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Comment by antoncohen | Hacker News Reader

Why is this Google's fault?

I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name.

Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (which is also a strange name given that there is no beach). It wasn't really Rincon Hill, it is the area below Rincon Hill and is at sea level.

The East Cut is part of the larger South of Market area, and some of it could be considered to be the southern part of the Financial District[1]. But the neighborhood has evolved into its own thing, and deserves its own name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_in_San_F...

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It's somewhat problematic when Google starts to become an arbitrator of real-world boundaries, as there is functionally no oversight or recourse for those affected. Google was not appointed by the residents, is not incentivized to avoid damaging changes, and is functionally impossible to hold responsible - they're an opaque monolith to anyone who tries to effect change or revert their decisions, and their black box-esque tendencies make it impossible to know the policies or algorithms that determine their actions, making it infeasible to work around or prevent behaviors with a negative impact.

While in this case the impacts are fairly minor (with the exception of the border incident mentioned), this article is emblematic of the greater problem with tech giants in the information era: They cannot be regulated, managed, or held responsible for their behaviors, and have gained - and continue to gain - nigh-unprecedented influence over a staggering number of aspects our daily lives, without being chosen to do so by the people affected.

From the article:

> The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district.

> Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources.

The residents voted to create a non-profit to improve the area, the board of the non-profit voted on the name and then asked google to add it to the map. What is the problem here? How is google in any way at fault?

I am strongly suspicious that the contingent of residents that hired the nonprofit is not all of the residents, and the people objecting to the new name decided to try and use google maps as their battle ground.

I am not trying to assign correctness, it might be that a developer came in and started the rebranding project to raise property values in objection to other residents, or the objectors might just be curmudgeons, the article doesn't provide enough information to tell.

The same old problem with Google's dominance. In this case, Google is just another publisher of such a map, there are others with equivalent services; that way it doesn't seem troubling.

You can't operate a map site and not be:

> become an arbitrator of real-world boundaries, as there is functionally no oversight or recourse for those affected.

If you do what people ask, you're being the arbiter.

If you do what people don't ask, you're still being the arbiter.

Yea, a fine example is the china-india border which google displays differently to residents of china, india and pakistan.

This is one of those edge cases I love to hate in software dev. It's nice to imagine everything has a real value out there somewhere, but some data points don't actually have a clear definition _anywhere_.

Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up' but fails to provide any evidence of that actually happening. Instead, all the other odd names they call out actually originated somewhere in the community, albeit perhaps from esoteric sources.

What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing this makes them no more the arbiter of it than a library is the arbiter of all knowledge.

Yes, another article from the Times complaining that they don't get to make up neighbourhood names anymore ("newspapers used to disseminate new names") but Google does.

Can you point me to the other articles where the NYT complains that they don't get to make up neighborhood names anymore but Google does?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/new-york-neighbor...

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/procro-sobro-fid...

What I'm noting in these articles is an absence of mentions of Google or newspapers.

> names 'just being made up'

Ultimately, is there any other possible source of names?

>Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up'

Unlike all those other placenames like "South of Market" which were decreed by god when he created San Fransisco :P

What they're really getting at is that it was made up by the wrong people. Like anything else that once happened organically among groups of people, you can now wrangle up an advertising budget and push it along.

My neighborhood has a "real" neighborhood name and a silly sub-neighborhood name that gets brought up once a year for a block party. If real estate developers thought the name was valuable, I bet it would mysteriously become a lot more popular.

That's more an issue of how US society is presently structured.

Money (spent) IS speech.

Want to speak more or louder? Spend more money.

True, community efforts to agree socially on something also matter, but it takes much more social capital than it does cash capital to affect such changes.

From the article:

> In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.

How are these the "wrong" people to be naming the neighborhood?

One of the cities I’m most familiar with (Cambridge) has a set of neighborhood names and boundaries that a lot of people would more or less agree with. But they’re by no means canonical and not all the boundaries are especially rigid.

Plus there are plenty of sub-neighborhood names that do get used but don’t really define any meaningful community or other enclave.

Some cities do seem to take a more active role in defining official neighborhoods but many don’t.

It's funny how the article simultaneously complains about using the "wrong" name for East Cut while also saying that the same area has three other names the locals know it by. It seems like no one agrees on the official name

Even if it wasn't Google they wouldn't be the first to influence the naming of neighbourhoods. Telephone companies used to have a similar authoritative role:

> Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/nyregion/amateur-mapmaker...

Most importantly the neighborhood names are spatially non-exclusive. So the first paragraph is already somewhat incorrect. SOUTH OF MARKET, SOUTH BEACH and RINCON HILL are all clickable labels, which assigned areas are at least partially overlapping with what is labelled THE EAST CUT.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+of+Market,+San+Franc...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+Beach,+San+Francisco...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rincon+Hill,+San+Francisco...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+East+Cut,+San+Francisc...

It is not the East Cut. It will never be the East Cut. That is Rincon, and the real-estate marketeers can bite me.

Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.

Rincon was almost certainly a real estate marketing name a hundred years ago.

No, it is named for Rincon Point, which took its name from Rincón, the Spanish word for 'corner'.

Bored cynicism kinda requires the underlying reality support one's cynicism.

But that name certainly wasn't the name the natives gave it before the Spanish expedition came around. Names change over time. Sometimes because of rebranding, sometimes because of hostile takeover of foreign land.

Call it what you want, but I don't see the point of being concerned over the change.

Why did Constantinople get the works?

Did you think of the mailman?

I get postal mail for someone living a few blocks away because they're technically in another suburb with a slightly worse reputation, and their real estate agent sold them on the idea they were in my suburb instead.

The post office, however, isn't paying attention to marketing or non-profit interest groups, it's paying attention to council zoning and regulation.

So every so often, I get mail addressed to a street name similar to mine, but in the next suburb over.

Names change over time, but when there's a central registry of names with a democratically founded process for managing those names, and the names are a public utility for locating things, it's best we don't just shit all over it and make up whatever we like because it suits us at the time.

Names are kind of a consensus thing - that place is(will be) called East Cut if and only if a sufficiently large part of the people who talk about the area call it East Cut.

Conversely, if most people do start calling it East Cut, you will be obligated to do the same if you want people to understand what you mean, since if you'll say "Rincon" they'll (mis)understand it as an area that explicitly excludes territory which they now call otherwise.

I take it you've never asked for directions in a small town? Of course as far as that reasoning takes you, you're correct. I'm pointing out that there is _not_ consensus.

I also refer to the Emperor Norton Memorial Bridge, which is my own small contribution to building consensus on naming a different geographic feature.

I’ve found exactly zero people who recognize the name “Rincon Hill,” including Bay Area natives. I get stuck describing it as “east of SOMA, south of the Financial District, kinda near the Ferry Building and Salesforce Tower” before people recognize what I’m talking about. So I don’t mind the initiative to give it a single crisp name.

Isn't the East Cut referring the old name for the area (Second Street Cut) when it was the location of all the mansions before the cable cars enabled them to move to Russian Hill?

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