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I had been a Google fan for a long time but they lost my business recently because despite paying over $30/mo for G Suite and a YouTube Premium family plan with

• ceejayoz 8y ago
  If she's under 13, it's likely that's the reason. Even if you're paying for G Suite, you can't have someone under 13. There is a special, limited type of Google account for sub-13 kids: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338 https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338
  • bleriot 8y ago
    Maybe Google should have put that in the explanation instead of not giving a reason.
    • ceejayoz 8y ago
      I wouldn't be shocked if the lawyers say COPPA means they can't, as they're not supposed to have any info about the child, including a) that they exist and b) that they're under 13.
  • rstupek 8y ago
    Then you'd think it would be easy for Google to have said that instead of giving him no reason beyond "yep it's legit"
    • dekhn 8y ago
      Google typically won't give reasons because people use that information to get around blocks.
      • 8ytecoder 8y ago
        They don't have to disclose how they inferred the age but they can absolutely say that they'll ban anyone under 13 from streaming. The rule must be made transparent and clear - how they measure it and its boundaries can be somewhat opaque to aid enforcement and prevent reverse engineering
        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          > The rule must be made transparent and clear The rule itself is transparent and clear. Whether the rule in as the basis for the action here is not. It clearly would generally be required (as due process) to make that clear, too, if Google was the government of the US or one of it's states, but they aren't. Absent a contractual obligation I have seen no evidence for, I don't see why they would be obligated to explain this, even if I might find it prerable if they would.
          • 8ytecoder 8y ago
            Aren't we all talking about how we would like it to be and not what is legal or contractual? I thought so at least. If we are talking about contract, it's all stacked against us. We have no bargaining power. We have no rights whatsoever. Google absolutely has the right to do what they want within legal boundaries. These discussions and the noise we generate is how we are flexing our muscle and accomplishing what we want from Google.
            • dragonwriter 8y ago
              > Aren't we all talking about how we would like it to be “Must”, in the post I was responding to, seems to clearly indicate otherwise. It is possible that word was poorly chosen.
      • 8y ago
  • dep_b 8y ago
    But he also has YouTube Premium family. Family members are often sub 13.
    • ceejayoz 8y ago
      You can't just spin up a regular 13+ G Suite account for those family members, though.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      Yes, and there are special types of accounts for under-13 family members. https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en Having a Family plan for YouTube Premium (or other Google services) doesn't suddenly make it okay to use regular Google Accounts for young children. There are laws that apply here, and Google has special accounts designed to comply with those laws.
  • mc32 8y ago
    Wait, what about that Ryan kid (who's a proxy for his parents) who does all the reviews for kids' toys and makes millions. Is he in danger of getting nixed?
    • snowwrestler 8y ago
      It depends on who owns the account. Kids under 13 can appear in videos posted by their parents' account.
  • techntoke 8y ago
    That is a possibility, however it would have been helpful if they had said that. I assumed with my permission that she would be able to live stream. She also likes to play Roblox, and I had setup OBS for her. She was honestly pretty sad about it seeing that there are lots of other kids live streaming that appear to be her age.
  • merpnderp 8y ago
    Then how do kid streaming shows like Ryan’s toy review gather millions of subscribers over several years?
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  It's the NRA strategy. Stonewall you at every step and you'll never get to discussing the merits of an actual policy.
• krustyburger 8y ago
  That does seem capricious. At the same time, I’m not sure how old your daughter is, but it might be better that she’s not performing for an audience when she plays with her toys. I’m not convinced that sort of thing is healthy for a child’s development.
• meritt 8y ago
  Unless you've also ceased usage of Google search, maps, and YouTube they didn't lose your business. You're still helping deliver 84% of their revenue.
  • techntoke 8y ago
    True. It is hard to disconnect from them entirely, but at least this way I'm not giving them my money directly.
  • shrewduser 8y ago
    of those only youtube doesn't have what i would consider a viable alternative.
  • tehlike 8y ago
    For that particular person, no. Subscription users are more valuable, so 84% is on average.
• benologist 8y ago
  They don't act like robots, they design auto-emailers because nobody is forcing them to support their customers. Google's support strategy is so deliberately-negligible they could substantially improve their tech support by acquiring Comcast.
  • kevinyun 8y ago
    The Comcast part made me laugh. But yes, sadly even in my experiences, Comcast has better customer support than Google.
  • sfilargi 8y ago
    Unless you are huge corp buying ads by the bucket you are not "really a Google customer", are you?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • BostonEnginerd 8y ago
    Near as I can tell, the only way to make progress there is to know someone on the inside.
    • jlarocco 8y ago
      Not true. Having thousands of followers and "going viral" is an equally good method.
      • sfilargi 8y ago
        That's like saying being born rich or winning the lottery is a good method to make money
• suresk 8y ago
  I don't know that any tech companies are good at this? I would, a few times per year, spend $10 or $20 to promote some tweets on Twitter. At one point, I stopped being able to do that, due to some nebulous "violation" of their TOS. I've gone back and forth with them a handful of times, and they always basically say "Yep, we looked into this, and you definitely did something bad, but we won't tell you what it was or which tweet it was in." They still send me emails and other ads trying to get me to buy advertising, though. I don't really care, it is just kind of funny. I don't know why they all are so bad at customer support.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • benologist 8y ago
    My theory is they're bad at customer support because they spend nothing to support us. That's why AT&T, Comcast etc can support ~100 million people by phone, Amazon support a multiple of that by live chat and Google can't even reply to email.
    • jchw 8y ago
      Comcast "support" is almost not better than just having robots at the other end, never have I ever gotten a problem resolved from support, I've just had them try to upsell me relentlessly. To this day my Comcast email is somehow setup wrong and I no longer care to try to fix it.
      • suresk 8y ago
        Interestingly, Comcast has been one of the consistently better support experiences for me over the years. Usually very quick and pretty helpful, even if it is just to schedule someone to come out and look at the problem. Their service in general has gotten kind of unreliable around here the last year or so, with a handful of widespread outages, one of which lasted almost an entire day, but the customer support has never been something I've been unhappy with.
    • 8y ago
• unfocused 8y ago
  I had a similar experience where I contested two $2 charges (so $4) a month at the beginning of every month. It happened for 2 months and the only contact I could get was an automated reply saying that me or someone in my family had done this purchase. That wasn't the case at all. After 2 months, this 1st of the month expense disappeared on its own. I no longer have any paid services with them because trying to get a human to respond was impossible.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• electriclove 8y ago
  Wait, you have gSuite and were able to use a YouTube Family plan?!?! Is this really possible now?
  • techntoke 8y ago
    My YouTube family plan is separate from my G Suite account.
    • electriclove 8y ago
      Ahh, I ended up doing the same and have painfully migrated everything over to a regular Google Account (except mail for which I'm still considering my options) just so I could use the Family sharing for Music, YouTube, Drive/One.
• int_19h 8y ago
  That's another side effect of large monopolies - when you have millions of customers, most of which are already locked in through one way or another (Chrome, GMail, YouTube etc), there's no particular incentive to care about them that much. It's likely that the cost of losing you as a customer was deemed less than the cost of changing their policies.
• vlozko 8y ago
  It’s no different with App Store submissions. For all the hate and talk of how stringent Apple is with their process, they at least provide very detailed reports and are quite good with feedback whenever things do go wrong. Google on the other hand? It’s often a crapshoot trying to track down what went wrong. Their responses are often too generic and getting a live person is an exercise in patience.
• telltruth 8y ago
  Had you heard about Sergei Brin obsessed about speed of page load on Google and could accurately tell how many seconds passed to a decimal? I'm using Google Music on iOS. It is by far the slowest app on device, sometime literally taking half a minute to perform an action. This was the time I realized billionaire founders must have left the building and Google is not what it used to be. Sure enough, I recently read article that Page and Brin went through divorces of their own, now spending lot of time staying out of the office basically leaving the company on auto-piolot. Pitchai et al may be good managers like Ballmer & Cook but they are far from visionaries. Fortunately AI is rising and search would be the biggest upcoming disruption.
• KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
  Crappy customer service is one of the hallmarks of a market dominated by a monopoly.
• panarky 8y ago
  Your comment is completely irrelevant to the article.
• sametmax 8y ago
  3 reasons: - they are too big now. No one care, no one is paid to care, and no one has any incentive to change that. - they are too big now. Tpoo many customers, with too many dumb problems. Just sorting out the real ones from just the idiots would cost too much. It's more economical to just reject in mass, and loose a few clients, when you have the monopoly. - they are an easy legal target for huge sums of money. If they tell you why they blocked you, you can fight it in court. If they don't, you can't.