Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 158 posts

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#141

Post by edmundsauto »

tpxl wrote: post #106
nomel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.

Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees. The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.

Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at.

Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.

From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#142

Post by donmcronald »

zerocrates wrote: post #108
natch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.

You could interpret that in a positive way, that they're not just papering over problems in their filter by privileging their own messages. Not super positive but still.

You could also interpret it in a negative way. They don't maintain _anything_ over there. How hard would it be to whitelist (can I still say that?) super high value, bulk sending, domains?

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #123
scottrogowski wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not connecting random people via video chat (the site generates a unique url that is meant to be shared among friends). However, even if I was connecting random people, I think it would have been appropriate for them to specify why they suspended my account. I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though. This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/ad…

"Counterfeit" might be the issue. Do you have any method of reporting copyright violations? If you are offering a streaming video service they might think that it could be used to stream copyrighted material. Maybe the problem is as simple as having an appropriate DMCA contact info displayed on the homepage.

> Google Ads prohibits the sale or promotion for sale of counterfeit goods. Counterfeit goods contain a trademark or logo that is identical to or substantially indistinguishable from the trademark of another. They mimic the brand features of the product in an attempt to pass themselves off as a genuine product of the brand owner. This policy applies to the content of your ad and your website or app.

> Google Ads counterfeit vs. DMCA/Copyright/Pirated products

> Counterfeiters mimic the trademark brand features, rather than copying the product itself (software, books, artwork, movies, etc.).

Couldn't have been.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#144

Post by joshuamorton »

john_moscow wrote: post #60
rubyn00bie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical vs approving articles is a very weak proxy for antitrust. In this case most of them come from the same source (a conservative media company). It seems to me Google is better about removing useless results, or that which are regurgitated (copied) content, than DDG. I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Do…

I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant. Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap'). So if you google…

I'm confused, the two main headlines, one about property tax, and one about being gifted the estate, appear on both engines.

DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second.

The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#145

Post by paulryanrogers »

thewebcount wrote: post #124
throwaway_1299 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each pr…

I don't think they need a human to handle every single case you mention above. If advertisers had specific actionable steps to take when there's a problem and a way to say, "We've done those things," (and I'm sure Google can automate checking that they actually have), "and it's still not working," they probably wouldn't need to have as many humans working on this as you're saying above. A lot of the problem is that w…

My guess is the vague responses, or no response at all, is because scammers will game the system using any information they disclose.

One would hope transparent, clear rules and enforcement would prevail. But ambiguity and silence are far less expensive.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#146

Post by alasdair_ »

megous wrote: post #131
Nasrudith wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a bit ironic of an accusation given all of the people who don't do even back of the envelope math about what their demands for scaling would cost to try to do manually. Isn't that like saying plumbers are arrogantly obsessed with imprisoning water using pipes instead of free flowing streams of water while not considering the evaporation and contamination of said approach? Scalability of algorithims is how…

Techdirt doesn't sound like a small website, so presumably it generates quite some money for Google. How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;

Or even just have a “pay us $150 for a month’s support” option.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#147

Post by donmcronald »

throwaway_1299 wrote: post #15
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each pr…

Is 3 mins a ticket realistic? That seems super low for anything that isn't dead simple.

I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.

The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.

IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.

It's pure speculation, but makes sense to me.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#148

Post by y0ssr3n »

throwaway45349 wrote: post #86
benlivengood wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it's pretty simple. There are ML models predicting the ad quality score; when the predicted outcomes for a site/account don't match reality it is a strong signal that something is wrong. Other inference models determine what is likely being violated on the site or by the account. A human has no chance of digging through the model to figure out exactly what causes the flagged outcome. The only solutio…

> I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?

I think the preferred term is "allowlist" not "whitelist". I like Allowlist personally because it's immediately obvious what it means esp for less technical folk. It takes time for new terms to become commonplace.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#150

Post by M2Ys4U »

madacoo wrote: post #4

It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…

> It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice

To mis-quote Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Post reply on HN