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

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

#411

Post by yut43 »

londons_explore wrote: post #183
arnaudsm wrote: post #4

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…

> * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)

If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.

Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)

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

#412

Post by delecti »

mabbo wrote: post #398

Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product. Google does not care about non-paying customers individually . They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers,…

He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.

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

#413

Post by toyg »

RivieraKid wrote: post #201

Abandoning Google services will not work because only a negligible number of people will actually do it. Here's what may actually work: - Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same. - Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this…

> Abandoning Google services will not work

That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.

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

#414

Post by metalliqaz »

mabbo wrote: post #398

Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product. Google does not care about non-paying customers individually . They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers,…

This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.

One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.

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

#415

Post by harpiaharpyja »

p410n3 wrote: 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…

Regardless of what's happening internally, I've come to the realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it is.

Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long run.

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

#416

Post by kevingadd »

thetanil wrote: post #302
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing. > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happe…

I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?

Many smaller devs have pivoted to leverage alternative platforms like Itch, Epic Games Store, Game Pass, etc alongside Steam for monetization, and some have ditched Steam entirely based on complaints with Valve's developer relations and pricing. Valve seems unlikely to ever make any concessions to win back the hearts of smaller developers, but they did panic once Epic Games Store and other storefronts started capturing exclusives for large titles by offering big studios a reduced cut (20-25% in some cases) to keep them around.

Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market share when it has neither.

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

#417

Post by kevincox »

HenryBemis wrote: post #203
WA wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn't added and the whole model is bullshit. One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products. Another would be: Active time since signup. I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money spend > 200" might to the trick though.

This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card numbers and/or payments using Apple/Google pre-paid cards out there, so it's not difficult to automatically build accounts with this kind of 'reputation'. Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).

It can be gamed. But if the average value of a fake account is $100 and you set the threshold to be $200 it is no longer profitable.

Of course this still isn't a perfect metric. But it seems that banning people with accounts that have spend thousands of dollars and been active for many years should probably be avoided and this will significantly help that.

I mean if the account has spent >$50 you can probably afford a human review at the very least.

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

#418

Post by toyg »

42droids wrote: post #328
Lutzb wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are also on GSuite (Workspace now?). I am currently considering moving everything to Office 365. However I am not sure about the photos part.

Honestly, Office 365 sounds good, but we are a Linux & Mac only business. Can't imagine using MS products... Or will that not matter at all? :)

MS software for the mac is pretty decent - Excel alone is likely worth it to any org. Linux users can access the web versions, which are now pretty powerful. And if you are a Slack user you can move to Teams (which is now fairly good) and drop that subscription.

I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together on "office in the web age".

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

#419

Post by koheripbal »

amelius wrote: post #318
p410n3 wrote: 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.

You think humans are better at spotting abuse? Mods on Reddit demonstrate that such systems can be worse.

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

#420

Post by ConceptJunkie »

p410n3 wrote: 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…

Google is above needing PR. Or at least they seem to think so.
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