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Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has

• Judgmentality 6y ago
  > I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails. :( I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
  • leppr 6y ago
    There's a reason for the hype around web3. The more time passes the more pressing the demand for it, and the better the UX becomes.
    • rlayton2 6y ago
      Do you have a good resource for how web 3 would work? All I read is hyperbole and "could be"s but I am looking for actual concepts of how it would work. Any ideas?
      • diggan 6y ago
        web3 as a whole is very early and still being built and developed, that's why there is not one definition of web3. The biggest commonality is that the solutions are focused on decentralization and censorship-resistance, as those are two of the main issues plaguing the web today. Imagine the web in the 90s, some people saw promise while others asked themselves what it actually is. Fast forward 5/10/20 years and what web3 is will be a lot more clear as we'll have mainstream web3 applications deployed and used then.
        • 8note 6y ago
          Are those the main issues plaguing the web? I would lean that the foremost problem is radicalization, and that decentralization and censorship resistance will make the internet an even better tool for radicalization than it is today
      • vertis 6y ago
        Web3 means a lot of things to a lot of people. In this context the decentralization enabled by blockchain or federation is probably what the GP is talking about. With a decentralized app you can't be banned in the same way (though this presents other problems). While blockchain based technologies are often cited as an example of Web3, and some of the worst hype offenders are pushing this. It's not exclusively blockchain. In some ways Web3 is a return to earlier internet where there were open protocols rather than everything being controlled by companies. Redecentralize[0] has a great set of founder interviews talking about some of the projects and challenges. To be clear it's not necessarily anti-company, just a recognition that a handful of companies controlling everything is problematic. Coupled with a recognition that running at the scale of the Big 5 is prohibitive (e.g. server costs, preventing malicious actors, people to handle problems). The UX around these things is hard, though getting better. Mastodon[1] is a reasonable alternative to twitter now (doubly so if you cross-post). Gitcoin[2] is a good example of a Web3 app (all the core functions are smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain). There are plenty of example of Web3 apps(dapps) on Webby[3] and DApp.com[4] (though the latter you have to wade through all the Decentralized Finance stuff). [0]: https://redecentralize.org/interviews/ https://redecentralize.org/interviews/ [1]: https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social [2]: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ [3]: https://heywebby.app/webby https://heywebby.app/webby [4]: https://www.dapp.com/topics https://www.dapp.com/topics
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
    Ha! I’m sorry but it’s already screwed. Compared to where we stood when people were actually arguing for a free and open internet and against centralization and corporatization we have arrived at almost all of their dire predictions and the last few seem to be well on their way. No one is fighting it anymore, they’re just trying to grab the scraps that fall off the table that the big five sit at and hoping they don’t get stomped into oblivion by the giants.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      A lot of the free and open Internet arguments were about copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies. Turns out being able to pirate MP3s is a poor consolation prize when you can have your startup permabanned from AdSense or Amazon for no good reason, and there's nothing you can do about it. Wrong goal on the wrong sports field.
      • tremon 6y ago
        copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies. What do you think the free software movement was all about, if it wasn't about avoiding Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies? Read Stallman's "The Right To Read", from 1997.
        • wizzwizz4 6y ago
          Open source, on the other hand, has been embraced by those automated Kafkaesque monopolistic bureaucracies.
          • skeeter2020 6y ago
            Do you mean the consumption of open source software has been embraced, i.e. they love using free software but are not big fans of the backside of the model?
  • jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago
    > I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great. The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.
    • ctvo 6y ago
      Asking for sacrifice from others is often hard, simple, and ineffective. > Stop eating calories and you'll lose weight As America approaches 50% obesity > Stop using AWS, Microsoft Office, AdSense, and Instagram (If we want to talk about domineering monopolies) Sure. Let me count the ways you've inconvenienced me. A better approach would be to provide a viable alternative to change the underlying systems that put us in this state. That's never simple though.
    • TomSwirly 6y ago
      Now, you know these things aren't going to happen, not in any quantity to make the slightest difference. So why even suggest it? Strong regulation is the only solution. The Magic Invisible Hand just is not working.
    • Brian_K_White 6y ago
      It's like they didn't hear you say "the solution isn't easy", and so they had to say what you already said, and probably feel like they are saying something smart and worth hearing as they do.
    • wly_cdgr 6y ago
      You will never, ever get a critical mass until your freedom-based burger tastes better than a real Google burger. It's not "not easy". It's Impossible
      • angry_octet 6y ago
        God damn, now I want to eat a burger.
  • zwaps 6y ago
    My worry about AI isn't Skynet and Terminators. It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier. It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.
    • 317070 6y ago
      > It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck But all technology is like that. Cars work, because we conformed our environment to it. Email works, because we conform to checking our mailboxes regularly. Telephones work, because we pick them up when they ring. If you are interested in knowing more, the whole work of the french philosopher Jacques Ellul is based around this idea. AI is not going to be any different in this respect. It is going to be us meeting it halfway. And that is going to be dystopic in the same way as it has been with other types of technology.
      • alistairSH 6y ago
        Wow, not sure why you're getting all the down-votes. I don't necessarily agree with you, but it's an interesting perspective regardless. You also touch on the Amish approach to new technology. Each new thing is assessed for impact on life/tradition/etc and adoption is limited accordingly. For example, phones might be considered useful enough to have one per town, but distracting enough to be kept out of individual homes. Or, a computer might be allowed in the back-office of a wood shop for purposes for managing online sales, but nowhere else in the community.
      • andrewzah 6y ago
        The difference is we have a choice in those matters. I.e. my telephone does not work in that sense, because I will not pick up for an unknown number in most cases. A communicable human is on the other end. With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason. "AI is not going to be any different in this respect" The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck. It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".
• brigandish 6y ago
  Sadly ironic when you think about how a large part of Google's data collating effort comes from reading virtually everyone's email.
• Dma54rhs 6y ago
  Adsense is Google and Google is an American company, you have to be very careful about the words in use. Usually it means a massive blocklist of words, when finding them don't display the ads on that page. Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.
  • lostlogin 6y ago
    This is very dystopian. Don’t say the bad word, the machines are listening.
    • sofixa 6y ago
      It's not the machines, it's the advertisers. If you're paying for publicity, you don't want it next to things anyone might find unsavoury. You don't want your products to be associated with X.
      • leppr 6y ago
        In that case the ad networks themselves should provide tools that automatically detect forbidden words and disable ads, instead of arbitrarily enforcing their policy on random small players.
      • wernercd 6y ago
        Associated with words defined in a dictionary? How pedantic do you have to be to say "I don't want to advertise with Britannica because their dictionary has the word rape"?
        • christophilus 6y ago
          I think it’s more that you don’t want your ad to show up on a page about rape, but you’re fine with it showing up on a page about joy. Coca-Cola works hard to associate their brand with happy experiences. They’d probably take out ads on the positive words in a dictionary but not the negative ones. If this site was making no distinction, it would lose Coca-Cola as a sponsor. Not really defending Google, but the puritanical explanation isn’t the best one.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  Happened to me for Amazon. Customer for 20+ years, wanted to sell something, account closed. No appeal, no explanation, last mail said "DONT SEND US MORE MAILS". No humans, just AI (ML) decisions.
  • ben_w 6y ago
    I’m no lawyer, but as I read it, fully automated decisions with no possibility of human appeal is a violation of GDPR (and, IIRC, its UK predecessor the Data Protection Act): https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/rights-related-to-automated-decision-making-including-profiling/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
    • sam_goody 6y ago
      Isn't GDPR a Europe only thing. Won't help for a US small business selling on Amazon, I imagine
      • ben_w 6y ago
        There may be other local laws; GDPR itself was a unification of existing local laws.
    • imagine99 6y ago
      The question is: How do you enforce that or even complain about it? Say your Amazon account gets locked for whatever reason due to an automated decision (probably all of these decisions are automated). There is no way to contact Amazon without an account. It's not like they have a link on their website that says "Request human appeal under GDPR" (I haven't checkt tbh, but I'm 99.9% sure they haven't). I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement. Short of hiring a major law firm whose letterhead might get someone's attention and/or making major waves, I don't see how Joe Sixpack can force a human appeal without major monetary outlay. I think their strategy of burying their head in the sand and just ghosting you works probably pretty well for the large majority of cases where people simply won't bother (or be able to bother). The cost for the one or two cases that have the energy and commitment to fight is comparably minor and quickly resolved once it hits the front pages somewhere.
• jfoster 6y ago
  The crazy thing is that Google even took this action despite it also being against their interests. Sure, your business specifically is relatively inconsequential to them, but they must've made hundreds of thousands of similar mistakes. That's a fair amount of ad inventory to miss out on, surely? Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene? It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.
  • ALittleLight 6y ago
    One possible problem is that there are always more people willing to step in. I assume that I can still find a Japanese to English dictionary by searching Google. If one, or N, such websites get taken out by algorithmic flaws or bad actors reporting competitors, then others will simply rise up and take their place (or Google will subsume their content into the instant answers section). In this way, Google may not really be losing anything even if they are constantly burning their partners - there are always new partners coming up.
    • marshallbananas 6y ago
      Yup. And since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them. The funny thing is that my AdSense ban didn't affect the SERP position at all. I was still the second result for "japanese dictionary" on Google and had a steady million pageviews a month for years.
      • CPLX 6y ago
        > since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them You’ve hit on the actual problem. This is why so many believe the real fundamental problems the culture is facing with tech companies start with antitrust enforcement.
• ithkuil 6y ago
  > There are simply no humans working Skynet's greatest achievement was to make you think it's not real. Some folks here are in touch with it though. Perhaps you'll have a better luck using HN as the google support channel.
• 3np 6y ago
  I was using the Youtube API for personal access, only related to my personal account and information. Had my API key revoked because it hadn't been used for 90 days. They provided a link to reclaim it, yielding a LONG form where most questions were only applicable to businesses and service providers. I answered to the best of my abilities, requesting them to give me access again,also exhausting other available communication options on the matter. That was about 6 months ago, all I got so far was automated emails telling me it's in review.
• speedgoose 6y ago
  Maybe a dictionary shouldn't have ads and tracking.
  • junon 6y ago
    That's a ridiculous jump to conclusion.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      Why? Why would every website's business model be based on ads and tracking? Why should Google know that I'm looking at the translation of sexual words in Japanese? Actually, even Google does not want it.
      • kalleboo 6y ago
        > Why would every website's business model be based on ads and tracking? Certainly there are for-pay services as well, but the absolute vast majority of people prefer to pay with their privacy than with their cash, to the point where starting a for-pay service of that type today without a known brand name behind it is not going to pay your hosting bills let alone put food on your table.
        • pessimizer 6y ago
          Also, there would be absolutely no economic motivation to not exploit the data of the users of a for-pay service.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      No, it's a question about why we're tracking what people are reading, and whether that's a good thing. It's why librarians were the only significant contemporary dissenters to the Patriot Act. They've created ethical standards around what they do, unlike tech professionals (outside of the FSF.).
      • junon 6y ago
• airhead969 6y ago
  Dystopian like the movie Brazil isn't it? Arbitrary, automatous machinations lacking in human supervision, with anonymous accusations believed automatically, convicted instantly, and banishment forever.
  • narrator 6y ago
    This is the AI tyranny they warned you about. Let's say the future is fully automated AI locking you out of things for social credit score violations. There's no due process or appeals, there's no one working in customer service. They don't really care about you individually because you're just taking up space and not generating much revenue anyway. One of the problems with very large corporations like Google is the marginal benefit of each additional customer is negligible. They have so much money that they don't really need extra business and would rather pursue other objectives. Look at all the stuff getting cancelled lately for whatever reason. The whole thing takes place extra-judicially and is not in the monetary interest of these companies. Stakeholder capitalism if you will. I think the old profit driven system was better because at least you knew what the rules were. Now, the way these big companies make decisions is largely opaque and based on secret rules and arbitrary decisions often based on nothing but whim, or worse, a "good enough" algorithm.
    • AaronM 6y ago
      I feel like I've read this before several time on HN. Just curious if you've posted this on other comment threads
    • dognotdog 6y ago
      Arguably, this has nothing to do with AI, but an imbalance of power. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense to do whatever is just good enough to turn a profit with minimal effort. As long as there is healthy competition, there is enough incentive to do better, and a customer can switch services without experiencing significant hardship. However, with a lot of the big tech companies, that is no longer the case, and once you run into a problem there is neither free-market nor regulatory mechanisms that can help any individual solve their problem. Currently, the big tech companies can eschew responsibility by claiming the rights of private business -- having very strong autonomy over how and with whom they do business -- and despite them being de-facto public utilities at this point, the claims are made that regulation is not necessary / not allowed / not productive / harmful. Why this is accepted is puzzling to me, as it is very commonly known macro-economic theory that the usually claimed self-regulating free-market mechanisms no longer work for when large imbalances, eg. monopolies, exist. We have the government explicitly for this reason, to create a counter-balance against forces so large that any individual cannot deal with on their own. And while it is true that we can expect regulatory intervention to be difficult, especially as the political process cannot possibly keep pace with technology, it is indeed very strongly preferable to giving free reign to private entities with explicitly anti-consumer interests (eg. a corporation has to make their shareholders money, not protect their customers or the environment). So what's the solution? Maybe regulatory agencies need to be given more teeth, including funding and updated charters. Yesterday's Cartel is today's Big Tech.
• sideshowb 6y ago
  It begs the question seeing as they've written a bot to determine what's offensive why don't they hook it directly to the ad servers and auto disable ads on the offending pages only?
  • syshum 6y ago
    That would be Pro-Consumer. Google is Anti-Consumer so that would be against their core principle
    • merpnderp 6y ago
      Google won't even let you know the app privacy on their iOS apps, how could they possibly be pro-consumer? Maybe the downvoters mean "pro-consumer" in that they're pro manipulating people into consuming their advertisements and incredibly invasive tracking?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • some_random 6y ago
      I detest Google, so I absolutely have to say this is an absurd way to look at the world. Google doesn't care if it's actions are pro or anti consumer, they care about money and power and go about pursuing it in a way that tends to be anti-consumer.
      • cwkoss 6y ago
        I think that google doesn't care is precisely the point
  • sn_master 6y ago
    Most websites aren't static (e.g. forums).
    • sideshowb 6y ago
      Neither are the ads they serve; furthermore the amount of profanity detection required scales linearly with the number of pages on which ads are served, so this really shouldn't be a barrier.
• tzfld 6y ago
  I recently got policy violation notices citing shocking content for articles about land usage in West Virginia and uneven distribution of GDP around the world. Their AI is definitely not good.
• ecommerceguy 6y ago
  Instead of attempting to contact google perhaps your time is better spent contacting the anti-trust folks at the doj.