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> They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. This isn't really true. The main grievance people have

> They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity. Even massive channels and companies have a hard time fighting back. A recent example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/bungie-slams-youtubes-dmca-system-in-lawsuit-against-destiny-takedown-fraudsters/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/bungie-slams-you...

derefr 4y ago
> they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have internal contacts for their equivalents in any other department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is supposed to be the machine's job. As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above. I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though: - There are public product discussion and bugs mailing lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The engineers working on these products monitor these lists. - Some things you'd think Google develops in private, are actually developed in public. Examples: https://github.com/googleapis https://github.com/googleapis; https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform. You can file issues on these repos! - When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers, put their public @google.com email addresses on conference presentations, they do that for a reason. They want you to reach out with questions/concerns about the thing they've built!
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  > Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. This is because Google has no culture of human support, so when an agent does become available they're flooded with backlog. If Google started providing it, especially where money is involved, the backlog would eventually be caught up and this would no longer be a big issue. But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost.
  - derefr 4y ago
    > But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost. I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut down many of its services if they had to provide human support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness, would turn the the products from positive-margin or at least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-margin.
    - trasz 4y ago
      >the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves That cost is mostly imaginary. First, it’s already tiny - computers are cheap - and second, 90% of that cost is for stuff that only matters to Google; you could make that part disappear without hurting user experience.
      - derefr 4y ago
        We're talking explicitly about the cost of putting humans in the loop as content moderators / customer-service representatives / ombudsmen / etc. That cost, industry-wide, grows at O(N) with the number of customers; as some constant fraction of people will always call with their problems rather than attempting to engage with automated support systems.
        trasz 4y ago

derefr 4y ago

> they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have internal contacts for their equivalents in any other department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is supposed to be the machine's job. As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above. I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though: - There are public product discussion and bugs mailing lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The engineers working on these products monitor these lists. - Some things you'd think Google develops in private, are actually developed in public. Examples: https://github.com/googleapis https://github.com/googleapis; https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform. You can file issues on these repos! - When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers, put their public @google.com email addresses on conference presentations, they do that for a reason. They want you to reach out with questions/concerns about the thing they've built!

ericbarrett 4y ago
> Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. This is because Google has no culture of human support, so when an agent does become available they're flooded with backlog. If Google started providing it, especially where money is involved, the backlog would eventually be caught up and this would no longer be a big issue. But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost.
- derefr 4y ago
  > But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost. I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut down many of its services if they had to provide human support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness, would turn the the products from positive-margin or at least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-margin.
  - trasz 4y ago
    >the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves That cost is mostly imaginary. First, it’s already tiny - computers are cheap - and second, 90% of that cost is for stuff that only matters to Google; you could make that part disappear without hurting user experience.
    - derefr 4y ago
      We're talking explicitly about the cost of putting humans in the loop as content moderators / customer-service representatives / ombudsmen / etc. That cost, industry-wide, grows at O(N) with the number of customers; as some constant fraction of people will always call with their problems rather than attempting to engage with automated support systems.
      - trasz 4y ago