Live data from Hacker News

Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

twitter.com

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#311
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet. Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health. (I am offering no solutions…

> If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it. I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is tha…

I heard on a podcast recently that a trading system needs to keep logs of why a particular trade was executed for several years just in case the authority wants it. So it isn't too much effort to build a similar report or log of behaviour to explain why someone was banned.

Obviously this will also help the spammers who will use this information to get around the filters.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#312
post #23

This 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.

Within Google Takeout, you can setup monthly backup to another service (I chose OneDrive with 1TB storage)

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three: * Respect the user * Respect the opportunity * Respect each other The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features. The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expec…

TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of conduct.

The OR ELSE part or 'moderation procedures' probably didn't need to be written down.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#315
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite. I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer. So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".

Or better yet, get the domain elsewhere. (Not GoDaddy either.) You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite, Exchange Online, roll your own, …

If recommendations are useful here, both EasyDNS (easydns.com) and Hover (hover.com) seem ok.

I've used both over the years, though the EasyDNS UI is a bit harder to work with. They seem more technically competent than Hover though, who are decent but not fantastic. ;)

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account. There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.

I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card. That’s the bar.

It's not the criticism being levelled here, that Google has no support.

I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean, it's far better than AWS at that level.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.

You have to understand that this is SINO (service in name only), an offering that is there on paper to satisfy procurement requirements of businesses ("Does this product offer this service with that SLA? If yes, you can buy it. If not, you can't"). That doesn't say anything about the efficacy of this service. In fact you will find that it isn't very useful (I've only had to use it once, but still, useless and frustra…

Google Gsuite/Workspaces has an SLA.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#318
post #9

This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN. My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high. So I get why t…

> Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.

So hire more people. You can't argue that you can't do your work properly because your AI is not yet up to the task.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#319
A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the machines to explain why they made their decisions. With Google's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for Google.

Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).

How about a review department at Google?

We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs.

Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?

Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#320
post #248

I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing). One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic require…

> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that migh…

Kafka approves.
Post reply on HN