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-you...
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/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!
This seems pretty ridiculous though, right? Imagine a system like this for any other service. A self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of allegiance.
I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault. They are choosing to be this big, and they can choose to have better customer support. It would just cost them a lot of money.
You're being flip, but there are actually plenty of things like this.
For example — you know those arcades full of UFO-catcher machines, where the games are rigged so that it only allows you to grab the thing after N tries?
You can pump 10 dollars into the machine, and maybe still not get it... or you can just politely ask the attendant to get you the thing out of the machine after trying and failing once. And they will, because — unlike a carnival side-show operator who owns their booth+merchandise — for a gacha-store employee, it's no skin off their back if everyone gets a bear. Unacknowledged public side channels!
For another — it's a common belief that Adobe is perfectly fine with individuals pirating Photoshop, and really only go after companies who pirate. They think of individuals using the pirated version of their software, as future professional users in training; where the company those professional users work at, will inevitably buy them a Photoshop license. Adobe won't give you a Photoshop educational license (or at least, they didn't used to have such a thing) — but by pirating it, you're essentially taking advantage of an unacknowledged public side-channel left there by Adobe.
But really, in the Google case, it's not just about it being an unpublished side-channel; it's also specifically about engineers being okay with being reached out to by other engineers, who are signalling by their method of outreach that they understand engineering culture, and so, implicitly, that they understand the engineering problem implied by their request; have already tried to solve the problem themselves; etc.
It's the same reason that people in NOCs have unpublished numbers to get people in their peer NOCs on the line in case of a network outage. They're fine with people reaching out with a problem, if those people are going to tell them something useful that they don't already know.
The Google engineer is fine being told that their code breaks in edge-case XYZ. But they don't want to be asked how to empty your trash in Gmail. And they especially don't want to deal with demands and threats from people who have been scammed out of money over email, who want their money back, and think it's Google's legal responsibility to do that for them.
> I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault.
It's "our" fault in the sense of Google being an American corporation incentivized to maximize profit; and profit maximization implying maximization of margin by cutting / avoiding cost-centres (e.g. support costs); and consumers enabling that by preferring services that have those lower-margins over services that have higher margins. Your ability to use email, today, for free, has higher Net Present Value than your future unanswered support questions.
Or, to put that another way: it's capitalism's fault. But not capitalists' fault, per se. It's the fault of people doing what's economically rational. It's economically rational to use Gmail instead of a paid email service. It's economically rational to build your following on YouTube instead of Dailymotion/Vimeo/etc.
People can complain all they like, but they still do it, rather than doing something else, because a free product with no support still optimizes better for their preferences than spending a single dollar on an alternative does.
Okay, and what about the thousands of people who legitimately need help? Do you really think it's acceptable that people have their content stolen or falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned without recourse?
The only reason the scenario you've described could happen is because Google has made it impossible to talk to a real person in the first place.
> 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'm aware of these. None of them are an acceptable alternative to having actual human support for paid products.
Furthermore, even if I were to concede that your first point is valid that still wouldn't excuse large channels or corporations having to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare to get basic human support. It speaks volumes that Bungie's team of lawyers couldn't even stop someone from filing false DMCA claims on their behalf without considerable effort.
Yes. Or rather, these particular commercial relationships shouldn't exist in the first place — they're fundamentally untenable.
As I say in my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071124#32073569), Google shouldn't be attempting to work with independent creators at all; there's no way to make it work. It shouldn't allow people to directly post on YouTube. (At least, monetized. They could still support it for hobbyists who aren't out to make money and are explicitly opting out of any support.)
Instead, YouTube should be directly engaging — and encouraging the consolidation of — MCNs, into a small collection of reseller-partners; a collection small-enough that YouTube can scalably listen to those partners' complaints. Where those partners then act as collectors and filters for complaints, only raising to YouTube's attention the problems that actually seem to be YouTube problems rather than PEBKAC problems.
Am I reinventing mainstream media? Yes. Because mainstream media scales.
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.
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.
