Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.
At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the problem worse.
It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
Yeah, exactly. I pointed out to them that I might be an attacker and my purchase of the domain didn't prove that I was who I said I was. They accepted that I was the person paying the bills, but said they couldn't do anything unless I was also the owner of the domain.
I figure that they either never thought through this process, or it was deliberately designed to make the cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart people, I think the latter.
So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their stuff.
A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?
Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run.
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
Microsoft (used to?) pick up the phone if you called about an issue with Windows. If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
> If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license
That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
> Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.
But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.
You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
Thankfully these companies are big enough that the supply of SVPs and VPs is near endless. In fact, with DHL my biggest effort was wading through the list to find the people I thought most likely to reply. Of three messages I wrote, two replied and offered to help.
I worked at large bank where being able to make people wait until end of day or end of week for a reply was a kind of status symbol. My wife needed to do physical therapy after a car accident and rather then letting her take an hour to do that her boss decided to fire her, all the paperwork was sent to London for an managing director to sign. My wife went across the street to a doctor’s office, got him to sign a medical leave application, and walked it to HR office. By the time the MD saw her termination paperwork she was three days into a federally protected medical leave and continued to receive most of her salary for almost a year. She could have worked a full day every day of that time if the bank had made the slightest accommodation, instead they ended up paying for a year of leave. :)
In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
With some planning we could have accommodated the 120K rps rate and more, but just out of the blue it caused a lot of issues, the database shards for historic information tended to be configured for infrequent access to large amounts of historic data, their access completely thrashed our caches, etc. We did want Google to index us, if there had been an open dialog we could have created a separate path for their traffic that bypassed the cache and we could have brought additional database servers into production to handle the increased load, we even had a real time events feed that updated whenever content was created or updated that we would have given Google free access to that so they could just crawl the changes instead of having to scan the site for updates, but since they would not talk to anyone none of that happened.
I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests) or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it's not like they have choice really: the server is refusing to provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.
Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:
> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent?
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
Even for a free account, there is a contract in place between you and Twitter, which Twitter can't unilaterally terminate without reason, especially if the "code of conduct" collides with the right of free speech (https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-aktuell/meinungsf...)
Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data in exchange for the account.
I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.
A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and turned into a spambot.
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
What is being discussed here is not "I lost the password", is "Google disabled my account because they have reasons". In the latter case, you could have the right password and the account would still not work.
> surely I am protected from this, right?
Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it.
> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
Many high-profile departures from Google seem to involve an incident like this, in my experience. When I was there most of the high-profile departures I saw were related to internal strife (in some cases with widely shared complaint posts on internal G+ or internal gdocs), management misconduct, or things like the company's health insurer refusing to cover surgeries. Then occasionally you have the departures where notorious abusers or sex pests are sent off with a severance package, like ("allegedly") Andy Rubin's $90m farewell gift.
In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Yeah I wonder if there would be a tier of Google One that comes with "we won't ban your account". Assuming users/customers are operating in good faith, they cannot get banned even if an automated check flags them.
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
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.
I've had to deal with googles support for Google Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace (or whatever they call it now) and in many cases it's not much better than no support. Often the people you could get on the phone had no overlap with the people that could help you and even when they could help you they had no sense of urgency and some pretty critical issues could take weeks to get a proper answer.
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 frustrating, not much different from talking with GPT3). Many if not most enterprise software vendors have SINO offerings, Microsoft and VMware are just two I experienced personally that provide you with certain 24/7 telephone support lines which will not do anything but waste time until the next morning (if you're lucky) where you might be able to get an escalation. So if you're buying ESXi hoping that VMware might help you fix a pink screen at 2 in the morning, you are mistaken. But management will be able to tell everybody "yes, we have a 30 minute SLA on this with the vendor". Sure.
Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.
I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Sorry, how does paying for Google Workspace prevent you from getting your account locked and not being able to do something about it? I do believe that to login to the admin back-end and to contact support in the first place, you need to log in with your Google account.
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy.
I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
And also they have programmable filters (Sieve) and auto-expiry settings for folders (delete mails in this folder after N days unless also in another folder).
There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social media; support for multiple domains (10+) and dozens of aliases per user which you can easily switch between; 30 sec undo after sending an email; send later function; snappy UI that's not from the 90s.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
I think Fastmail ticks all your boxes except the split tab for messages and ads. Not sure about pricing. They’re cheap enough for my use case.
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient and clean.
Sounds like I'll have to check out Fastmail :-) However, please bear in mind that if you've got to switch over a whole organisation, you'll have to keep UI friction to a minimum. Users who have used Gmail for almost a decade (our Outlook, for that matter) will be extremely hesitant to be dragged over on to a new service. I guess, a fully featured mail server doing all the work in the background while offering you a front and that looks like OWA, Gmail or $UI would be ideal (pipe-dream, I know, but wouldn't it be great?).
Still, I get what you're saying and I'll look into it.
Do you have any experience with Fastmail for business? Can it be branded and used with different domains and aliases without paying through the nose?
I think Office 365 / Exchange / Outlook has all of that for around 2x the cost. Possibly missing automatic email categorisation, but it does sort into 'focussed' and 'general' buckets.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
If you're going to switch email providers to something like Fastmail, be smart about it and register a custom domain, and pay a little extra to hook it up to your new account (unless Fastmail lets you do it for free).
Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.
I recommend everyone does this; not just if you switch to fastmail. Having your email identity tied to a particular service provider is a terrible idea. Email will probably be with us until we die; and chances are very high you won't want that particular email service provider for 60 consecutive years.
I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case any more.
A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn't consider "famous person" being the shocking part of this. The shocking part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is a business partner of Google's.
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 happen.
Unfortunately this opens the door to unscrupulous devs publishing their own knock-off versions - or even repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work (resource/asset swaps, etc).
My impression from reports I've read about all the major App Stores is that they won't put much effort into processing violation notifications or takedown requests when the publisher or developer filing the complaint doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) - so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money they've made provided they've transferred it out of their payment account, I think?
> repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work
Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are already lots of actual Terraria clones by different names.
Another way of putting it: if a 3rd party published a Mario game on Playstation, do you think Nintendo would hold back just because they are not also there?
Amazon deals in counterfeit goods all the time and there's still been no substantial changes to how they deal with it either.
If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll likely gladly make a settlement with you that's considerably greater than the actual damages because they value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable Wall St. Journal headlines...
The Stadia version is the one cancelled. I doubt Google doesn't have a tougher screening process for games for Stadia, since they are the ones running the game. It is highly improbable that a knockoff game will land on it.
Yep. Also the approval process on Stadia is very complex and you need to set up so.much.stuff. It's not like their playstore where you can release almost anything. Even if you have an already fully working game on Stadia, just the process of meeting all technical requirements and setting up the pages on the backend and all the hooks can take months. It's far too much effort for something that wouldn't even go through the submission process, or if it did it would be removed immediately.
Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.
That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to the same Google account, will he still get money from apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from the play store if he cannot even log in?
The Play Store Terraria is a different publisher. It's likely not his decision to make - and he shouldn't care considering that makes dealing with Google on that front is not his problem.
Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of units sold, double the price).
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support *any of your platforms* moving forward.
Emphasis mine.
But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly doubt they will revert any existing support.
But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the Apple App Store?
Play Store isn't struggling for content. Removing terraria from it has zero impact on Google's bottom line. Stadia on the other hand very much is - removal(or cancellation) of an extremely popular indie game from the platform just accelerates its inevitable demise, something that will very much hit google's bottom line.
Even if they haven't said it out loud, Google has already decided to cancel Stadia, so unfortunately cancelling a game for it will have zero impact on Google.
Stadia hasn't gotten a dollar from me, and won't. I absolutely think it'll be gone by then, but that's not the same thing as "has already decided to cancel".
> "If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money."
and
> "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
mean entirely different things. Of course people expect Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they've already decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant lie. Don't spread fake news.
No, the fake news is Google having any plans to make anything out of Stadia. They don't just decide the night before to shut a project down. Google has a long history of leaving projects to fallow for months to years before finally admitting to everyone that they hadn't been putting resources in and are finally shutting the project down. It's insidious because, if you don't know the playbook, you might think you can count on the service to stick around. Look at everything VR they did: some great products that sat around for a full year before Google finally admitted they weren't doing anything more with it. I fully expect Google has plans already to shut down Stadia, but haven't told anyone yet because... I don't know why. Why do they ever just let this shit go on forever? Sims kind of face-saving or senior-engineer-retention program.
I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
> Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"?
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
I think the only way it makes sense is if you can't afford the upgrade to a new console or PC, and even then the issue is that my experience with Stadia's stability and lag make it not appropriate to play response-timing sensitive games.
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
Your mileage may very depending on a variety of factors. I got a free Stadia kit (controller + Chromecast Ultra) for being a YouTube Premium/Music subscriber, and decided I'd give a good and honest attempt at playing through a full game on Stadia.
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
> If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
Valve does treat game developers poorly, and it can’t be fixed because their no-internal-structure setup means nobody can actually change anything at the company. They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal. Kind of a problem when the newer younger people into anime aesthetic are also the ones making all the LGBT content.
As an indie dev I disagree very heavily with this. Games like Hentai Nazi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183970/Hentai_Nazi/) are allowed to be on the store because they're generally very permissive, as long as you're following the laws that they have to follow because they're in America. If you're making games with sexual content and characters of questionable age (as many of these banned anime games do), then it's reasonable that some of them will get banned, since Valve has to obey the law.
Yes, those are ironically more likely to make it through because it makes it look like they’re following through on their promise to not moderate any store content. It’s all luck though, we don’t know what never made it in.
Actual foreign developers who don’t speak English don’t have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN devs and can’t fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when it wasn’t.
(Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some really out there actual sexual content because they’re weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for Steam/Nintendo platform so
Do you have evidence of this still happening? I know games getting rejected for no real reason was somewhat common back around the Greenlight era, but I haven't heard anything like that since they moved to the minimum moderation system and started allowing porn games.
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
> Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
I'm including their own employees under game developers. There's various stories about people having to leave after trying and failing to get the company to actually make a game or ship any products lately.
> They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below).
Dunno if the games contain that or not, all I can tell you is they don't have illegal content in the US. They certainly can ban whatever they want. The problem is they say they don't moderate the store, and they don't negotiate the not-moderation, so now you can't find out how to avoid it.
The developers are not criminals or trying to gross you out, but they do have weird fetishes and I think might be physically incapable of making something Westerners would be fine with without a lot of handholding. I mean, Jun Maeda seems to think he's doing a good job at writing women, but they all come out acting like they have an IQ of 10.
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.
His post implies he's dropping support for all Google platforms, presumably including Android, where Terraria is consistently one of the top selling games. That seems like a much more difficult decision.
Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".
Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.
I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed people might get better support. The expected reply time for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes. Compare that to phone or email customer support on many platforms.
That's no longer the case. In my experience, most companies have stopped responding to complaints on Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to DM them and then sends you a holding message.
It's no different than pre-internet. Complaining publically has been around since TV, it's a staple of local news to have "exposes" on bad local businesses to shame them when they won't do right privately. Before that it was radio. Before that it was newspaper. Before that, it was just gossip.
Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia.
Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
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-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
Indeed - and they have made a little headway here...
* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.
* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.
* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
> But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify. Google have multiple billion accounts (Chrome has 2B users). I use "utterly trivial" here because "XYZ is likely" type events that might occur at xxx,xxx users translate to "sheer overwhelming force of statistics" when you get to x,xxx,xxx,xxx users - if you have 100,000 users and just 10 people successfully figure out how something works internally, scaling that to 1,000,000,000 users increases that pool of 10 people itself to 100,000. And a pool of 100,000 proactive and interested people is more than enough to create several thousand cottage industries, lots of competition, then one or two emerge at the top and become an exponential force, etc etc etc.
> Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it just notes the reason for the ban in the database, and then tells the user why the ban happened?
> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify
There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.
Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in any form of communication with a business partner whose services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.
Communication is one thing, but not having any appeals process other than hoping a social media post goes viral enough for Google to take action is ridiculous.
Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
Doesn't seem an issue at all for almost every other company in the world.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
> * 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.)
I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd.
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
> If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
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 they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
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
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the description.
These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.
Worse than that, these systems are perfect for decision laundering. You can make the system do arbitrary judgements, and blame negative consequences on "bias in the training data" or such.
They've applied ML to discern status updates from emails. They've applied ML to recognize speech fairly accurately... This kind of behavior seems far too unsophisticated for that. In the Twitter thread some people are suggesting it's something to do with politics. If that's so, then it likely means hands-on-keyboard-finger-on-scales thing a human would cause.
There's virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I can't see him being on it.
Thanks; I've initiated that process on your advice. Is the data in a reasonable format and not just something you can re-import into a replacement google account?
It's possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is worrying.
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem:
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
> The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before.
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
> And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know, but only remembered which playlist it would have been in. I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing it is.
Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.
The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.
Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.
...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort of standardized lookup though to support such a system.
SPF is trivial to set up for people who already have their own domain; it's literally 1 DNS TXT record.
I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).
No. Terms and conditions do not apply. Anyone can, at any time, for any reason. Email domains are a historic accident; let's semantically decouple them from the domain system. The tech companies can figure out how to implement that.
The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)
It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.
Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.
Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.
Using an AI to automate banning is not an excuse for not being able to quickly redress the problem for a multi-billion dollar company such as Google.
In fact, it should probably be illegal for companies to automatically ban any of their users/customers with AI/algorithms without being able to respond to said complaints within 24h.
Bottom line is that Google should have better customer support, because it's not like they can't afford it.
The only reason they don't have good support is because they are a monopoly and monopolies don't care about the repercussions to any individual customer unless something is illegal.
Their size insulates them from competition, which means less accountability.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
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 is significantly harder to game though - companies succesfully offer behavioral monitoring for DLP products with far less data than the payment data Google has access to. Years of payments with a certain payment type? That's a pattern.
Renting movies at certain time in the week? That's another...
The truth of the matter is, somebody has to actually care to do this. From accounts of googlers I've read, that's not what the culture of Google is likely to result in though.
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.
Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it's a payer-customer's account, issues should be sent to a human. Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google contact(s) should be notified & included in the process.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach.
Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day).
An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being
It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious grudge.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
Couldn't care less about twitter but if you use google for email/storage/docs etc then it's a real issue.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this argument, like these companies aren't sitting on piles of cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)
You've shown that it's possible for human moderation to be awful, you haven't shown that it's impossible for human moderation to work well. It is possible. HackerNews is a fine example.
Paid moderators can have their work supervised (a 'meta-moderation system') akin to Slashdot.
These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
> Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
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.
Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
I just gave up the last time my google account died. There's really little value in it at this point if you're not publishing apps and I would never build a business on one of their platforms for this reason anyway.
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
They could start with having support for all the accounts that make significant amounts of money for them. If an account makes Google >$100k a year then isn't it worth it to have support personnel that will handle the 2 tickets the account might have in a year? And the rest of the time they can focus on other tickets.
> This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
My best guesses:
1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so it's a losing investment.
2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the bulk of what the humans have to deal with.
3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
> They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
This is the first time I hear someone making this claim. Is there prior evidence of this being a regular occurrence with outsourced customer support operations?
1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of acceptability in some countries where trickling money from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local society.
2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize the opportunity they have.
We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
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.
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.
The more fundamental issue here is a lack of trust. Google has lost it due to years of this stuff, and it will take a lot more than “we actually do have support on GCP” to rebuild it.
> 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.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
> We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.
I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP customer.
Support was hit and miss:
- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Why on earth would anyone want to rely on GCP if Google's executives have constantly been demonstrating that they do not give a shit?
Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.
Well because otherwise they would never be able to compete with AWS. I hate Amazon, but AWS has the best customer support of any product I've ever used.
It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.
This is a bizarrely biased view. There are no shortage of nightmare testimonials out there for Amazon customer service, unfairly banned accounts, and all of that.
Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.
That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?
Despite the picture you're trying to point, generally my perception is that Amazon (both AWS and the retail) is known for the quality of its support, Google is known for having awful support.
I'm certain GCP has separate support, otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete with AWS.
It’s a matter of trust and credibility. Google has lost it for engineers, Amazon hasn’t. Trying to come up with arguments against an emotional position is pointless.
This is exactly my point. Trust and distrust aren’t logical positions, they’re opinions based on emotions. You can’t come up with a slide deck to explain why you should trust Google any more than you could use numbers to convince your spouse to trust you.
Fundamentally, Google has spent its credibility with this crowd, and that’s not something that can be reasoned against. What Google needs to do is put the effort in to re-earn trust, which it clearly is not doing.
Personal experience has been the absolute opposite, and so has been what I've read. Please check hn history for no of times AWS customer service was said to be bad vs google
What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?
The answer is that you don't have it entirely dependent on your account. You have a business account with an account manager, and while any one dev who's linked to your account may get banned, your account shouldn't, or at the very least your account manager would be able to re-instate it because they know the relationship.
Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
The letter said that my account was banned because of violation of their terms. no further details. no options for the solution of the problem.
until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Most companies doesn't have leadership, they have administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to ensure the company doesn't change course.
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of people banned from (some) Google's services and unable to get any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((
It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.
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.
For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months about their lack of moderation [0]
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly.
They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama.
Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
At least the Parler incident seems foreseeable, if you are hosting content that could bring down the hammer onto the giant corporations that you use to host the content, these corporations will cut you loose to protect themselves. Parler leadership must have know they were in hot water as soon as the amateur coup happened.
The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite this same story happening time and time again, google still doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
Chances are they simply can’t get their internal teams/systems in line to enable partial bans, and nobody with the political clout to get it done cares.
This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it would avoid Google's self-dug grave from getting deeper.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
This is the exact opposite of what Google/Apple want to do. Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell loud enough. This is their tiering system.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
>Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent organisation, which makes its power evil
The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
> The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights?
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it's an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number of domains to your account without extra costs.
Many/most people don't see the government as a threat. And since you own your own domain you can migrate to another email provider any time you want if you experience they're doing fishy things.
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
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 expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
It's supposedly about respecting the opportunity Googlers have to work at a big company with resources to change the industry. Like, I get it, but tone deaf...
Not quite. It's about respecting the opportunity of Google to make money.
Nobody cares about "changing the industry" if it doesn't "move the needle". And in the end, the needle is neither the number of users, nor the positive impact of the project.
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
The majority of the code is talking about personal values (working backwards up the list, I'm counting independence, class, worldly knowledge, being a stand-up guy, being observational, honourable, amenable, strategic, rational). The parts that deal with being part of a group are not that unusual either - everyone is part of a group and that isn't a problem. Employers all want to be a little like a family.
If you want to argue that Google is promoting these values amongst it's employees that is fine; but that is a great idea on Google's part. It isn't strengthening your argument.
The Mafia /g has teams that all do the same thing. Google has teams doing different things: here, in one corner, a team makes something benign or maybe even positive, over there, other "googlers" are doing suspect things, like putting together the [AI] surveillance infrastructure. They are all "googlers" but only some used to have TSCs. So "respect each other".
Now as far as "the user", well the joke is apparently on GP, as everybody and their dog knows that 'on the internet, if the product is free, you are the product and not the user!'. Even dogs on internet know this, but alas, HN has forgotten. So, "respect the user" means respect the folks who are paying us to track everybody and their dog on the internet.
Respect "the opportunity". Translation: This is a "Golden Time' for the few to lord it over the many! So the respect the user, and respect each other, and the rest should be grateful for having 'the permission' to use our platform.
> TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of conduct.
Towards other Mafia people.
Which is a key point. People who aren't in the Family have different opinions of people on the other side of the tommy gun barrel and its humane usage.
Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'. Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are our big brother.
A good slogan should say something. If the inverse of your slogan is invalid or the same as your slogan, then your (original) slogan is probably not saying anything.
If you aren't giving something else up, then you aren't saying anything. It's just platitudes.
"Do not be evil" is basically meaningless as a lot of evil is done with the intention of doing good. With that level of ambiguity, it is entirely down to individual interpretation.
> 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.
Except when a theme park ride malfunctions, maims and kills most of a family in a gruesome fashion. Of course then you cannot sue because you've agreed/signed an arbitration clause in the terms of service.
It was a funny cute thing when they came up with it cause they were a landmark company built on the web, breaking new grounds in terms of how businesses will be run in the future, sticking it to the establishment, etc etc etc
Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at that in the most basic ways and they're not held accountable for it because "they're a private company, they can do what they want!"
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.
I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
The sysadmins at these companies must be laid off right now. Same with Windows admins using .local for their AD domain name, now you shot yourself in the foot never being able to sign some services with globally trusted certificates.
This doesn't mean you've ever been able to get signed certificates for nonexistent TLDs. If a TLD were to stop existing i would excuse the administrators who set up their systems under that domain, but if you're setting anything up that isn't under an available TLD you're doing it wrong.
.io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be bullshit, since those islands have no permanent inhabitants).
That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such across much of what you do online, but whether that'll impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate with and how they treat spam.
> .io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be bullshit, since those islands have no permanent inhabitants).
That's not strictly true - British Indian Ocean Territory has permanent inhabitants, just not any native ones (never had had them, really - it was uninhabited until 1793). US military Diego Garcia base is there...
It's bullshit for other reasons, and expulsion of Chagossians to build the base is a tragedy - but not due it being empty territory (it's not).
Well they did until the British exiled them all to build a US naval base on Diego Garcia. And they would very much like to return home. The UK courts have ruled in favour of the Chagossians, but they are consistently ignored by the UK and US governments.
> It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
Price changes are a concern indeed. But I think if you get something form your country, or a .org, it should be mostly fine.
I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now. Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I believe), I've see no price hike over time.
That part is probably not a good bet, as life can go in unexpected directions.
Some country providers (eg .eu) only provide service to their citizens, so if you move country or otherwise become "not a citizen" they'll terminate your domain. As happened recently to the UK holders of .eu domains. :/
Probably better to pick a .net/.com/.org domain, for (hopefully) longer term stability.
.eu is not a country. .co.uk holders were unaffected by Brexit. meanwhile .org had price caps removed and was nearly sold off to private capital on the promise of "we promise that for the first decade we will only raise prices by 10%/yr". I'm not so sure that a legacy TLD is a better bet than a ccTLD with a similar record of stability when we get into these long term long tail events.
Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have worked out so well had you been making this decision in Ukraine a decade ago
.eu is classified as a ccTLD [0], not gTLD by IANA, so for the purpose of this discussion it is one - and the registrar for it (EURid) requires ciitzenship of one of the member states to hold .eu domain. EU citizens living the UK can have .eu names, but no-longer-EU-citizens of UK do not.
Things like .rocks, .guru, .club, and all those other recent gold-rush gTLDs have been a disaster from the spam standpoint*. It doesn't help that some registrars are complicit via allowing massive bulk name purchases, so I see zillions of somebody@{random-word-1}{random-word-2}.goldrush addresses, all with valid DKIM/DMARC.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
> 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".
If you want to get your own domain to take control of your identity, do NOT under any circumstances register it through a hosting package. Ideally keep it separate from everything, including your email provider.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
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. ;)
OVH’s UI is awesome for the domain settings compared to all the providers I’ve seen (1and1, GoDaddy, Aws, DigitalOcean). Even at DO what has a fantastic UI, the settings of a domain are complicated.
Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
I actually have my @gmail.com address redirect to Fastmail, I have a filter on the Fastmail inbox that shows me mail sent to the gmail address.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10 USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to register each email domain, usually big discounts if you purchase for many years at once)
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.
I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.
It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Not if your account gets suspended in this way - there are some testimonies from people that said it locks you out of support and you get stonewalled too.
> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
Unfortunatly icloud does not work well unless you are all in on their ecosystem.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be happier.
I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's services a few times a year.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way. Gmail is not the problem as far as I'm concerned. Nor Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like there is a substitute.
As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff.
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin.
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just consider the amount of work that can get vaporised.
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
There's that, but also the fact that to these people games are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing with professionals and business clients that use their software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that Twitter thread.
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
It is somewhat ironic that "work time", for which one gets paid, typically ends up perceived by individuals as "less valuable" than free time. It's one of many ways in which our societies are effectively broken.
I was pretty disappointed by the EU’s big tech bill not addressing this.
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem.
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
> That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers.
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.
> You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
Surely the creator of a video game that's sold tens of millions of copies, who also has an on-going business relationship with your company passes the bar?
My point is that literally millions of people could be considered "high profile". Does (the recently deceased) Leon Spinks pass the bar? I could go on naming semi-famous people indefinitely, they all ought to pass this bar.
I agree that it's a trickier line to draw than I initially considered. However, there are only ~200 developers building games for Google Stadia. If Google cannot guarantee it won't cut any of them off at a moment's notice, with — seemingly — no right to appeal, then I think that bodes very badly for the ongoing viability of Stadia.
Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadIt is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
What happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone else or claimed by Sedo, etc?
I figure that they either never thought through this process, or it was deliberately designed to make the cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart people, I think the latter.
So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their stuff.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
All these companies will continue the race to the bottom unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job creator to me!
For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.
But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
[1]: https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XW...
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-...
I look forward to this getting used against Google and everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or recourse.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
(Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.)
EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
> surely I am protected from this, right?
Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it.
> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
But when your account is suspended that doesn't really help you eh
For example, someone got banned from Ads for paying with Apple Credit Card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.
I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy. I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
You can.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.
I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case any more.
For storage, I’ve successfully reached human tech support at synology and backblaze.
> 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 happen.
Good example of standing up.
My impression from reports I've read about all the major App Stores is that they won't put much effort into processing violation notifications or takedown requests when the publisher or developer filing the complaint doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) - so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money they've made provided they've transferred it out of their payment account, I think?
Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are already lots of actual Terraria clones by different names.
They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll likely gladly make a settlement with you that's considerably greater than the actual damages because they value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable Wall St. Journal headlines...
Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.
But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
The games are published by an indie game studio.
Normally this is done over an separate, non personal, account. Sometimes even multiple non personal accounts for multiple products.
So RE-LOGIC's Google account should not have been affected.
Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of units sold, double the price).
Still there as of yet.
But maybe he means that he won’t be pushing any updates to Google Play?
Current Version 1.4.0.5.2.1
Updated December 8, 2020
Requires Android 4.4 and up
Time will tell I guess
Emphasis mine.
But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly doubt they will revert any existing support.
But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the Apple App Store?
I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see how this works out...
It's likely that the primary devs have little to no control of that port, including the ability (and possibly ip rights) to take it down.
and
> "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
mean entirely different things. Of course people expect Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they've already decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant lie. Don't spread fake news.
I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
the amount of people using Stadia that don't have access to a device that could play terraria is likely very small.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is this targeting?
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
Actual foreign developers who don’t speak English don’t have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN devs and can’t fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when it wasn’t.
(Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some really out there actual sexual content because they’re weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for Steam/Nintendo platform so
The difference is that now when they moderate, they call it something other than moderation and instantly permaban you and refuse to discuss it.
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
I'm including their own employees under game developers. There's various stories about people having to leave after trying and failing to get the company to actually make a game or ship any products lately.
> They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below).
Dunno if the games contain that or not, all I can tell you is they don't have illegal content in the US. They certainly can ban whatever they want. The problem is they say they don't moderate the store, and they don't negotiate the not-moderation, so now you can't find out how to avoid it.
The developers are not criminals or trying to gross you out, but they do have weird fetishes and I think might be physically incapable of making something Westerners would be fine with without a lot of handholding. I mean, Jun Maeda seems to think he's doing a good job at writing women, but they all come out acting like they have an IQ of 10.
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.
If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply asking you to DM and give you a hold.
Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia.
Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
* 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-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.
* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.
* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
Of course, there's some stuff you can disable that completely breaks how you'd expect e.g. Android integration to work with that account.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
I don't see why all the reasons above mean basic transparency can't happen.
> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify
There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
Google chooses this path, it’s not forced on them.
That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
There is no excuse.
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.)
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
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 they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
They've applied ML to discern status updates from emails. They've applied ML to recognize speech fairly accurately... This kind of behavior seems far too unsophisticated for that. In the Twitter thread some people are suggesting it's something to do with politics. If that's so, then it likely means hands-on-keyboard-finger-on-scales thing a human would cause.
If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is most definitely screwed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral whatever. We reap what we sow.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
YouTube feels like it's about to hit some wall though, content matching copyright take downs seem to be getting out of control.
Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.
...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).
The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)
It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.
Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.
In fact, it should probably be illegal for companies to automatically ban any of their users/customers with AI/algorithms without being able to respond to said complaints within 24h.
Bottom line is that Google should have better customer support, because it's not like they can't afford it.
The only reason they don't have good support is because they are a monopoly and monopolies don't care about the repercussions to any individual customer unless something is illegal.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
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.
Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).
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.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
The big ones just cannot care about all, even if they really wanted. They had to be both onmiscient and omnipotent.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
Sheer hubris?
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
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.
Paid moderators can have their work supervised (a 'meta-moderation system') akin to Slashdot.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
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.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
My best guesses:
1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so it's a losing investment.
2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the bulk of what the humans have to deal with.
3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
This is the first time I hear someone making this claim. Is there prior evidence of this being a regular occurrence with outsourced customer support operations?
1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of acceptability in some countries where trickling money from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local society.
2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize the opportunity they have.
I don't have any scientific evidence. https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.abs-cbn.com/amp/business/0... is one instance of Google having to switch vendors for fraud in a non-1st-world country.
this. this is why. bots, chat or otherwise, are not competent enough to replace humans.
Actually, sometime humans aren't that great at this either, if poorly paid/motivated/trusted.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
https://cloud.google.com/contact
It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.
Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.
30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions.
In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.
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.
That’s the bar.
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.
You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
I love Google Cloud for its technology, but their support needs improvement.
Would I start any new business on GVP? Never, now, because I would be scared that they just change something that breaks my app because they can.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Support was hit and miss:
- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.
Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.
That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?
I'm certain GCP has separate support, otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete with AWS.
Fundamentally, Google has spent its credibility with this crowd, and that’s not something that can be reasoned against. What Google needs to do is put the effort in to re-earn trust, which it clearly is not doing.
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
That seems to be what they want...
got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was never unblocked.
since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any of their products.
until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
"Google Support" was already a joke way back.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
[1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite this same story happening time and time again, google still doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.
A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you could justify suspending that account.
If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?
Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
In fact, you can pay for your Google account with Google One, and I do, but it may or may not stop The Machine from accidentally banning my account.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
You can't please everyone; here is how I would frame it.
Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise Support.
It's absurd that they aren't already doing something like this.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
It means I was employing the common rhetorical device of exaggeration.
Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high enough that the ban will make the news?
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[1]: https://mailcow.email/
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
* 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 expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
[1]https://about.google/community-guidelines/
The rest is literally copy-pasted, Ctrl+F is your friend.
Honestly, this reads like a Rule of Acquisition. I think Google may be run by Ferengi at this point.
Nobody cares about "changing the industry" if it doesn't "move the needle". And in the end, the needle is neither the number of users, nor the positive impact of the project.
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
The Mafia Code isn't bad because it has bad stuff.
The Mafia Code is bad because it doesn't prohibit awful stuff.
The Mafia Code says nothing about being not evil, or, for that matter, not killing your enemies, not extorting non-mafia people, and so on.
It's all about being loyal to, and protecting the interests of the Family.
Which is what Google aims to be - one big family, which will take care of all your needs, as long as you follow the code.
If you want to argue that Google is promoting these values amongst it's employees that is fine; but that is a great idea on Google's part. It isn't strengthening your argument.
Now as far as "the user", well the joke is apparently on GP, as everybody and their dog knows that 'on the internet, if the product is free, you are the product and not the user!'. Even dogs on internet know this, but alas, HN has forgotten. So, "respect the user" means respect the folks who are paying us to track everybody and their dog on the internet.
Respect "the opportunity". Translation: This is a "Golden Time' for the few to lord it over the many! So the respect the user, and respect each other, and the rest should be grateful for having 'the permission' to use our platform.
Hope this helps.
Towards other Mafia people.
Which is a key point. People who aren't in the Family have different opinions of people on the other side of the tommy gun barrel and its humane usage.
Also no programmer had anything to say how bad it is. In a software company...
Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according to this criterion.
Citation needed. This seems like an arbitrary criterion to me.
"Do not be evil" was a good slogan.
If you aren't giving something else up, then you aren't saying anything. It's just platitudes.
"Do not be evil" is basically meaningless as a lot of evil is done with the intention of doing good. With that level of ambiguity, it is entirely down to individual interpretation.
But most of all, the user is still the product.
Unless by user they mean "the advertiser".
From the perspective of an AI moderation system, all you have to do to be perfectly internally consistent is to ban all accounts that raise any flags.
Friend Computer sees no Conflict if one is no longer a Citizen, because being in Conflict with the Computer is Treason.
Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at that in the most basic ways and they're not held accountable for it because "they're a private company, they can do what they want!"
For example, Google got a lot of flack for literally tracking its users' every move whether or not they consent to do so[1].
Is it "respectful"? Is that "the right thing"? You can justify everything by the value that Google provides.
But it's, you know... kind of evil.
Sadly, this not something one could refer to anymore in a meeting discussing this issue.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
[1] http://www.iki.fi/
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171113150544/https://getstream...
[1] https://plan.io/blog/moving-from-planio-to-planiocom/
[2] http://www.thedarksideof.io
Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such across much of what you do online, but whether that'll impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate with and how they treat spam.
That's not strictly true - British Indian Ocean Territory has permanent inhabitants, just not any native ones (never had had them, really - it was uninhabited until 1793). US military Diego Garcia base is there...
It's bullshit for other reasons, and expulsion of Chagossians to build the base is a tragedy - but not due it being empty territory (it's not).
There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now. Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I believe), I've see no price hike over time.
That part is probably not a good bet, as life can go in unexpected directions.
Some country providers (eg .eu) only provide service to their citizens, so if you move country or otherwise become "not a citizen" they'll terminate your domain. As happened recently to the UK holders of .eu domains. :/
Probably better to pick a .net/.com/.org domain, for (hopefully) longer term stability.
Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have worked out so well had you been making this decision in Ukraine a decade ago
Very much agreed on .org.
[0] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/eu.html [1] https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
Ahhh, hadn't realised that. Though I'd suspect .com and .net would be in the same position as .org in that respect.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
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".
If you buy a domain through Google, you should still be able to transfer it to another registrar.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite, Exchange Online, roll your own, …
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. ;)
Actually, I've been thinking about doing the same thing.
But i don't know much about emails.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.
So at least I could redirect my accounts to a new address if worst happens.
I’ve been trying to switch off gmail for a while but spam filtering is really hard for me.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
...
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
They fail in stupid ways (like this) and then cancel Stadia and then celebrate their "failure culture".
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
I think this is just a case of very vocal minority.
Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
I wager 18 months.
As if you could create a big impact game from (or near) scratch in a year xD
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.