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It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideo

It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article? It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.

kiba 6y ago
Who knows? They had decided long ago that genuine tech support is not in their business model, and that's the end of things.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.
  - asdff 6y ago
    It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      I would argue a second gauntlet only makes matters worse not better for "arrogance".
      - asdff 6y ago
        Maybe in the past where these professional degrees guaranteed highly compensated positions, but that's not the case now that these fields are saturated. A medical school grad still has a painful and overworked road to travel before they start making serious money and overcome their medical school debt. Similarly, if you are in a law school that isn't in the top 10, or you are not in the top 10 of your class, drop out while you can because you are looking at a career of terrible pay and insurmountable debt. These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I think I was a pretty cynical bastard at 22 so I would actually have thought they were full of it.
    - sli 6y ago
      Sometimes there's a very fine line between cynicism and realism.
      - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
        That line is the size of a Venn Diagram intersection.
- throwaway_1299 6y ago
  As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B. One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense. So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit. Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step. So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
  - madacoo 6y ago
    Providing tech support by responding to customers is a different beast entirely to content moderation, however. It may be the case that human oversight of algorithmic moderation is also unreasonable, but I find this fairly unlikely. I wouldn't expect it would require quite so many man hours. But again, could be wrong.
  - grahamburger 6y ago
    > Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That seems a bit ironic of an accusation given all of the people who don't do even back of the envelope math about what their demands for scaling would cost to try to do manually. Isn't that like saying plumbers are arrogantly obsessed with imprisoning water using pipes instead of free flowing streams of water while not considering the evaporation and contamination of said approach? Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus. It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
  - megous 6y ago
    Techdirt doesn't sound like a small website, so presumably it generates quite some money for Google. How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;
    - alasdair_ 6y ago
      Or even just have a “pay us $150 for a month’s support” option.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's a hard problem, because the alternative to algorithmic solutions is human solutions, which people are quite unhappy with as well. Facebook for example has gotten a ton of negative press over the years for their human content moderators.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  In this space, it doesn't matter how many times you get it right, just how many times you got it wrong. Also, it was probably a bad idea for Google and Facebook to be so cavalier while they destroyed print advertising (i.e. the press). Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, as they say.
- asdff 6y ago
  The problem with facebook isn't that they use humans, it's that they treat them very poorly. Treat people with dignity and respect, and the good press will follow.
natch 6y ago
After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
- natch 6y ago
  Can’t edit. Not two decades, but ever since gmail added spam filtering and started flagging many Google Alert emails as spam.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  You could interpret that in a positive way, that they're not just papering over problems in their filter by privileging their own messages. Not super positive but still.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    You could also interpret it in a negative way. They don't maintain _anything_ over there. How hard would it be to whitelist (can I still say that?) super high value, bulk sending, domains?
  - natch 6y ago
    I suspect that’s what they tell themselves. And that heuristics are beneath them. Better to have an elegant algorithm that does the wrong thing automatically than a set of human-tweaked rules that could come much closer (also automatically) to doing the right thing.
mtgx 6y ago
The explanation could be that Google would prefer to use the excuse that "it's our objective algorithm that downranked our competitors, not us!" And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments. Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.
john_moscow 6y ago
Because Google has a skin in the game. It is a de-facto monopolist in the online advertisement business, and online search. And it's only the political goodwill that keeps it safe from antitrust scrutiny. So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state. There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  Critical vs approving articles is a very weak proxy for antitrust. In this case most of them come from the same source (a conservative media company). It seems to me Google is better about removing useless results, or that which are regurgitated (copied) content, than DDG. I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.
  - john_moscow 6y ago
    I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant. Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap'). So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      I'm confused, the two main headlines, one about property tax, and one about being gifted the estate, appear on both engines. DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second. The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.
alehul 6y ago
> why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation When people assume malice so often as you mentioned, it, at least intuitively, feels easier to fault human moderation than algorithms. Algorithms offer a black box which protect against accusations of bias. If accused of bias, an algorithm's biases can just be labeled unintentional accidents, whereas a human's biases are malicious.
nomel 6y ago
> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
- tpxl 6y ago
  Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees. The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Somewhat ironically, the very site at issue has long claimed that content moderation at scale is impossible[0]. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at. Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service. From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.
- InfiniteRand 6y ago
  One thing I imagine is if you scale up assuming that algorithmic solutions will be good enough, and then find out that they aren't, you find yourself in a hole, because you haven't budgeted enough to hire human moderators now, and you have enough visibility and investors that it is hard to scale down. There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this. Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.
syshum 6y ago
At some level though incompetence has to transition to malice. Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"
- throwaway45349 6y ago
  An organisation the size of Google's probably fucks up thousands of times daily. I reckon <1% of issues are actually complained about, so yeah, I'd believe it's a mistake.
srndpty 6y ago
If no one tries it, no one will ever get it right. Sure, they could do it alongside real support in a simulated way, but that doesn't seem like it fits with their MO.
benlivengood 6y ago
My guess is that it's pretty simple. There are ML models predicting the ad quality score; when the predicted outcomes for a site/account don't match reality it is a strong signal that something is wrong. Other inference models determine what is likely being violated on the site or by the account. A human has no chance of digging through the model to figure out exactly what causes the flagged outcome. The only solution is trying various changes on the site and seeing what the models and clickers/consumers think of it unless you want to try to pay Google to deepdream your site for you with their inference models; good luck with that. It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.
- throwaway45349 6y ago
  > I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?
  - y0ssr3n 6y ago
    I think the preferred term is "allowlist" not "whitelist". I like Allowlist personally because it's immediately obvious what it means esp for less technical folk. It takes time for new terms to become commonplace.
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      Post hoc rationalisation, but okay. My non-technical friends know exactly what a whitelist/blacklist are but none of them have ever heard these new politically correct terms.
jariel 6y ago
"I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation" That's really easy to understand. Humans cost money, algorithms are free. Also, Google is full of the kind of people that 'don't understand humans' and 'understand algorithms very well'. To Google, the answer to all of life's problems is probably 'an algorithm'.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
> It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice To mis-quote Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

kiba 6y ago

Who knows? They had decided long ago that genuine tech support is not in their business model, and that's the end of things.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

tmpz22 6y ago
Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.
- asdff 6y ago
  It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    I would argue a second gauntlet only makes matters worse not better for "arrogance".
    - asdff 6y ago
      Maybe in the past where these professional degrees guaranteed highly compensated positions, but that's not the case now that these fields are saturated. A medical school grad still has a painful and overworked road to travel before they start making serious money and overcome their medical school debt. Similarly, if you are in a law school that isn't in the top 10, or you are not in the top 10 of your class, drop out while you can because you are looking at a career of terrible pay and insurmountable debt. These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I think I was a pretty cynical bastard at 22 so I would actually have thought they were full of it.
  - sli 6y ago
    Sometimes there's a very fine line between cynicism and realism.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      That line is the size of a Venn Diagram intersection.
throwaway_1299 6y ago
As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B. One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense. So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit. Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step. So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
- madacoo 6y ago
  Providing tech support by responding to customers is a different beast entirely to content moderation, however. It may be the case that human oversight of algorithmic moderation is also unreasonable, but I find this fairly unlikely. I wouldn't expect it would require quite so many man hours. But again, could be wrong.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  > Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 6y ago
That seems a bit ironic of an accusation given all of the people who don't do even back of the envelope math about what their demands for scaling would cost to try to do manually. Isn't that like saying plumbers are arrogantly obsessed with imprisoning water using pipes instead of free flowing streams of water while not considering the evaporation and contamination of said approach? Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus. It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
- megous 6y ago
  Techdirt doesn't sound like a small website, so presumably it generates quite some money for Google. How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    Or even just have a “pay us $150 for a month’s support” option.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

It's a hard problem, because the alternative to algorithmic solutions is human solutions, which people are quite unhappy with as well. Facebook for example has gotten a ton of negative press over the years for their human content moderators.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
In this space, it doesn't matter how many times you get it right, just how many times you got it wrong. Also, it was probably a bad idea for Google and Facebook to be so cavalier while they destroyed print advertising (i.e. the press). Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, as they say.
asdff 6y ago
The problem with facebook isn't that they use humans, it's that they treat them very poorly. Treat people with dignity and respect, and the good press will follow.

natch 6y ago

After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.

natch 6y ago
Can’t edit. Not two decades, but ever since gmail added spam filtering and started flagging many Google Alert emails as spam.
zerocrates 6y ago
You could interpret that in a positive way, that they're not just papering over problems in their filter by privileging their own messages. Not super positive but still.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  You could also interpret it in a negative way. They don't maintain _anything_ over there. How hard would it be to whitelist (can I still say that?) super high value, bulk sending, domains?
- natch 6y ago
  I suspect that’s what they tell themselves. And that heuristics are beneath them. Better to have an elegant algorithm that does the wrong thing automatically than a set of human-tweaked rules that could come much closer (also automatically) to doing the right thing.

mtgx 6y ago

The explanation could be that Google would prefer to use the excuse that "it's our objective algorithm that downranked our competitors, not us!" And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments. Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.

john_moscow 6y ago

Because Google has a skin in the game. It is a de-facto monopolist in the online advertisement business, and online search. And it's only the political goodwill that keeps it safe from antitrust scrutiny. So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state. There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate

rubyn00bie 6y ago
Critical vs approving articles is a very weak proxy for antitrust. In this case most of them come from the same source (a conservative media company). It seems to me Google is better about removing useless results, or that which are regurgitated (copied) content, than DDG. I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant. Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap'). So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    I'm confused, the two main headlines, one about property tax, and one about being gifted the estate, appear on both engines. DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second. The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.

alehul 6y ago

> why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation When people assume malice so often as you mentioned, it, at least intuitively, feels easier to fault human moderation than algorithms. Algorithms offer a black box which protect against accusations of bias. If accused of bias, an algorithm's biases can just be labeled unintentional accidents, whereas a human's biases are malicious.

nomel 6y ago

> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.

tpxl 6y ago
Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees. The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Somewhat ironically, the very site at issue has long claimed that content moderation at scale is impossible[0]. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at. Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service. From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
One thing I imagine is if you scale up assuming that algorithmic solutions will be good enough, and then find out that they aren't, you find yourself in a hole, because you haven't budgeted enough to hire human moderators now, and you have enough visibility and investors that it is hard to scale down. There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this. Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.

syshum 6y ago

At some level though incompetence has to transition to malice. Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"

throwaway45349 6y ago
An organisation the size of Google's probably fucks up thousands of times daily. I reckon <1% of issues are actually complained about, so yeah, I'd believe it's a mistake.

srndpty 6y ago

If no one tries it, no one will ever get it right. Sure, they could do it alongside real support in a simulated way, but that doesn't seem like it fits with their MO.

benlivengood 6y ago

My guess is that it's pretty simple. There are ML models predicting the ad quality score; when the predicted outcomes for a site/account don't match reality it is a strong signal that something is wrong. Other inference models determine what is likely being violated on the site or by the account. A human has no chance of digging through the model to figure out exactly what causes the flagged outcome. The only solution is trying various changes on the site and seeing what the models and clickers/consumers think of it unless you want to try to pay Google to deepdream your site for you with their inference models; good luck with that. It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.

throwaway45349 6y ago
> I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?
- y0ssr3n 6y ago
  I think the preferred term is "allowlist" not "whitelist". I like Allowlist personally because it's immediately obvious what it means esp for less technical folk. It takes time for new terms to become commonplace.
  - throwaway45349 6y ago
    Post hoc rationalisation, but okay. My non-technical friends know exactly what a whitelist/blacklist are but none of them have ever heard these new politically correct terms.

jariel 6y ago

"I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation" That's really easy to understand. Humans cost money, algorithms are free. Also, Google is full of the kind of people that 'don't understand humans' and 'understand algorithms very well'. To Google, the answer to all of life's problems is probably 'an algorithm'.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

> It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice To mis-quote Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.