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It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#71

Post by nonameiguess »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #40
logicalmonster wrote: post #24

1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…

>Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays. Intelligence is a funny thing. People can be the world’s foremost expert in whatever the heck, don’t matter for my point, and be utterly incompetent in every other area of their life if someone else is picking up for them. Think of career scientists giving humiliating public speeches for the first time since high school (industry confere…

Your solution would be an unfunded mandate. That's fine if you accept the tradeoffs, but as others have said, the practical upshot is that open-registration services like free Google accounts would just not exist any more.

The electrical company's situation is not comparable. You can only get an account by proving you own a property they already run a line to, and at some point, they need to go out and physically run that line to hook you into their grid. If registering a Google account was similar, then sure, they could be expected to provide a similar level of service, but no more anonymous accounts, no more duplicate accounts from the same person, and no 10 figure user base. This, of course, would mean they're no longer as important to you as electricity because the network size is likely the reason you think that.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#72

Post by lobocinza »

cryptos wrote: post #67
2143 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. Warning: totally hypothetical controversial opinion follows (I'm playing the devil here): From a game theoretical perspective, if you had to pay fo…

That sounds like a case for regulation. If the support fee doesn't exceed a certain level, it would be hard to much money with support. Basically it should only cover actual costs, because it would unethical to earn money from problems they have caused.

Regulation here is a deus ex machina.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#73

Post by lobocinza »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #26
toastal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be in one place? There are dozens of cheap and fairly private email providers and you can run spreadsheets locally or self-host an Etherpad.

If you need to ask this you’re not understanding the business need Google is providing me.

What will happen to your business the day Google decides to arbitrarily ban your account? You don't understand the risk.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#74

Post by cs137 »

aeternum wrote: post #53
cs137 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausible deniability for whom? Employers? Which side are you on? If we don't regulate employers and the decisions they make, people will continue being denied jobs for stupid reasons. In the ongoing war against fascism, moderation is no virtue and extremity is no vice.

If being denied jobs is the main concern it's much more effective to change your legal name to one that is slightly more common vs. try to scrub the internet of information. If you somehow succeed in regulating google, I as an employer will simply search for your name using Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. Good luck getting all of them to play along with your particular censorship ask.

That's why it's important to regulate employers even more tightly than search engines.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#76

Post by masukomi »

gist wrote: post #25
logicalmonster wrote: post #24

1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…

> I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after puttin…

> In part I want to agree with you because I get the same version of random calls but for different reasons. But the truth is the difference between what we (or anyone) is doing and what google is doing is google makes plenty of money that they can use to throw at the problem.

This line of thinking is based on a fundamentally flawed view of google. In almost all cases, you are _not_ the customer. You are the product. A business does not provide service to it's product. The farmer does not provide counseling and custom beds for all of their cows. They make sure that overall the heard is healthy. They cull the old or the sick, and except for the monetary loss if one runs off or gets eaten (free range cattle) they generally don't care.

You are not the customer. You are the cattle. You output useful data which google spends a lot of money collecting, and then turning around and selling to their customer: the adverstiser.

They have a massive pile of money in no small part because they do not build massive service centers staffed with thousands of people who each need health care and computers.

> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve.

they already do this. Google's enterprise products do come with some level of support. Not saying it's "good" support, but this is an existing thing.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#79

Post by blindmute »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #40
logicalmonster wrote: post #24

1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…

>Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays. Intelligence is a funny thing. People can be the world’s foremost expert in whatever the heck, don’t matter for my point, and be utterly incompetent in every other area of their life if someone else is picking up for them. Think of career scientists giving humiliating public speeches for the first time since high school (industry confere…

I disagree. The service is free; they aren't obligated to do anything. If you want support, pay for it, via Fastmail or the like. People think they are entitled to not only a free email provider, but also free drive storage, free google docs, free search, free SSO, free calendar, and now free support. You're not entitled to any of that.

Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users

#80

Post by aeternum »

cs137 wrote: post #74
aeternum wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If being denied jobs is the main concern it's much more effective to change your legal name to one that is slightly more common vs. try to scrub the internet of information. If you somehow succeed in regulating google, I as an employer will simply search for your name using Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. Good luck getting all of them to play along with your particular censorship ask.

That's why it's important to regulate employers even more tightly than search engines.

I'd support tightly regulating those that advocate for regulations.
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