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

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

#61

Post by raxxorraxor »

cs137 wrote: post #42
aeternum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has defamation laws that you might be able to leverage. This seems to only be very tangentially related to google, what about other search engines or the websites that host the content?

Damages for defamation are hard to prove. If someone with a million followers says on Twitter, "I don't like Bob", then Bob is never going to get hired anywhere, but there's no legal case. Indeed, the person voicing the opinion didn't break any laws or do anything wrong--the problem, rather, is with employers who refuse to hire anyone remotely controversial (and who, in doing so, implement "cancel culture", although…

Employers should ban those providing them with this info. It is these people that are and should be controversial. If your company is connected to them and uses their services, it should be made public. Behavior will change yesterday. Imagine you are connected to people cancelling other on internet rumors you cannot verify. You can search for a new country immediately and especially the professional world would not want to associate with you. Applying the same rules would do quite a bit although companies above a certain size only care for certain types of reputational costs.

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

#63

Post by mdrzn »

Thin_icE wrote: post #12

Google offers support to paying customers https://one.google.com/about/support

Not even "real" support, I once subscribed to One to have 1tb of space in Google Photos, couldn't invite family members, after going back and forth with the support for 2 weeks they couldn't find the issue and just refunded me my subscription.

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

#64

Post by Gibbon1 »

romanhn wrote: post #38
gist wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would…

> Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support.

Quibble they aren't offering free 'products' they are offering free services. Offering free products is a anti-trust violation commonly referred to as dumping. Proper thing to do is extend antitrust to services.

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

#65

Post by CogitoCogito »

logicalmonster wrote: post #50
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Providing support should be required by law. I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

> You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

Maybe that's worth it?

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

#66

Post by sfe22 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #65
logicalmonster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Providing support should be required by law. I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

> You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward. Maybe that's worth it?

Not for me, but got some good news for you. If you just use services that meet your needs (offer customer service to your standard), you are already set. Don’t try to use the monopoly that is supposed to work for all of us against me and many others. That makes one a tyrant.

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

#67

Post by cryptos »

2143 wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

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

#68

Post by magicalhippo »

gumby wrote: post #30
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you list a couple? I’m interested in moving my email, document storage, and document manipulation (word and sheet stuff) to one nice solution somewhere else.

For example microsoft will give you mail and shared docs, for example. Use your own domain. I’ve used it, it’s ok, certainly no worse than google and you get a much better text editor, spreadsheet, and actual Powerpoint if you need that. I think you can get sso across github, linkedin, teams instead of zoom, etc too, though I haven’t tried. If you use Apple you can use icloud/iwork which has shared editing, etc, but…

> Use your own domain.

This requires one to use GoDaddy as the registrar[1], which is a hard pass for me.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

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

#69

Post by KptMarchewa »

logicalmonster wrote: post #50
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Providing support should be required by law. I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

Maybe not "anything they put online" but "anything they put online and require account, reserving an option to terminate it without any human appeal path".

I don't need support for Google Search, but would definitely need it for Gmail.

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

#70

Post by naturalauction »

For those saying just pay them - I was serving ads with google admob and they just put a block on my account out of the blue. We went from pulling in $3k a day in revenue to 0. There was no support contact, no one to talk to.

Luckily someone at Google was able to get our account reviewed by a human - but many businesses wouldn't have that option.

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