
There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social media; support for multiple domains (10+) and dozens of aliases per user which you can easily switch between; 30 sec undo after sending an email; send later function; snappy UI that's not from the 90s.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
I think Fastmail ticks all your boxes except the split tab for messages and ads. Not sure about pricing. They’re cheap enough for my use case.
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient and clean.
Sounds like I'll have to check out Fastmail :-) However, please bear in mind that if you've got to switch over a whole organisation, you'll have to keep UI friction to a minimum. Users who have used Gmail for almost a decade (our Outlook, for that matter) will be extremely hesitant to be dragged over on to a new service. I guess, a fully featured mail server doing all the work in the background while offering you a front and that looks like OWA, Gmail or $UI would be ideal (pipe-dream, I know, but wouldn't it be great?).
Still, I get what you're saying and I'll look into it.
Do you have any experience with Fastmail for business? Can it be branded and used with different domains and aliases without paying through the nose?
I think Office 365 / Exchange / Outlook has all of that for around 2x the cost. Possibly missing automatic email categorisation, but it does sort into 'focussed' and 'general' buckets.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
Yeah I wonder if there would be a tier of Google One that comes with "we won't ban your account". Assuming users/customers are operating in good faith, they cannot get banned even if an automated check flags them.
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Sorry, how does paying for Google Workspace prevent you from getting your account locked and not being able to do something about it? I do believe that to login to the admin back-end and to contact support in the first place, you need to log in with your Google account.
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy.
I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.
You have to understand that this is SINO (service in name only), an offering that is there on paper to satisfy procurement requirements of businesses ("Does this product offer this service with that SLA? If yes, you can buy it. If not, you can't"). That doesn't say anything about the efficacy of this service. In fact you will find that it isn't very useful (I've only had to use it once, but still, useless and frustrating, not much different from talking with GPT3). Many if not most enterprise software vendors have SINO offerings, Microsoft and VMware are just two I experienced personally that provide you with certain 24/7 telephone support lines which will not do anything but waste time until the next morning (if you're lucky) where you might be able to get an escalation. So if you're buying ESXi hoping that VMware might help you fix a pink screen at 2 in the morning, you are mistaken. But management will be able to tell everybody "yes, we have a 30 minute SLA on this with the vendor". Sure.
Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.
I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
I've had to deal with googles support for Google Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace (or whatever they call it now) and in many cases it's not much better than no support. Often the people you could get on the phone had no overlap with the people that could help you and even when they could help you they had no sense of urgency and some pretty critical issues could take weeks to get a proper answer.
Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.
Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
Thankfully these companies are big enough that the supply of SVPs and VPs is near endless. In fact, with DHL my biggest effort was wading through the list to find the people I thought most likely to reply. Of three messages I wrote, two replied and offered to help.
I worked at large bank where being able to make people wait until end of day or end of week for a reply was a kind of status symbol. My wife needed to do physical therapy after a car accident and rather then letting her take an hour to do that her boss decided to fire her, all the paperwork was sent to London for an managing director to sign. My wife went across the street to a doctor’s office, got him to sign a medical leave application, and walked it to HR office. By the time the MD saw her termination paperwork she was three days into a federally protected medical leave and continued to receive most of her salary for almost a year. She could have worked a full day every day of that time if the bank had made the slightest accommodation, instead they ended up paying for a year of leave. :)
In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
With some planning we could have accommodated the 120K rps rate and more, but just out of the blue it caused a lot of issues, the database shards for historic information tended to be configured for infrequent access to large amounts of historic data, their access completely thrashed our caches, etc. We did want Google to index us, if there had been an open dialog we could have created a separate path for their traffic that bypassed the cache and we could have brought additional database servers into production to handle the increased load, we even had a real time events feed that updated whenever content was created or updated that we would have given Google free access to that so they could just crawl the changes instead of having to scan the site for updates, but since they would not talk to anyone none of that happened.
I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests) or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it's not like they have choice really: the server is refusing to provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.
At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the problem worse.
It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
Yeah, exactly. I pointed out to them that I might be an attacker and my purchase of the domain didn't prove that I was who I said I was. They accepted that I was the person paying the bills, but said they couldn't do anything unless I was also the owner of the domain.
I figure that they either never thought through this process, or it was deliberately designed to make the cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart people, I think the latter.
So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their stuff.
A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?
A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
Many high-profile departures from Google seem to involve an incident like this, in my experience. When I was there most of the high-profile departures I saw were related to internal strife (in some cases with widely shared complaint posts on internal G+ or internal gdocs), management misconduct, or things like the company's health insurer refusing to cover surgeries. Then occasionally you have the departures where notorious abusers or sex pests are sent off with a severance package, like ("allegedly") Andy Rubin's $90m farewell gift.
In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and turned into a spambot.
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
What is being discussed here is not "I lost the password", is "Google disabled my account because they have reasons". In the latter case, you could have the right password and the account would still not work.
> surely I am protected from this, right?
Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it.
> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:
No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run.
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
Microsoft (used to?) pick up the phone if you called about an issue with Windows. If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
> If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license
That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
> Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.
But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.
These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent?
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.
Even for a free account, there is a contract in place between you and Twitter, which Twitter can't unilaterally terminate without reason, especially if the "code of conduct" collides with the right of free speech (https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-aktuell/meinungsf...)
Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data in exchange for the account.
After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
There's that, but also the fact that to these people games are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing with professionals and business clients that use their software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that Twitter thread.
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
It is somewhat ironic that "work time", for which one gets paid, typically ends up perceived by individuals as "less valuable" than free time. It's one of many ways in which our societies are effectively broken.
I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
From a European perspective, EU regulation 2019/1150 covers protections for business users of online intermediation platforms [1].
Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision"
This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff.
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin.
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem.
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
> That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers.
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.
> You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
Surely the creator of a video game that's sold tens of millions of copies, who also has an on-going business relationship with your company passes the bar?
My point is that literally millions of people could be considered "high profile". Does (the recently deceased) Leon Spinks pass the bar? I could go on naming semi-famous people indefinitely, they all ought to pass this bar.
I agree that it's a trickier line to draw than I initially considered. However, there are only ~200 developers building games for Google Stadia. If Google cannot guarantee it won't cut any of them off at a moment's notice, with — seemingly — no right to appeal, then I think that bodes very badly for the ongoing viability of Stadia.
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
Chances are they simply can’t get their internal teams/systems in line to enable partial bans, and nobody with the political clout to get it done cares.
EU regulation 2019/1150 would seem to be the first real attempt I'm aware of at addressing this issue.
Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11".
It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision".
It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles in Article 4.
I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just disappeared from my google account. Like gone.
I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea.
The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
This is well outside of the practical capabilities of anyone but a nation state or large commercial entity. Even then, it's hard. It's more practical for a physical letter than for digital stuff. For a digital service, you'd have to go down to cabling infrastructure or take something like the SpaceX route and launch satellites. If you need something between a few nearby buildings, it's more practical to come up with a solution, but anything further out ... you're kind of stuck.
I don't believe the law has ever been revoked that requires anyone sending documents through a non-USPS service* to include the appropriate USPS postage cancelled with a pen along with their shipment
* excepting a point-to-point courier service for some reason
The USPS carved out a few exceptions, like delivering urgent mail. Gaming the system will get you raided by armed agents of the enforcement arm of the USPS.
I really detest this kind of attitude. Yes, the government is NOT restricting what you can say in an online space. But at the same time, there is no government platform I can speak from. They're not stopping me from saying what I want but they're also not giving me a platform.
Why are we giving corporate entities a pass on tyranny? It's not like restricting people's liberties is only something the government can do.
My onboard, state of the art, military grade AI suite is detecting infantile sarcasm, irritability unrelated to the current topic, and a tone unbecoming of a hacker news commenter.
the difference here though is that physically you can at least own the address, but even your digital address isn't actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided by someone else and can be taken away.
Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.
No, a town owns an address and rents it to you. If something goes wrong with the billing you get evicted, if they want a mall they forcibly "buy" it from you.
There's no resource you can count on in this way. Resources get reallocated at some point.
> Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.
Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.
it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.
these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of these serious issues.
> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.
Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google has revoked access to the given Google account.
Edit: Godaddy is not just a (crappy) registrar. GoDaddy is also a (crappy) hosting provided which I moved an organization out of.
Edit again: I guess I ought to explain domain names to you. Most DNS providers are crappy (unlike Cloudflare), and have a non-negligible TTL. Even if AR15 had access to GoDaddy's account to change their DNS records (A record for the www subdomain and root domain), it takes a while for new records to propagate globally.
More likely, what happened is GoDaddy told AR15 to take their domain to someone else. And thats what they did.
The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
Well, considering Google announced they're shutting down all internal development on Google Stadia games, and now they're locking people out of developer accounts, guess it's safe to say that once again, Google can't be trusted to follow through with their products and need to be taken with extreme skepticism on any and all future endeavors.
I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated.
I found My old gmail account placed under a flagged status one day. It would not allow me to purchase anything on the play store. Turns out, it was because I used an old Google service called Google Checkout(?) or something more than a decade ago to purchase a few hundred dollars worth of clothes overseas. The clothes were purchased from an H&M equivalent, legally operating stores of course, and no payments were deferred or anything - they just simply said something about my account being associated with possible fraud and disabled all Google Wallet features suddenly many years after, citing my purchase history. Wanting to purchase a $2 game on my phone, I inquired about removing the restrictions placed on my account, but the response I received were quite haphazard and they finally stated that they would not accept anything short of physical copies of my IDs before removing any restrictions. No, fuck off.
I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of my life.
As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)
But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone.
The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.
>As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I mean a real human, not a markov chain.
> 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number.
For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.
If you have a business you get a separate phone number for it, and potentially for each customer project. You can reuse it when the project is done, or it makes it easy to hand off the amount, assets etc to the customer.
What I do is use my gf's number (so occasionally I have to ask her for the code that shows up on her phone :-) ). I am fortunate not to use google for anything I care about, or even much at all, so this is no inconvenience for me; OTOH she not only keeps everything in google but used to work there.
This is the exact opposite of what Google/Apple want to do. Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell loud enough. This is their tiering system.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
>Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
> The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it's an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.
Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights?
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it would avoid Google's self-dug grave from getting deeper.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent organisation, which makes its power evil
This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected.
The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue.
Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
good question, not exactly sure, need to download and look at contents... (queue Jeopardy thinking music) ...
Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following:
* Google Photos
* Contacts
* Drive
* YouTube and YouTube Music
Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta.
I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity.
Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail.
Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.
My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay
. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive
data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube
channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail
address of over 15 years.
This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
So I get why they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
> This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
My best guesses:
1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so it's a losing investment.
2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the bulk of what the humans have to deal with.
3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
> They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
This is the first time I hear someone making this claim. Is there prior evidence of this being a regular occurrence with outsourced customer support operations?
1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of acceptability in some countries where trickling money from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local society.
2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize the opportunity they have.
They could start with having support for all the accounts that make significant amounts of money for them. If an account makes Google >$100k a year then isn't it worth it to have support personnel that will handle the 2 tickets the account might have in a year? And the rest of the time they can focus on other tickets.
Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn't added and the whole model is bullshit.
One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products.
Another would be: Active time since signup.
I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money spend > 200" might to the trick though.
Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it's a payer-customer's account, issues should be sent to a human. Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google contact(s) should be notified & included in the process.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card numbers and/or payments using Apple/Google pre-paid cards out there, so it's not difficult to automatically build accounts with this kind of 'reputation'.
Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).
It is significantly harder to game though - companies succesfully offer behavioral monitoring for DLP products with far less data than the payment data Google has access to. Years of payments with a certain payment type? That's a pattern.
Renting movies at certain time in the week? That's another...
The truth of the matter is, somebody has to actually care to do this. From accounts of googlers I've read, that's not what the culture of Google is likely to result in though.
It can be gamed. But if the average value of a fake account is $100 and you set the threshold to be $200 it is no longer profitable.
Of course this still isn't a perfect metric. But it seems that banning people with accounts that have spend thousands of dollars and been active for many years should probably be avoided and this will significantly help that.
I mean if the account has spent >$50 you can probably afford a human review at the very least.
It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious grudge.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this argument, like these companies aren't sitting on piles of cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)
You've shown that it's possible for human moderation to be awful, you haven't shown that it's impossible for human moderation to work well. It is possible. HackerNews is a fine example.
Paid moderators can have their work supervised (a 'meta-moderation system') akin to Slashdot.
There's virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I can't see him being on it.
Thanks; I've initiated that process on your advice. Is the data in a reasonable format and not just something you can re-import into a replacement google account?
It's possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is worrying.
Couldn't care less about twitter but if you use google for email/storage/docs etc then it's a real issue.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
No. Terms and conditions do not apply. Anyone can, at any time, for any reason. Email domains are a historic accident; let's semantically decouple them from the domain system. The tech companies can figure out how to implement that.
The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)
It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.
Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.
Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.
The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.
Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.
...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort of standardized lookup though to support such a system.
SPF is trivial to set up for people who already have their own domain; it's literally 1 DNS TXT record.
I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem:
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
> The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before.
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
> And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know, but only remembered which playlist it would have been in. I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing it is.
Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.
I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach.
Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day).
An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the description.
These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.
Worse than that, these systems are perfect for decision laundering. You can make the system do arbitrary judgements, and blame negative consequences on "bias in the training data" or such.
They've applied ML to discern status updates from emails. They've applied ML to recognize speech fairly accurately... This kind of behavior seems far too unsophisticated for that. In the Twitter thread some people are suggesting it's something to do with politics. If that's so, then it likely means hands-on-keyboard-finger-on-scales thing a human would cause.
Their size insulates them from competition, which means less accountability.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
> Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
Regardless of what's happening internally, I've come to the realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it is.
Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long run.
Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
I just gave up the last time my google account died. There's really little value in it at this point if you're not publishing apps and I would never build a business on one of their platforms for this reason anyway.
We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
I know everyone loves to give Microsoft a kicking but they have amazing customer support compared to Google. I've known people buy dodgy keys from eBay that haven't worked and have gone through MS support and had the key activated.
A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
Google makes ~$90 billion in profit a year, they can shave off a little to open up a few call centers to deal with issues like this. It's seriously shameful at this point.
Google has a serious problem with their tightly coupled identities. They need to be forced to decouple their business so losing your YouTube account doesn't have an effect on your email service or literally any other service. Clearly they're not going to do it voluntarily, so it's time for courts to step in and start taking care of consumers.
They have to at least provide the ability to download all your data in case they ban you. Otherwise it's a hostage situation. IIRC even Facebook does that.
Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just consider the amount of work that can get vaporised.
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.
Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
We can't possibly know, but the point is there are a bunch of free services and bans generally cascade. If Google provides an explanation we can conclusively answer this, but as is anyone using Google services is probably getting some of it for free.
This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.
I know the usual explanation is that they're too big to respond, but at this point I've become of the mind that if you can't handle the most basic explanation as to why lock out a user from your service, and at least one way to appeal and get a response from someone able to make a decision, then you shouldn't be allowed to scale at all. Even if it would become a bottleneck, this can't keep happening.
Simple rule: Do not use Google services for business-critical areas. Expect that you can lose access to Gmail,
Google Workspace, Google One at any time without doing anything wrong.
What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Most companies doesn't have leadership, they have administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to ensure the company doesn't change course.
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.
Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of people banned from (some) Google's services and unable to get any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((
Abandoning Google services will not work because only a negligible number of people will actually do it.
Here's what may actually work:
- Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same.
- Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc
Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly.
I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it.
It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”.
So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious.
There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.
I had and still have the same suspicion. I had a lot of friends who said they had the same thing happen around the same time and they all just did it. The real tinfoil hat part of me wonders if it was to aid efforts being fed and ramped up by firms like Cambridge Analytica et. al. in anticipation for the 2016 election and their data collection ops as a whole.
Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs.
You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it?
(not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
It would raise some flags if my bank representative or doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to do so, would not.
Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose.
A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.
I show my ID to pick up my order from Home Depot. I’d suppose Facebook would be trying to prevent someone else from accessing your account, like Home Depot is preventing someone from taking my order.
Very different to flash an ID to a store employee than to give them a copy of your license tied to a highly-detailed account of online activity on and off of their platform :shrug:
There comes a point when the demands of the business outweigh the value of the services they provide. For some of us that will include providing identification, particularly in cases where the handling of the identification is opaque. These cases are far removed from letting front line staff glance at a card to compare your face to a photo or verify the details that you voluntarily submitted on a form. The only times I have let anyone actually handle my identification for services directed towards consumers were for financial services and with my employer. The latter case was only because I knew how the identification would be handled in the transaction.
In the case of Blizzard I would say no and accept my losses. (Well, let's say Steam since I have actually dealt with them.) In the case of Facebook or Google, I would say no simply because I don't trust their motivations.
Not answering a simple question about what the options are, followed by irrevocably deleting data the user wants. That’s what you think good customer support looks like? I never want to be your customer.
For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors).
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
Let's not forget that any time a competitor starts taking part of their market or becoming successful they just buy them out with an amount of money that is hard for any sane person to turn down.
The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't. And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So realistically competition is great on paper, but in this case the competition already has such market dominance that any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see how competition will do anything.
The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly opaque to the consumer and affects their safety.
The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control.
Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
What about giant app stores that control almost all consumer spending in those markets? How many businesses can survive being banned by both Apple and Google's stores? Or even by just one?
Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you can easily get a new email address.
Just to be clear, you are talking about the quality of b2b services, between parties that have entered a business relationship, not consumer protection.
b2b issues greatly affect consumers - there's no fabled "consumer choice" if a handful of businesses are allowed to dominate or decide who may enter their market/app store.
And when so many businesses are at the mercy of a few giant companies, we probably shouldn't deny them protection with the "it's a b2b matter" dismissal.
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
> When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated.
They created that page in order to highlight that there are no humans reading your mail, but OP's point that "it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services" is still true to this day. It's just that it's all automated.
> These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
They don't scan your emails for ads, they use your search history etc for ads.
Fair point, though I think that wording leaves room for interpretation...
Does learning your social graph by looking at email metadata (sender/addressee, location, time) count as "scan[ning] or reading your Gmail messages"? There are a lot of insights you could "skim from the top" if you control an entire communication platform, even if you don't fully dig into the content.
And regardless: to OP's larger point, the reason Google offers services such as Gmail for free isn't mostly because their support cost is low -- it's mostly because these services allow them to collect a large amount of data that is then used for selling targeted ads, far surpassing the amount of money they would earn from offering ad-free services.
All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they don't do that.
Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result?
Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.
The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot of gray area and there is a lot of information contained with an email that is not the "message" of the email.
Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?
> Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?
Yes, here is the official statement:
> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.
Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse.
That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?
The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.
Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
> why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad.
What does this have to do with anything I said?
I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity
Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to "scale".
Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.
This is a bit of a tautology. Of course if they spend more on service than the service makes them the margin is negative.
But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a small country as a rounding error.
That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer better service for it, they would still be making absurd amounts of money.
Actually their support in gmail is non-existing.
I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years. They haven't started testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused us to get better safety in some ways.
Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.
>And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years
Exactly.
Modern cars are optimized for "the tests" occasionally to the point of absurdity. As in certain systems get de-tuned (so to speak) so they are completely and totally used up at whatever the max test speed is because that's what makes the car look best in the benchmarks.
If we modernized the tests high speed crashes would be more survivable and low speed crashes would be less costly.
It's not all government's fault though. Society has a very unhealthy relationship with risk. If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
> If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
Or they're pedestrians who don't want to be cut in half in a parking lot. Car-on-car isn't the only thing in consideration here.
A crumple zone capable of affecting the deceleration of a 3000+lb car while complying with bumper strength requirements (though today's standards are much relaxed from those decades ago) isn't going to protect a sack of meat from a car. The bulbous front end plastics that take up a lot of space without much underlying structure, flimsty upper radiator core support and thin easily bent hoods are where the pedestrian safety comes from.
As you alluded to in the other comment, these would be safety factors not regarding the structure of the car (which should be focused on decelerating the car) but instead on mechanisms that alert the driver / automatically stop the car when it is going to hit a pedestrian.
We've made cars quite safe in this regard; I suspect there's more wiggle room to drop deaths with crash avoidance at this point. Backup cameras (now mandated by regulation), pedestrian detection, automatic breaking, lane change warnings, etc.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
"Regulation" gave you slavery. In the more natural state of affairs, you can't just go about enslaving someone without the risk of them running away or outright murdering you while you're looking away. It is the power of the state that captures the fugitive slave or punishes them for defending themselves.
With the arguable exception of slavery, social change gave us all those things. Regulation was just the part where we coerced the hold-outs to do as we wanted under threat of violence. Regulation in a democracy always lags social change.
There's a lot of policy to encourage competition that isn't regulation. The USPS helped with early airplane development by contracting out mail delivery to civilian pilots, and grants provided by NASA et. al are partially done to help with competition in the aerospace field (can't find a source for this one but the people I know in the space all agree this is by design).
Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple platforms in a period of time so short that it looked coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.
Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things, especially when reporters are calling for comment on a specific act.
If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick, even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide it.
> It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things
It's also likely that there's a higher threshold for being the first to take action. Once the first one takes action, the rest can hit their (now lowered) threshold much faster or even immediately. That can give the appearance of coordination, but the only coordination being that everyone was waiting for someone else to be the first.
That would be a good argument if there weren't public conferences, discussion panels, and work groups that these companies send representatives to in order to coordinate their efforts in "combating the rising threat of <insert boogeyman>".
lol, yeah, "networking". That kind of self delusion will come in handy as the cartel activity becomes increasingly bold and the regulatory capture ensures no way out.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
Regulatory capture makes it hard for new companies to enter a field.
It's one of the main reasons there's so much hype about SpaceX.
What seems to happen is that an oligopoly makes the written and unwritten rules so complex that they injure themselves, creating a power vacuum for deregulation or just someone saying "fuck your (unwritten) rules" and either staying exactly within the confines of the letter of the laws, or leveraging their popularity into getting away with infractions. "Oops, didn't mean it!"
That we root for the underdog is in part an expression of our shared pain in the stunted progress that was made up until that point.
Of course. I only presented a broad _sample_ of diverse industries which had, or have, problems with monopolistic behavior. I feel that I could have continued at some length, but my time is limited.
There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
> I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "competition" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
See how that works? Competition can also mean races to the bottom, price dumping, plus it works best with commodities. In every non commodity market competition is diminished and sometimes disappears naturally.
Good regulation can be a great answer to problems (and not just anti-trust). Bad regulation is... well, not a good solution of course.
For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook and other online services that I don't want to lose. I wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)
You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest; "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good regulation.
I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
Great comment. They probably are closer than I originally said.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
I agree with you about the potential that we're at the end of usefulness for our current system of professionalization. It's easy to forget how recently we've developed technology to cheaply distribute information about the past performance of individuals.
I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the organizations is have some strong form of identification that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar association (or whoever) can check that you are who you claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having people get public / private key pairs from the government (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a system.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
Always worth adding - snake oil was a legitimate thing based on traditional medicine in both Europe and China, imported to America. But then some folks found it more profitable to pass off mineral oil rather than bothering with the snakes.
> they would be spending billions on customer support
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
I think that's completely different from what was said in the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple for their behavior with the app stores and there are actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the same about them running a free email or social media service that has crappy support.
“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly state that companies can't do something or have to do something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of 1934.
"Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest.
Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.
> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort:
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
You pay for a license to be a developer on the app store. You pay for a phone. You pay for apps on the app store. You pay monthly for Stadia. YouTube aside, these are not free!
You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to be able to target you with personalized advertising. They use your data to train their AI and build better algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead they offer you some free services.
Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they offer?
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.
Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.
The focus on customer service and customer care is what sets Amazon apart from Google.
Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that does not appear to be a priority for them.
> Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime).
I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very liberal return policy.
Yeah, and it would seem that Amazon has recently destroyed one million worth of clothing from a business owner on (allegedly) spurious counterfeiting claims, and an inability to get into touch with support.
The letter said that my account was banned because of violation of their terms. no further details. no options for the solution of the problem.
until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
Does anyone not working for Google have an opinion which isn't a variant on "Serves Google right"?
I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service, and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death within 3 years.
It's also bananas that they ban your entire google existence. If you violate some Developer TOS then ban you in the app store not in google drive, gmail, etc. That kind of collatoral damage begs for them to be broken up IMO.
Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game developers?
Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care?
Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?
This is a great case for Google to decouple, either voluntarily or by court order.
YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account should never result in you losing your access to your Drive, email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
I use G Suite and regularly export all my data using google takeout in case something like this happens. Plus since I have my own domain I can move my email address to another provider.
Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99% that this frustrating issue doesn’t happen to any individual.
As a small business we use Google Suite.
We would need a single solution which provides all these:
- Email (unlimited domains, unlimited addresses)
- Drive (Docs, sheets, forms)
- Photos (this is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync is a lifesaver)
- Calendar
Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
MS software for the mac is pretty decent - Excel alone is likely worth it to any org. Linux users can access the web versions, which are now pretty powerful. And if you are a Slack user you can move to Teams (which is now fairly good) and drop that subscription.
I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together on "office in the web age".
This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game developers publishing in China given their review board and capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet major western developers continue to court China, so what do I know)?
There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
> The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't tolerate with corporations.
> apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year as well. And that money comes from its customers, whether directly or indirectly.
And yet we don't allow for blowing off that error rate because of the number of total cases in the system. It's also possible to get a retrial or dismissal if the errors are identified.
In practice, we collectively do blow off that error rate. For example, the US has many high profile miscarriages of injustice that it hasn't meaningfully solved for decades. There are people who get jerked around the justice system that can't get the system to justify a retrial or their retrial produces the same flawed outcome, similar to how Google's systems jerk people around with little meaningful recourse. There has been plenty of public protest (and insurrection) about these issues throughout the US that indicate the system isn't working as these people are fighting their issues outside normal civic/political channels.
The US is a democracy and its citizens do tolerate this level of failure.
When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs. With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a sticking point for many people is an early warning that that this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail to do something big about it.
People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error. Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support that platform?
The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.
If Google's goal is to make sure that future regulation forbids them from ever banning an account of real person or company, they're on the right path for that.
In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers" inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc.
Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning process.
Google is evil, etc..., but just a PSA: people often overlook emails in their backups. Don't trust your provider to not fumble the ball and lose them (or lock you out of them).
If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
I was pretty disappointed by the EU’s big tech bill not addressing this.
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the machines to explain why they made their decisions. With Google's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for Google.
Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).
How about a review department at Google?
We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs.
Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?
Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)
My list to improve the play store process that requires $0 additional dollars from google and would fix 99% of issues:
1) give developers a period to respond to the complaint before takedown (maybe 1 week)
2) if they respond, make a decision within 1 week.
3) show all this information in a portal to see basic information like your app is facing a review, pending google response, etc. Really basic stuff.
4) allowing you to attach information in responses (one situation I have been in, the trademark office had ruled in my favor but I literally didn't have a way to provide that ruling in the appeal).
5) having a premium developer support program that provides good support. I think most serious devs would prefer to pay $300/yr to have good support vs what they have now (zero support).
Google, Google, Google! When will you guys learn that you simply can't do this? You want me to use Google Cloud Platform but you keep killing off apps and locking people's accounts. Why would I trust you with my livelihood? The PR fallout from stories like this is killing your chances.
Maybe unrelated but I was pretty much banned from using Amazon for over two years through no fault of my own. I even asked here for suggestions on what I could do. Alt accounts just got immediately locked too.
In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally).
FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.
They are posting billion dollar profits year on year on year. There is literally no incentive to do this at all. For every customer wronged this way there are hundreds if not thousands who are extremely happy with the service.
That's what made it so daunting. I was completely powerless to argue against this massive, faceless corporation. I imagine for those who store their whole lives on Google, this feeling is amplified 100x.
This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
I keep seeing high profile cases of this pop up every month or two. If it happens to this many high profile people, imagine how many people it happens to that don't have a voice.
They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but they earn billions because they are so big.
This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of businesses.
The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to avoid.
> The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google account.
A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased via namecheap.
Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail, but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking for some peace of mind.
When Stadia was announced I wanted to buy one. I pre ordered it in the Google Store. A couple of weeks later I received an email that they were not able to process my credit card. That never happened anywhere else. They also said that pre ordering would not be possible anymore and therefore I would not be able to purchase the limited pre ordering offer. They would be sorry, but stated that I could buy Stadia as soon as it gets released.
Google’s product philosophy is more like they are providing the technology, not the product. If the product fails, then it is your problem because they only offer up until what their tech actually does.
Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts none of them could do anything useful.
I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the blogger site.
It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite.
I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
Worst case for your Protonmail account is losing access to your email (which you can almost fully mitigate by using your own domain and having backups).
Worst case for your Google account is losing access to hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try to use it as an individual.
If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like Google does, and you start using these new services, it would absolutely have the same risks.
> 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned.
There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their personal account banned for a terms of service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion. In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole business account, so lots of collateral damage.
Isn’t Stadia effectively dead in the water anyway? The idea was based on universal infinite low-latency bandwidth which is wasteful and incongruent with the laws of physics. There are articles elsewhere showing Google abandoning its own development on the platform.
This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be around in 2023?
This is what terrifies me about Google, specifically losing access to all accounts that I signed up for using my Gmail. I started transitioning to a custom domain that I can redirect to any email, but I just realized I bought that domain using Google Domains...I'm **ed if Google decides to ban me.
Number one step to leaving google: get your own email service. One that you pay for, from a company whose primary business is email. Then gradually move your important accounts off.
This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
Each day I become more convinced that Google at the end of this decade will be nearly irrelevant.
It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product, which values engineers that have technical prowess and often don't care about the product.
As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal for Google of having it on there, but from the sidelines here, it seems to me to be terribly wasteful. It's like the energy consumption angle was never even considered. I presume it wasn't.
OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not, but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly un-PC origin! :)
Man I came up with that username when I got my first Nintendo DS for christmas when I was ~9 years old. The only game I had was the Sword of Mana GBA cartridge, and that game asks you to come up with a name for both a male and female character when you start. Being a hilarious 9 year old, I wanted to give the female character an ugly sounding name, so I just started making random ugly noises with my mouth and trying to transcribe them into the text field. That's how I ended up with "bogwog"
It wasn't until a few years ago that I stumbled upon an Urban Dictionary entry for it. That was so disappointing because I always thought I was so creative coming up with that unique and interesting-sounding name...like Tolkien!
I'm definitely not important enough for anyone to bother cancelling me over it (especially considering how mild and obscure it is), but I've stopped using it just in case. I still have a lot of old accounts lingering around that use it though.
Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)
My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want.
Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche.
I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their work laptop or TV (with Chromecast).
Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that there will be more people talking about this here on HN than actually affected by not bringing some game to Stadia.
To Google's credit, it's pretty easy. Go to your account (from GMail choose 'manage my account'), then go to 'data & personalization', find the 'download your data' option.
I am not fan of regulation, but apparently not every abuse of the market can be solved by courts in a practical way. Like in this case, a mere mortal can not possibly sue Google.
I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service provider like Google:
- Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free, will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today.
- Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform.
- Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable email address these will become transferable too.
I'm not sure how a foo@gmail.com email address could realistically be transferred to another provider.
At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs" statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to implement, but that's what you get when you become so large that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable?
Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.)
In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!”
My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be outraged at Apple’s $100/yr — despite it being a price point at which you get to talk to people.
apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep. their first level basically tries to stop you going down the levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of the time it's not even the people, it's basically their stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if it gone trough.
also if there is a mistake in the system and they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay tons of money.
It all depends on what you're trying to do. I accidentally stayed subscribed to Apple Arcade. A day after the charge, I called, and the first rep I talked to was able to stay on the phone and cancel+refund the subscription.
> Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
Journalists like access. Confronting Sundar and making him feel ambushed even for a second means they won't get the access for the rest of their career.
You could credibly accuse Apple of many things, and I say that as an unashamed Apple fanboy. But making it basically impossible to reach a real human being by phone via AppleCare, or in person at your local Genius Bar if you prefer, is not one of them.
The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70 years old and married
Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get in touch with a human at Google.
Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months about their lack of moderation [0]
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly.
They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama.
Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
At least the Parler incident seems foreseeable, if you are hosting content that could bring down the hammer onto the giant corporations that you use to host the content, these corporations will cut you loose to protect themselves. Parler leadership must have know they were in hot water as soon as the amateur coup happened.
The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite this same story happening time and time again, google still doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists.
If Google has no procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that this guy is leaving out some facts.
Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples where people were banned by Google without reason or explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In at least one high profile case a Google employee's spouse was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or reversal!
You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)