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It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing.

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it. Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world's gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don't play ball with them, you're cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.

jeremyjh 6y ago
Its only 9 times out of 10 when the story is escalated to the front page of Hacker News. For all we know, 99,999 times out of 100,000 its a case of fraud or law enforcement action that is completely correct and valid, and you do not give those actors information on how you detected them.
- nullc 6y ago
  It absolutely is, which is why what they're doing looks fine on internal metrics. Imagine I make a laser bug zapper and install them at every fast food joint in the US. 9999 out of 10000 times it zaps an insect. 1 out of 10000 times the laser fires it blinds a child. I could wax all I want want about the 99.99% accuracy, the _relative_ accuracy won't mean a thing to the million people blinded by it. When there is a mix of spambot garbage and human beings that being harmed the right metric isn't the ratio. Blinding a million children wouldn't go from unacceptable to acceptable just because the level of insects swarming around a restaurant increased by a factor of 10. The harm stands alone, and there is a level of harm which could not be justified by any amount of boring spambot influx.
  - smallnamespace 6y ago
    Something about this argument doesn't smell right. I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me. Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen. If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      Humans are notorious for under estimating routine hazards, and overestimating things that are rarer. We worry about strangers in deep dark alleys trying to rob/rape/beat/kill us, when in fact, most crime is perpetrated by someone the victim is familiar with.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      It is trivial to put every criminal to prison: put everyone in prison. It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone. If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.
      - pb7 6y ago
        Can you give some examples of this type of job done flawlessly? i.e. where all bad actors are stopped and no good actors are hurt in the process
        tpxl 6y ago
        No, but I can think of a few examples where most of the fraud is stopped while not significantly harming users.
        Nextgrid 6y ago
        Make fraud impossible through technical means or make "abuse" impossible by just not providing any incentive to do so (for example, make the service paid so that there is no longer any incentive to "abuse" the free service)?
- yorwba 6y ago
  > you do not give those actors information on how you detected them. Not about how you detected them, but you should tell them what you detected. E.g. if you're using a spam filter, you don't want spammers to know which exact keywords triggered the classification, but it wouldn't hurt much to let people know that their account was locked for sending spam instead of some other reason.
  - jeremyjh 6y ago
    If it were spam I think they'd tell them that. If they don't tell you the reason, almost certainly its fraud, and the only way to win against fraudsters is not to play with them. Anything you tell them is just an invitation for them to argue with you and waste your time, or infer detection methods. It is very hard to control fraud costs without alienating your users, especially for a free service with low barriers to entry. That isn't an excuse for Google to be so terrible, but I do think people lack appreciation for the actual problems here.
- holoduke 6y ago
  Bullshit. Maybe 99.999 are successfully identified, but one is mistakenly banned/suspended for no reason and it often has significant impact on his/her business. Google automation is a broken system. A system made by people who never have to deal with the actual users.
commandlinefan 6y ago
You would think that with congress seriously talking about breaking up monopolistic tech companies, the big players would have tried to _tone down_ the monopolistic behavior, not amp it up...
vessenes 6y ago
One thing that is tough about these stories is that there a class of US enforcement responses for which it is illegal to disclose why you responded. For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them. The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers that trigger reporting, but they cant tell a customer why they are dumping them, so the word comes from ‘on high’ or an algorithm and thats it. Nobody internally can help because for their own good they do not know the reasons for account termination. This may be that or it may not, but probably its not that google is being dicks to its own employees. It is an outcome of a pernicious set of government and institutional dynamics.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  Filing a required financial report is not similar to terminating someone's access to their account
  - m00x 6y ago
    Filing an SAR usually comes (99.99%) along with suspending the account. Suspension of account usually comes before filing the SAR as to stop any further illegal actions.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      > Filing an SAR usually comes (99.99%) along with suspending the account. You're missing half of the analysis. What percentage of account suspensions are preceded by an SAR filing? (Probably not many.)
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Google is not a government. It just acts like one.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
partiallypro 6y ago
It took 6 months for Facebook to get to an appeal of mine to unban a page. I was happy it was unbanned, but the ticket said "1-2 business weeks" in the turn around...I was never contacted for an entire 6 months. If that had been a crucial page for me that brought in revenue for me, I'd have been completely screwed. Google is also hard to get a hold of for anything unless you're a partner.
- kodah 6y ago
  I worked at a startup where we used Google Cloud. Even as a paying customer, when I'd try to talk to their "support" all they would do is try to upsell their consulting partners to answer a question about their own services.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Good to know
  - partiallypro 6y ago
    That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.
    - pixl97 6y ago
      Microsoft is a company born in selling physical products. Their software used to come on floppies and CDs. Google hasn't really sold anything real their entire existence.
    - kodah 6y ago
      Yeah, I was probably a bit spoiled at the time. I was at startups that leveraged AWS in the early days and their reps and support people were at least somewhat accessible but at the very least knowledgeable. That flew in complete contrast to my experience with GCP.
the8472 6y ago
> which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. I think the "cattle, not pets" implications haven't quite sunken in yet. Stragglers get turned into mutton.
- elyobo 6y ago
  Well, presumably not straggling cattle.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it. People willingly chose the free option and chose to not pay companies that would have offered support.
- 317070 6y ago
  Because support sucks universally and everywhere. There is no way to know if you will get support, even if you pay. Support is one giant lemon market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I get support from apple when I walk into their store, or I open up a chat window on their website. I received it in April when my phone died and they helped me try to revive it. I get support from Fastmail, and Migadu and Target and banks and plenty of other companies. I also provide support for my businesses. Support usually sucks with monopolies, such as ISPs who know you have no alternative. But even then, I’ve always been able to get someone on the line to fix my issue.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The argument that customers chose to be ripped off by opting for 'free' is not supported by evidence that paid services are any more accountable. Anyone who's had to deal with Google support for paid business accounts will tell you that the situation is barely any different for paying customers. Things might be different for very large businesses who are spending millions per month, but that's hardly relevant to how Google might handle email customers hypothetically paying $9.95 a month for a personal mailbox. . . . I do not understand why anyone defends consumer abuse by businesses. Unless they work for said businesses, or own their stock, there is absolutely nothing to gain by siding with an abusive business over an abused customer. The business isn't going to reward their supporters' loyalty by treating them better. Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.
kodah 6y ago
I don't think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms. This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it's my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn't even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in "platforms" in varying degrees. tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.
- naringas 6y ago
  imo the need for 'centralization' comes from the fact that in order for different people to understand each other, they must use the same dictionary (so to say). So the 'dictionary' is a centralized construction. It must be the same for everybody. If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult. Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years. To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.
    - kodah 6y ago
sangnoir 6y ago
I'll play the devils advocate: moderating any platform is a challenging endeavor, mostly because of malicious users. Having all the rules broken down in detail allows bad actors to either get close to the line but not cross it, or abuse the system while technically not breaking any rules. As such, having very broad rules (read TOS) helps. Additionally, not having to explain exactly what was violated means that people can't probe the system to figure out the rules in detail as well as the limits of acceptable behavior. The problem with such opaque systems is that it can go terribly wrong, but the answer is to not centralize anything important; always keep a backup. After all, the cloud is someone else's computer.
- swiley 6y ago
  Maybe it's better not have platforms that everyone on the planet have to use in order to access content/software.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    Perhaps - but it has always been prudent to keep redundant copies of anything important since before computing platforms existed. Frequently backup your data and test the backups.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      The bigger problem here is not really about the content, but the means. If all e-mail communication goes through Gmail (and maybe a bit via Outlook and some remnants of Yahoo), at some point you may lose your ability to communicate with the rest of the population unless you subscribe to one of these services. This is already happening to some degree but is definitely getting worse.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > moderating any platform is a challenging endeavor, mostly because of malicious users. Having all the rules broken down in detail allows bad actors to either get close to the line but not cross it, or abuse the system while technically not breaking any rules. Couldn't that same argument be used to support secret laws and secret courts enforcing those secret laws? After all, we're definitely seeing the problem of people going as close as possible to the line without overstepping. I think those laws would help tremendously, but mostly by forcing everyone to be overly cautious not to break them, creating strong chilling effects. They'd stifle freedom, and so does Google's secret law system. To minimize fallout, I think it's more useful to split up Google along services (Search, Youtube, Gmail, Office/Suite etc). You could search for double plus ungood things on Google Search then without running the risk to loose access to your emails.
_wldu 6y ago
Is it that easy to have someone locked out of Google? Just by reporting them for fake abuse? I'm sort of shocked if that is indeed true. It ought to be hard to do that. Otherwise, people who disagree with others may use that to get even or settle an online quarrel, etc.
- Daniel_sk 6y ago
  I had a small website few years ago and I placed Google Ads on it. After few weeks my Google Ads account got banned forever (no appeal available) for fraudulent clicks. There is no way to reverse this ban. I am 100% sure I didn't click on my own ads. I guess someone could easily do some suspicious activity on your ads (or just extract your Ads ID from Android APK) and then get your account banned. Fortunately, they only blocked me from Google Ads for life, but not from the rest of the account. Also - never ever open a Google Play developer account with your personal Google email. Create a new one for this.
  - mkl 6y ago
    > never ever open a Google Play developer account with your personal Google email. Create a new one for this. That means having another phone number, right? I tried to make a Google account for this kind of purpose, but had no way to receive the text they insist on without linking the new account directly to the old one.
    - danlugo92 6y ago
      A friend in the freeer err I mean 3rd world might hook you up
mcguire 6y ago
"The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose." I'm going to suggest (without any backup) that it's much more common but you simply don't hear about it.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  The whole thing is based on anecdotal numbers. We have no idea how often false positives happen or at what rate. And even in those that are apparently false positives and complain, it's not always 100% clear if they're saying the truth.
pdkl95 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ > It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal "You must understand, all problems are [user]'s own. If you only made certain to properly follow proper protocols, no such problems would exist!" > but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. "If there is a problem, fill out complaint form, and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born." # The Onion wasn't supposed be a prescient view of our future.
cbsmith 6y ago
"This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible." The "facts" are a bit misleading though. You won't hear stories like this when it isn't framed as a case of an algorithm gone rogue, and of course whether the billion-dollar shepherd assumes it is infallible or not is something being projected onto the story.
johnisgood 6y ago
> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able to use my account. I am not going to do that, so yeah. What I believe happened is that he attempted to login to my account a few times, which triggered their bullshit...
- randycupertino 6y ago
  I once got locked out of my Veeva Vault account because I couldn't remember who I put as "who was your best friend in kindergarten?" (I had like 8 best friends then!). After putting in a ticket and hearing nothing back I finally braved the phone system and called support line. The rep who unlocked my account and reset my password assigned me 4 different modules of 60-question EACH mandatory training in order to get back into my "dashboard."
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      Presumably the known providers such as Twilio, etc are blocked, but there are small companies that provide numbers from the same number ranges as the big cellular carriers so those are completely undetectable. I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
Really? The world is worse off because of the Internet? The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory. Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m people getting locked out of their accounts. I lost my Google account, which was tied to my phone number (Google Voice), a few years ago. It sucked. But, honestly, it wasn't even as bad as losing my license. I'll take free information for that.
- supercanuck 6y ago
  He is referring to the tech companies, you are referring to "the internet" Are you certain you two are speaking about the same concept?
Accujack 6y ago
>They somehow managed to skirt on that Not "somehow". Our national leaders in the US since Google was created have been fabulously pro-business, to the extent that they have never updated our laws governing privacy for the computer age (IE, limiting what businesses can do with data) and they've gutted consumer protections along the way. Since the US government is so thoroughly corrupted by money, once a corporation is large enough they can effectively write their own laws. Google and others have done this, so there's no law stating that they must give consumers rights in a dispute, must provide their data, or even must be fair. Government + money = corruption.
putlake 6y ago
> This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. This. And it happens in all businesses Google is part of. As a website owner who monetized with AdSense for a decade, this year their algorithms suddenly decided that 33% of the ad revenue was from "invalid clicks". The month before this happened, I was experimenting with a different ad provider. My suspicion is when I returned to AdSense the month-over-month increase in revenue tripped up the algo. Talking to Google reps was of no use because they have no control over the algo. I lost ~$12K in revenue over 2.5 months and eventually just stopped using Adsense.
vermilingua 6y ago
Not only is this incredibly Kafka-esque, it's archetypally Kafka-esque! This is effectively exactly the plot of The Trial!
tikiman163 6y ago
I'm confused, are they over policing to the detriment of users, or they don't police because they're not responsible for what users post? You can't have it both ways or switch positions just because you ended your paragraph. Did you ever consider that all of this shit is free and you're just an entitled idiot spouting contradicting rhetorics backed by cherry picked examples/data and strawman arguments? You can't sue the news stand that sold you a news paper that turned out to contain liablous statements about you because they didn't write. You also can't expect a company providing free services to hire enough support staff to cater to the individual problems of 2 billion people. And finally, the fact that you like the average consumer only used one or two major online communities is why you don't have alternatives when it comes to accessing original content. In short, people have behaved like people and your oxymoronic tiraid is neither insightful or helpful.
tupputuppu 6y ago
Doesn't GDPR have some sort of clause against "algorithmic decision making"? So in situations like this you can deny Google automated decisions? Probably not - can anyone explain, who knows the topic?
Cyberspy 6y ago
Though less serious, my wife has a similar problem with Amazon. She tried to review a product (first review for a very long time) and was greeted with this message: "! We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email reviews - help@amazon.co.uk." The 'community guidelines' link goes to a page with what the rules are, but doesn't say what rules have been broken. We emailed Amazon, using the email address in the post and got this reply: "I relayed your information to the team trained to handle this scenario regarding your inability to post reviews. They are not able to provide an exact date or time when they expect this issue to be resolved. For more information about our policies, please see our Community Guidelines (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines) We appreciate your patience in this matter. Warmest regards," 'Warmest Regards'? Really - you just told me she's locked out and it's gonna stay like that for the foreseeable future. :(

jeremyjh 6y ago

Its only 9 times out of 10 when the story is escalated to the front page of Hacker News. For all we know, 99,999 times out of 100,000 its a case of fraud or law enforcement action that is completely correct and valid, and you do not give those actors information on how you detected them.

nullc 6y ago
It absolutely is, which is why what they're doing looks fine on internal metrics. Imagine I make a laser bug zapper and install them at every fast food joint in the US. 9999 out of 10000 times it zaps an insect. 1 out of 10000 times the laser fires it blinds a child. I could wax all I want want about the 99.99% accuracy, the _relative_ accuracy won't mean a thing to the million people blinded by it. When there is a mix of spambot garbage and human beings that being harmed the right metric isn't the ratio. Blinding a million children wouldn't go from unacceptable to acceptable just because the level of insects swarming around a restaurant increased by a factor of 10. The harm stands alone, and there is a level of harm which could not be justified by any amount of boring spambot influx.
- smallnamespace 6y ago
  Something about this argument doesn't smell right. I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me. Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen. If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    Humans are notorious for under estimating routine hazards, and overestimating things that are rarer. We worry about strangers in deep dark alleys trying to rob/rape/beat/kill us, when in fact, most crime is perpetrated by someone the victim is familiar with.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    It is trivial to put every criminal to prison: put everyone in prison. It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone. If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.
    - pb7 6y ago
      Can you give some examples of this type of job done flawlessly? i.e. where all bad actors are stopped and no good actors are hurt in the process
      - tpxl 6y ago
        No, but I can think of a few examples where most of the fraud is stopped while not significantly harming users.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        Make fraud impossible through technical means or make "abuse" impossible by just not providing any incentive to do so (for example, make the service paid so that there is no longer any incentive to "abuse" the free service)?
yorwba 6y ago
> you do not give those actors information on how you detected them. Not about how you detected them, but you should tell them what you detected. E.g. if you're using a spam filter, you don't want spammers to know which exact keywords triggered the classification, but it wouldn't hurt much to let people know that their account was locked for sending spam instead of some other reason.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  If it were spam I think they'd tell them that. If they don't tell you the reason, almost certainly its fraud, and the only way to win against fraudsters is not to play with them. Anything you tell them is just an invitation for them to argue with you and waste your time, or infer detection methods. It is very hard to control fraud costs without alienating your users, especially for a free service with low barriers to entry. That isn't an excuse for Google to be so terrible, but I do think people lack appreciation for the actual problems here.
holoduke 6y ago
Bullshit. Maybe 99.999 are successfully identified, but one is mistakenly banned/suspended for no reason and it often has significant impact on his/her business. Google automation is a broken system. A system made by people who never have to deal with the actual users.

commandlinefan 6y ago

You would think that with congress seriously talking about breaking up monopolistic tech companies, the big players would have tried to _tone down_ the monopolistic behavior, not amp it up...

vessenes 6y ago

One thing that is tough about these stories is that there a class of US enforcement responses for which it is illegal to disclose why you responded. For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them. The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers that trigger reporting, but they cant tell a customer why they are dumping them, so the word comes from ‘on high’ or an algorithm and thats it. Nobody internally can help because for their own good they do not know the reasons for account termination. This may be that or it may not, but probably its not that google is being dicks to its own employees. It is an outcome of a pernicious set of government and institutional dynamics.

tehwebguy 6y ago
Filing a required financial report is not similar to terminating someone's access to their account
- m00x 6y ago
  Filing an SAR usually comes (99.99%) along with suspending the account. Suspension of account usually comes before filing the SAR as to stop any further illegal actions.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    > Filing an SAR usually comes (99.99%) along with suspending the account. You're missing half of the analysis. What percentage of account suspensions are preceded by an SAR filing? (Probably not many.)
reaperducer 6y ago
Google is not a government. It just acts like one.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

partiallypro 6y ago

It took 6 months for Facebook to get to an appeal of mine to unban a page. I was happy it was unbanned, but the ticket said "1-2 business weeks" in the turn around...I was never contacted for an entire 6 months. If that had been a crucial page for me that brought in revenue for me, I'd have been completely screwed. Google is also hard to get a hold of for anything unless you're a partner.

kodah 6y ago
I worked at a startup where we used Google Cloud. Even as a paying customer, when I'd try to talk to their "support" all they would do is try to upsell their consulting partners to answer a question about their own services.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Good to know
- partiallypro 6y ago
  That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Microsoft is a company born in selling physical products. Their software used to come on floppies and CDs. Google hasn't really sold anything real their entire existence.
  - kodah 6y ago
    Yeah, I was probably a bit spoiled at the time. I was at startups that leveraged AWS in the early days and their reps and support people were at least somewhat accessible but at the very least knowledgeable. That flew in complete contrast to my experience with GCP.

the8472 6y ago

> which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. I think the "cattle, not pets" implications haven't quite sunken in yet. Stragglers get turned into mutton.

elyobo 6y ago
Well, presumably not straggling cattle.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it. People willingly chose the free option and chose to not pay companies that would have offered support.

317070 6y ago
Because support sucks universally and everywhere. There is no way to know if you will get support, even if you pay. Support is one giant lemon market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I get support from apple when I walk into their store, or I open up a chat window on their website. I received it in April when my phone died and they helped me try to revive it. I get support from Fastmail, and Migadu and Target and banks and plenty of other companies. I also provide support for my businesses. Support usually sucks with monopolies, such as ISPs who know you have no alternative. But even then, I’ve always been able to get someone on the line to fix my issue.
bleepblorp 6y ago
The argument that customers chose to be ripped off by opting for 'free' is not supported by evidence that paid services are any more accountable. Anyone who's had to deal with Google support for paid business accounts will tell you that the situation is barely any different for paying customers. Things might be different for very large businesses who are spending millions per month, but that's hardly relevant to how Google might handle email customers hypothetically paying $9.95 a month for a personal mailbox. . . . I do not understand why anyone defends consumer abuse by businesses. Unless they work for said businesses, or own their stock, there is absolutely nothing to gain by siding with an abusive business over an abused customer. The business isn't going to reward their supporters' loyalty by treating them better. Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.

kodah 6y ago

I don't think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms. This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it's my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn't even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in "platforms" in varying degrees. tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.

naringas 6y ago
imo the need for 'centralization' comes from the fact that in order for different people to understand each other, they must use the same dictionary (so to say). So the 'dictionary' is a centralized construction. It must be the same for everybody. If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult. Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years. To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.
  - kodah 6y ago

sangnoir 6y ago

I'll play the devils advocate: moderating any platform is a challenging endeavor, mostly because of malicious users. Having all the rules broken down in detail allows bad actors to either get close to the line but not cross it, or abuse the system while technically not breaking any rules. As such, having very broad rules (read TOS) helps. Additionally, not having to explain exactly what was violated means that people can't probe the system to figure out the rules in detail as well as the limits of acceptable behavior. The problem with such opaque systems is that it can go terribly wrong, but the answer is to not centralize anything important; always keep a backup. After all, the cloud is someone else's computer.

swiley 6y ago
Maybe it's better not have platforms that everyone on the planet have to use in order to access content/software.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Perhaps - but it has always been prudent to keep redundant copies of anything important since before computing platforms existed. Frequently backup your data and test the backups.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    The bigger problem here is not really about the content, but the means. If all e-mail communication goes through Gmail (and maybe a bit via Outlook and some remnants of Yahoo), at some point you may lose your ability to communicate with the rest of the population unless you subscribe to one of these services. This is already happening to some degree but is definitely getting worse.
luckylion 6y ago
> moderating any platform is a challenging endeavor, mostly because of malicious users. Having all the rules broken down in detail allows bad actors to either get close to the line but not cross it, or abuse the system while technically not breaking any rules. Couldn't that same argument be used to support secret laws and secret courts enforcing those secret laws? After all, we're definitely seeing the problem of people going as close as possible to the line without overstepping. I think those laws would help tremendously, but mostly by forcing everyone to be overly cautious not to break them, creating strong chilling effects. They'd stifle freedom, and so does Google's secret law system. To minimize fallout, I think it's more useful to split up Google along services (Search, Youtube, Gmail, Office/Suite etc). You could search for double plus ungood things on Google Search then without running the risk to loose access to your emails.

_wldu 6y ago

Is it that easy to have someone locked out of Google? Just by reporting them for fake abuse? I'm sort of shocked if that is indeed true. It ought to be hard to do that. Otherwise, people who disagree with others may use that to get even or settle an online quarrel, etc.

Daniel_sk 6y ago
I had a small website few years ago and I placed Google Ads on it. After few weeks my Google Ads account got banned forever (no appeal available) for fraudulent clicks. There is no way to reverse this ban. I am 100% sure I didn't click on my own ads. I guess someone could easily do some suspicious activity on your ads (or just extract your Ads ID from Android APK) and then get your account banned. Fortunately, they only blocked me from Google Ads for life, but not from the rest of the account. Also - never ever open a Google Play developer account with your personal Google email. Create a new one for this.
- mkl 6y ago
  > never ever open a Google Play developer account with your personal Google email. Create a new one for this. That means having another phone number, right? I tried to make a Google account for this kind of purpose, but had no way to receive the text they insist on without linking the new account directly to the old one.
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    A friend in the freeer err I mean 3rd world might hook you up

mcguire 6y ago

"The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose." I'm going to suggest (without any backup) that it's much more common but you simply don't hear about it.

ehsankia 6y ago
The whole thing is based on anecdotal numbers. We have no idea how often false positives happen or at what rate. And even in those that are apparently false positives and complain, it's not always 100% clear if they're saying the truth.

pdkl95 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ > It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal "You must understand, all problems are [user]'s own. If you only made certain to properly follow proper protocols, no such problems would exist!" > but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. "If there is a problem, fill out complaint form, and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born." # The Onion wasn't supposed be a prescient view of our future.

cbsmith 6y ago

"This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible." The "facts" are a bit misleading though. You won't hear stories like this when it isn't framed as a case of an algorithm gone rogue, and of course whether the billion-dollar shepherd assumes it is infallible or not is something being projected onto the story.

johnisgood 6y ago

> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able to use my account. I am not going to do that, so yeah. What I believe happened is that he attempted to login to my account a few times, which triggered their bullshit...

randycupertino 6y ago
I once got locked out of my Veeva Vault account because I couldn't remember who I put as "who was your best friend in kindergarten?" (I had like 8 best friends then!). After putting in a ticket and hearing nothing back I finally braved the phone system and called support line. The rep who unlocked my account and reset my password assigned me 4 different modules of 60-question EACH mandatory training in order to get back into my "dashboard."
Nextgrid 6y ago
Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).
- justinclift 6y ago
  Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Presumably the known providers such as Twilio, etc are blocked, but there are small companies that provide numbers from the same number ranges as the big cellular carriers so those are completely undetectable. I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

Really? The world is worse off because of the Internet? The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory. Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m people getting locked out of their accounts. I lost my Google account, which was tied to my phone number (Google Voice), a few years ago. It sucked. But, honestly, it wasn't even as bad as losing my license. I'll take free information for that.

supercanuck 6y ago
He is referring to the tech companies, you are referring to "the internet" Are you certain you two are speaking about the same concept?

Accujack 6y ago

>They somehow managed to skirt on that Not "somehow". Our national leaders in the US since Google was created have been fabulously pro-business, to the extent that they have never updated our laws governing privacy for the computer age (IE, limiting what businesses can do with data) and they've gutted consumer protections along the way. Since the US government is so thoroughly corrupted by money, once a corporation is large enough they can effectively write their own laws. Google and others have done this, so there's no law stating that they must give consumers rights in a dispute, must provide their data, or even must be fair. Government + money = corruption.

putlake 6y ago

> This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. This. And it happens in all businesses Google is part of. As a website owner who monetized with AdSense for a decade, this year their algorithms suddenly decided that 33% of the ad revenue was from "invalid clicks". The month before this happened, I was experimenting with a different ad provider. My suspicion is when I returned to AdSense the month-over-month increase in revenue tripped up the algo. Talking to Google reps was of no use because they have no control over the algo. I lost ~$12K in revenue over 2.5 months and eventually just stopped using Adsense.

vermilingua 6y ago

Not only is this incredibly Kafka-esque, it's archetypally Kafka-esque! This is effectively exactly the plot of The Trial!

tikiman163 6y ago

I'm confused, are they over policing to the detriment of users, or they don't police because they're not responsible for what users post? You can't have it both ways or switch positions just because you ended your paragraph. Did you ever consider that all of this shit is free and you're just an entitled idiot spouting contradicting rhetorics backed by cherry picked examples/data and strawman arguments? You can't sue the news stand that sold you a news paper that turned out to contain liablous statements about you because they didn't write. You also can't expect a company providing free services to hire enough support staff to cater to the individual problems of 2 billion people. And finally, the fact that you like the average consumer only used one or two major online communities is why you don't have alternatives when it comes to accessing original content. In short, people have behaved like people and your oxymoronic tiraid is neither insightful or helpful.

tupputuppu 6y ago

Doesn't GDPR have some sort of clause against "algorithmic decision making"? So in situations like this you can deny Google automated decisions? Probably not - can anyone explain, who knows the topic?

Cyberspy 6y ago

Though less serious, my wife has a similar problem with Amazon. She tried to review a product (first review for a very long time) and was greeted with this message: "! We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email reviews - help@amazon.co.uk." The 'community guidelines' link goes to a page with what the rules are, but doesn't say what rules have been broken. We emailed Amazon, using the email address in the post and got this reply: "I relayed your information to the team trained to handle this scenario regarding your inability to post reviews. They are not able to provide an exact date or time when they expect this issue to be resolved. For more information about our policies, please see our Community Guidelines (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines) We appreciate your patience in this matter. Warmest regards," 'Warmest Regards'? Really - you just told me she's locked out and it's gonna stay like that for the foreseeable future. :(