To any Google employees who read HN: please raise this general issue in your internal groups and try to push to change this culture of faceless algorithmic decision making. Companies should not have to rely on getting to the HN front page to have a human being actually look at these issues. You have a voice internally and if you don't use it, in some way you are complicit.
Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
161–170 of 187 posts
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The playstore termination happened to me too. I happened to chance on some forums where you can pay money to people who can use multiple accounts and IPs to get your competitors banned by repeatedly hitting report and then copyright/infringement. After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.
Whoa! Where can I read more about this? If there aren't any news articles on the topic (in which case, this is a prime story opportunity for some enterprising journalist/blogger), can you link to the forums?
It's called flagging which youtube made it more prominent by "youtube heroes".
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pavyp8/youtube-co...
However you can just go to any app in the playstore and flag it. If you have a "high trust" then google algorithm can take it down with just one flag.
I have high points on google maps and it's scary how my edits for even embassy and consulates are approved instantly: https://screenshots.firefox.com/314Jgow6iDMhflNF/www.google....
Scammers have been banning competitors, changing bank phone number on google maps (https://www.hackread.com/fraudsters-changing-contact-details...) and also taking down youtube videos.
Google gives zero shit
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned That's what background checks are for. If you're hiring someone, it is your responsibility.
A background check for having once owned bitcoin? (To go with the previous metaphor)
And not reporting your gains to the IRS?
This wasn't a case of someone having had a previous developer account, but of someone having being banned for posting malware on the Play store.
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you do go viral there's no guarantee :-/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568 It's 7 years later and my company is still banned from Adsense and to this day they've never told us why. On the bright side, I should be seeing some of the class action settlement money any day now.. http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com
I had about 30 domains at one point so I set them all up on Adsense as I wasn’t using them. I spent about 3 days setting it up. On the last day I went and checked all 30 domains to make sure I setup all of them. 2 days later I got banned. So I was on Adsense for 5 days total. But I’ve never cared to contest it cos I don’t care. But I don’t understand how Google can’t ignore my views to Adsense.
Exactly, they can definitely detect your own views, why they can't just toss them out, I don't know. One time I got curious what the ads on my site were for and checked a few of the links out. I was banned permanently shortly after.
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pivot to a product that doesn't require Google approval? Honest question: what do you pivot too? Apple has different but equally bad risks of having your hands tied or just being barred. What's a safe platform to build on these days that actually has a market?
You could pivot to a PWA and rely on others channels to get the word out
PWA: Progressive Web Apps
I had to look it up so I think others might not know it too.
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
More proof google support only works if you manage to get publicity... otherwise you are SOL
Many companies are like that. What happens when your outlets for complaints are blocked as well? What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?
> What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?
Huh? Why would you expect any of those entities to oblige such a request? Other than perhaps some Reddit mods, depending on the subreddit.
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just rationalizing in my head that I only hear one side of the story, that surely there were some good reasons they were banned. Google has a lot of users, and I only hear about those worst cases and so on. But no, get to the frontpage and poof, it's solved. It really sucks for all those startups who didn't have luck getting their post viral.
As someone who wrote a Deep Learning-based anomaly detection pipeline used in real world I doubt they know precisely what the issue was. It could have been a simple flagging slightly over whatever threshold they set to their system, maybe ticking off a tiny majority voting of their "suspicion" detectors. Not having humans involved, nor having clearly human-interpretable results will be always an issue at scale.
Or it could also be that people who code these algorithms are not quite skilled enough to develop them in the first place? "If it is too big to fail, it is probably too big to exist"
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many companies are like that. What happens when your outlets for complaints are blocked as well? What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?
> What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go? Huh? Why would you expect any of those entities to oblige such a request? Other than perhaps some Reddit mods, depending on the subreddit.
An automated DMCA system could be abused to stifle dissent.
Like JetBrains recent DMCA to shutdown the /r/piracy subreddit [0], not for all the probably illegal stuff, but for "Asking about JetBrains Licensing".
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/b2xslo/reddit_legal...
Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#169Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...
I moved all my deployments to google cloud. I've started to use it originally because BigQuery was light years ahead of any foreseeable competition (Athena didn't even exist). I've stayed for awesome firebase. gcp has great offerings.
I just started using BigQuery, and I have no idea how people tolerate it. Can't delete a column. Can't rename a column. Can't change a datatype of a column. If I added a wrong column, I have to recreate the whole table (via SELECT * EXCEPT).