Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them
It's like page rank but even worse?
Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
111–120 of 1001 posts
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial. But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Sorry, how does paying for Google Workspace prevent you from getting your account locked and not being able to do something about it? I do believe that to login to the admin back-end and to contact support in the first place, you need to log in with your Google account.
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy. I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email. I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social medi…
are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient and clean.
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#114Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunt…
Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with G…
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that he has direct business with Google and yet _even he_ can't get his account unbanned. If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is most definitely screwed.
Notably, it also happened to an employee's husband: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
I think I'm going to spend the next few days working on a backup strategy for all my google related data and accounts...
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#116Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them
China has this for its citizens already
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#117[deleted]
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#118This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really feels like Russian roulette.
What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#119This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers. Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then move off. It's not the only solution. There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
> Then move off. Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.
You already can, if you use an email provider like gmail with your own domain name.