A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and let

A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and letting people fix issues when they're being harmed by google maps's mistakes. When I said "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys," I wasn't arguing that it is in fact possible to do it the way google is, just better. The argument is that doing it with a different business model or just not doing it are also options. Who knows what emerges? Maybe there's an alternate universe out there where google introduced an automatically gnerated encyclopedia and wikipedia was relegated to an openstreetmaps-like background, while people on alternate-HN argue about how alternate-google simply can't do any better because of how fundamentally hard the problem is (and it is fundamentally hard, no argument there).