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Sorry for the rant but Google has time and money to build things like this and yet they don't have customer support for people whose account got suspended for n

Sorry for the rant but Google has time and money to build things like this and yet they don't have customer support for people whose account got suspended for no reason?

scrollaway 6y ago
You have time to make this comment and yet you don't have time to volunteer at your local pet shelter? (I'll buy you a beer if you convincingly explain to me that these two analogies are meaningfully different) PS, not defending google, they generally suck.
- oreille 6y ago
  Providing customer support is a part of a having a business and should be prioritized over adding random features no one asked for to your product. Volunteering at a pet shelter is not part of the business of being an angry anonymous internet person.
  - elcomet 6y ago
    Non-paying users are not customers, thus google doesn't really earn them support for their products. For paying users, that's a different story.
    - merb 6y ago
      they banned somebody that bought stuff inside the app store.
      - nolok 6y ago
        Though Google is merely a storefront en payment intermediary of what the banned user bought (apps and movies), it could be argued the client of google per se is the companies selling the product, they're the one paying Google a share of their sales. Not that I disagree with you here just making the argument. Like parent said, I found that google has decent customer service once you clearly become their client (which I have been on adwords, analytics and on gsuite).
- kuschku 6y ago
  The money Google spent on these devs with inflated bay area salaries would’ve been enough for an army of customer support agents
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    Source your claim or show your work. My guess: you're wrong by a factor of three.
- donw 6y ago
  Not the parent poster, but I'll take a stab at this. I'd wager that the parent poster doesn't have any sort of direct relationship with the local pet shelter: there's no contract, or handshake agreements, nothing like that. The lack of a relationship is key. Google provides services to a large number of people, and while they don't charge (most) consumers directly for those services in dollar-units, Google's user base does pay via other means: nominally by being on the receiving end of hyper-targeted ads. There's a relationship there. Google provides a service, in exchange for psychological capital, which Google then translates into cashflow via advertisers. Relationships, good ones at least, require trust. And the fact that I know that there is a server inside of Google which will mercilessly nuke my account from orbit without warning... isn't exactly trust-inspiring. Moreover, I know that if that does happen, I have effectively zero options to resolve the problem. I'm screwed. Google could choose to fix this problem, and to invest their rather substantial resources in building trust. But they don't, and instead kick out toy apps like the above. This sends a very strong message to people like the parent poster, in that Google doesn't really value them or their well-being. Now, Google isn't required to be trustworthy. Plenty of organizations aren't. But there's nothing wrong with customers calling that out and demanding more when they feel Google isn't allocating its resources in their best interests. It's also completely within Google's purview to utterly ignore them. That's the difference: in one case, there's an established relationship, and that comes with certain expectations. In the other, not so much.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    I feel like in your attempt, you lost sight of the fact that this project has no relation with customer support at google, other than originating from Google. Lots of things originate from google. You can say the exact same thing of all of them. In fact you can plain and simply say "Google has time to do ANYTHING, yet it doesn't have time to provide customer support for that very thing?" There's a point to be made that Google should be providing support. Do you think this, specifically, is what they should cut for it?
- dlkf 6y ago
  Prima facie this comment enraged me, but on reflection it has a deep point; both parties here are just acting out of rational self interest. Google has decided that their bottom line won't suffer if they tell locked-out customers to get fucked. They would rather use the money on cheeky bets that carry small risk and have high potential upside. The critical corollary is that if you still feel it is a problem that Google doesn't provide support, and feel that "the market will fix it" is unconvincing in light of the available evidence, then you ought to be in favour of regulation that obligates them to.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    And would that regulation I'd be in favor of prevent them from doing this kind of cool project linked here? Because I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point.
    - h_anna_h 6y ago
      I do not think that anyone is against this project (except maybe for privacy reasons).
    - dlkf 6y ago
      > I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point The point is that FAANG companies are smart enough to elude a simple Hanlon's razor analysis. Put more explicitly: 1. Your critique of OP's argument is fundamentally correct. Pointing out that Google could solve the problem if they wanted to is missing the point. Google doesn't want to solve the problem 2. Therefore, we either have to live with the status quo, or we have to change the incentive structure. It might seem trivial to you, but I think it's an important point. Many members of the hn crowd exhibit this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, they have a strong moral intuition that a particularly policy of tech giants is wrong (in this case, their choice not to put money in support), but on the other hand, an equally strong knee-jerk resistance to regulation of our industry. Recognition that Google (or any other giant) are just doing what's best for them (as per their definition of "best") is an important step.
EvilEy3 6y ago
It doesn't work that way, Karen. Or you think they should move their 300k+ SWEs to manually cipher through millions of blocked trash to find something that wasn't supposed to be suspended?
- konschubert 6y ago
  Bezos would make his ppl do that until the problem is fixed. Bro.
  - jldugger 6y ago
    For now twitch is separate from Amazon. Can't wait till shitposting on twitch means you cant shop at whole foods anymore.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Google doesn't have anywhere close to 300K SWEs. More like 50K.
- buran77 6y ago
  I'll take your "Karen" reference as a crude attempt to insult OP. Let me recycle your "argument": You think Google should hire "300k+" SWEs (in reality according to their public filings it's more like a 5th of that at best) to build and maintain millions of servers in a system that indexes billions of pieces of information on the open internet just so in a fraction of a second you can find a tired meme (and definitely NOT to find the actual number of SWEs Google has) to use in an inaccurate answer to a legitimate question, albeit irrelevant to the posted topic? But here they are doing it. Alphabet is a trillion dollar company. The reason they're not fixing their customer support issues is that nobody is making them. They're not losing customers and they can just save the money. This doesn't make it OK or excusable. Certainly not with the "arguments" you brought.
  - snovv_crash 6y ago
    I believe the 300k is referring to $300k, not the number of engineers.
longtom 6y ago
Don't expect support if you do not pay.
Dma54rhs 6y ago
It costs way less to build something like that and depreciate it afterwards than have a proper support team, just one person going through complaints won't do it. This is probably well paid engineers side project while they didn't have anything better to do.

Sorry for the rant but Google has time and money to build things like this and yet they don't have customer support for people whose account got suspended for no reason?

scrollaway 6y ago

You have time to make this comment and yet you don't have time to volunteer at your local pet shelter? (I'll buy you a beer if you convincingly explain to me that these two analogies are meaningfully different) PS, not defending google, they generally suck.

oreille 6y ago
Providing customer support is a part of a having a business and should be prioritized over adding random features no one asked for to your product. Volunteering at a pet shelter is not part of the business of being an angry anonymous internet person.
- elcomet 6y ago
  Non-paying users are not customers, thus google doesn't really earn them support for their products. For paying users, that's a different story.
  - merb 6y ago
    they banned somebody that bought stuff inside the app store.
    - nolok 6y ago
      Though Google is merely a storefront en payment intermediary of what the banned user bought (apps and movies), it could be argued the client of google per se is the companies selling the product, they're the one paying Google a share of their sales. Not that I disagree with you here just making the argument. Like parent said, I found that google has decent customer service once you clearly become their client (which I have been on adwords, analytics and on gsuite).
kuschku 6y ago
The money Google spent on these devs with inflated bay area salaries would’ve been enough for an army of customer support agents
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Source your claim or show your work. My guess: you're wrong by a factor of three.
donw 6y ago
Not the parent poster, but I'll take a stab at this. I'd wager that the parent poster doesn't have any sort of direct relationship with the local pet shelter: there's no contract, or handshake agreements, nothing like that. The lack of a relationship is key. Google provides services to a large number of people, and while they don't charge (most) consumers directly for those services in dollar-units, Google's user base does pay via other means: nominally by being on the receiving end of hyper-targeted ads. There's a relationship there. Google provides a service, in exchange for psychological capital, which Google then translates into cashflow via advertisers. Relationships, good ones at least, require trust. And the fact that I know that there is a server inside of Google which will mercilessly nuke my account from orbit without warning... isn't exactly trust-inspiring. Moreover, I know that if that does happen, I have effectively zero options to resolve the problem. I'm screwed. Google could choose to fix this problem, and to invest their rather substantial resources in building trust. But they don't, and instead kick out toy apps like the above. This sends a very strong message to people like the parent poster, in that Google doesn't really value them or their well-being. Now, Google isn't required to be trustworthy. Plenty of organizations aren't. But there's nothing wrong with customers calling that out and demanding more when they feel Google isn't allocating its resources in their best interests. It's also completely within Google's purview to utterly ignore them. That's the difference: in one case, there's an established relationship, and that comes with certain expectations. In the other, not so much.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I feel like in your attempt, you lost sight of the fact that this project has no relation with customer support at google, other than originating from Google. Lots of things originate from google. You can say the exact same thing of all of them. In fact you can plain and simply say "Google has time to do ANYTHING, yet it doesn't have time to provide customer support for that very thing?" There's a point to be made that Google should be providing support. Do you think this, specifically, is what they should cut for it?
dlkf 6y ago
Prima facie this comment enraged me, but on reflection it has a deep point; both parties here are just acting out of rational self interest. Google has decided that their bottom line won't suffer if they tell locked-out customers to get fucked. They would rather use the money on cheeky bets that carry small risk and have high potential upside. The critical corollary is that if you still feel it is a problem that Google doesn't provide support, and feel that "the market will fix it" is unconvincing in light of the available evidence, then you ought to be in favour of regulation that obligates them to.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  And would that regulation I'd be in favor of prevent them from doing this kind of cool project linked here? Because I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    I do not think that anyone is against this project (except maybe for privacy reasons).
  - dlkf 6y ago
    > I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point The point is that FAANG companies are smart enough to elude a simple Hanlon's razor analysis. Put more explicitly: 1. Your critique of OP's argument is fundamentally correct. Pointing out that Google could solve the problem if they wanted to is missing the point. Google doesn't want to solve the problem 2. Therefore, we either have to live with the status quo, or we have to change the incentive structure. It might seem trivial to you, but I think it's an important point. Many members of the hn crowd exhibit this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, they have a strong moral intuition that a particularly policy of tech giants is wrong (in this case, their choice not to put money in support), but on the other hand, an equally strong knee-jerk resistance to regulation of our industry. Recognition that Google (or any other giant) are just doing what's best for them (as per their definition of "best") is an important step.

EvilEy3 6y ago

It doesn't work that way, Karen. Or you think they should move their 300k+ SWEs to manually cipher through millions of blocked trash to find something that wasn't supposed to be suspended?

konschubert 6y ago
Bezos would make his ppl do that until the problem is fixed. Bro.
- jldugger 6y ago
  For now twitch is separate from Amazon. Can't wait till shitposting on twitch means you cant shop at whole foods anymore.
throwaway3699 6y ago
Google doesn't have anywhere close to 300K SWEs. More like 50K.
buran77 6y ago
I'll take your "Karen" reference as a crude attempt to insult OP. Let me recycle your "argument": You think Google should hire "300k+" SWEs (in reality according to their public filings it's more like a 5th of that at best) to build and maintain millions of servers in a system that indexes billions of pieces of information on the open internet just so in a fraction of a second you can find a tired meme (and definitely NOT to find the actual number of SWEs Google has) to use in an inaccurate answer to a legitimate question, albeit irrelevant to the posted topic? But here they are doing it. Alphabet is a trillion dollar company. The reason they're not fixing their customer support issues is that nobody is making them. They're not losing customers and they can just save the money. This doesn't make it OK or excusable. Certainly not with the "arguments" you brought.
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  I believe the 300k is referring to $300k, not the number of engineers.

longtom 6y ago

Don't expect support if you do not pay.

Dma54rhs 6y ago

It costs way less to build something like that and depreciate it afterwards than have a proper support team, just one person going through complaints won't do it. This is probably well paid engineers side project while they didn't have anything better to do.