5 ms·

It's mostly because: A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it. B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money. C.) Th

by titzer 6y ago

It's mostly because: A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it. B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money. C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable. D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems. edit to add: E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.

titzer 6y ago
Let me also add a counter-point to my own point: Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive. The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks. But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
- vvanders 6y ago
  What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    How many other companies operate at the scale of Google and are not accused of the exact same problems? Do you have any examples?
  - jaimex2 6y ago
    Nothing other than Google is obsesed with automating things with half baked machine learning solutions and thinking they don't need a service desk with humans. Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
    - spondyl 6y ago
      Well, maybe not Twitter? I've used their hidden platform team contact form about 4 times and I've never heard a response from them. I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
      - jaimex2 6y ago
        I had a spare account hijacked and banned, recovery took about a day from memory using their contact form. This was sometime last year.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The main difference is traditional large companies aren't nearly as valuable or profitable because they employ a increasing number of support and customer service staff. The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
  - rmah 6y ago
    Google has a net income (aka profits) of $34b/yr and Youtube revenues ($16 bil) are about 12% of google's total revenues ($135 bil). If they sunk 12% of their net income (one year of net income growth) into hiring customer support and allocated 12% to youtube, that would be $490mil. Or around 5,000 account reps (avg cost of $100k/yr). At 1800 hrs/yr, that's around 9 mil man-hours they could put towards decent youtube creator relationship support. My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it. Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case. The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.
- ffhhj 6y ago
  Surprinsingly I got in contact with a human in Youtube to look into my blocked channel, after no avail I finally asked him to delete my account, but he refused. Why keeping it blocked forever? Seems like a blackmail scheme.
- malwarebytess 6y ago
  That sounds like a problem that is ordinarily dealt with by having human beings, who don't operate on a script, on the other end of the line. You can't automate everything, google.
- chongli 6y ago
  But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.
- laughinghan 6y ago
  Let's be much, much more specific about the counter-point to your counter-point. We have concrete, hard evidence they aren't doing enough to protect their users: they're massively, enormously profitable. If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.
dessant 6y ago
> C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable. The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry. One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued. [1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57 https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57 [2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63 https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63 [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20image https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20imag...
- fapjacks 6y ago
  The way people get around this apparent "shadowban" behavior is by creating a separate legal entity of some form to be the publisher of each app or extension or channel or whatever. It seems that once you are shadowbanned, you are shadowbanned forever. This of course increases the cost of publishing your project, but this is a monopoly we're dealing with and so we have no recourse.
sago 6y ago
I've been reading some Kafka this month. Issues like this article are the 21st century realisation of his pessimism. The Castle, and The Trial particularly. I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?

by titzer 6y ago

titzer 6y ago

Let me also add a counter-point to my own point: Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive. The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks. But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.

vvanders 6y ago
What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.
- pixl97 6y ago
  How many other companies operate at the scale of Google and are not accused of the exact same problems? Do you have any examples?
- jaimex2 6y ago
  Nothing other than Google is obsesed with automating things with half baked machine learning solutions and thinking they don't need a service desk with humans. Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
  - spondyl 6y ago
    Well, maybe not Twitter? I've used their hidden platform team contact form about 4 times and I've never heard a response from them. I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
    - jaimex2 6y ago
      I had a spare account hijacked and banned, recovery took about a day from memory using their contact form. This was sometime last year.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The main difference is traditional large companies aren't nearly as valuable or profitable because they employ a increasing number of support and customer service staff. The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
- rmah 6y ago
  Google has a net income (aka profits) of $34b/yr and Youtube revenues ($16 bil) are about 12% of google's total revenues ($135 bil). If they sunk 12% of their net income (one year of net income growth) into hiring customer support and allocated 12% to youtube, that would be $490mil. Or around 5,000 account reps (avg cost of $100k/yr). At 1800 hrs/yr, that's around 9 mil man-hours they could put towards decent youtube creator relationship support. My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it. Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case. The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.
ffhhj 6y ago
Surprinsingly I got in contact with a human in Youtube to look into my blocked channel, after no avail I finally asked him to delete my account, but he refused. Why keeping it blocked forever? Seems like a blackmail scheme.
malwarebytess 6y ago
That sounds like a problem that is ordinarily dealt with by having human beings, who don't operate on a script, on the other end of the line. You can't automate everything, google.
chongli 6y ago
But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.
laughinghan 6y ago
Let's be much, much more specific about the counter-point to your counter-point. We have concrete, hard evidence they aren't doing enough to protect their users: they're massively, enormously profitable. If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.

dessant 6y ago

> C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable. The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry. One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued. [1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57 https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57 [2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63 https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63 [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20image https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20imag...

fapjacks 6y ago
The way people get around this apparent "shadowban" behavior is by creating a separate legal entity of some form to be the publisher of each app or extension or channel or whatever. It seems that once you are shadowbanned, you are shadowbanned forever. This of course increases the cost of publishing your project, but this is a monopoly we're dealing with and so we have no recourse.

sago 6y ago

I've been reading some Kafka this month. Issues like this article are the 21st century realisation of his pessimism. The Castle, and The Trial particularly. I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?