Hacker News Reader

Comment by techntoke | Hacker News Reader

I had been a Google fan for a long time but they lost my business recently because despite paying over $30/mo for G Suite and a YouTube Premium family plan with Google Play Music, they apparently can't help tell me why they blocked my daughter from live streaming to YouTube.

The video in question was her playing with legos, and when I disputed it asking why they blocked her... they literally just responded saying the block was valid without ever giving a reason. Like, what the heck Google you act like robots. Anyway, just cancelled my Premium services because they could never give a straight answer.

View on HN

I don't know that any tech companies are good at this?

I would, a few times per year, spend $10 or $20 to promote some tweets on Twitter. At one point, I stopped being able to do that, due to some nebulous "violation" of their TOS. I've gone back and forth with them a handful of times, and they always basically say "Yep, we looked into this, and you definitely did something bad, but we won't tell you what it was or which tweet it was in." They still send me emails and other ads trying to get me to buy advertising, though. I don't really care, it is just kind of funny.

I don't know why they all are so bad at customer support.

My theory is they're bad at customer support because they spend nothing to support us. That's why AT&T, Comcast etc can support ~100 million people by phone, Amazon support a multiple of that by live chat and Google can't even reply to email.

Comcast "support" is almost not better than just having robots at the other end, never have I ever gotten a problem resolved from support, I've just had them try to upsell me relentlessly. To this day my Comcast email is somehow setup wrong and I no longer care to try to fix it.

Interestingly, Comcast has been one of the consistently better support experiences for me over the years. Usually very quick and pretty helpful, even if it is just to schedule someone to come out and look at the problem.

Their service in general has gotten kind of unreliable around here the last year or so, with a handful of widespread outages, one of which lasted almost an entire day, but the customer support has never been something I've been unhappy with.

Google support is bad because 99% of Google users are not customers, but the product.

The lack of being rooted in a customer serving business then extends to other areas where you are the actual customer, like Google Apps etc, where support exists but is often sub-par.

Traditional companies are now just as bad anyways, Experian's website is giving me errors and the number to call has absolutely no way of reaching a human, all of the options in the menu just lead to voice clips. I found another phone number for Experian support and it's the same thing. I've searched up and down about my specific error (which is a generic "technical difficulties" error) and I've looked for alternate ways to contact and I've exhausted everything I can find. So, I guess I'll have to file my dispute through snail mail, because it is literally not possible to reach Experian if you wanted to.

Customer service is expensive. I've had more luck with the tech companies because at least they sometimes pretend to care whereas some of these traditional companies would rather you died in a fire than got assistance from them.

The only time I've ever really gotten good customer service was from businesses that people could decide not to deal with if they didn't like the service.

You are unlikely to be a customer of Experian, instead your employer and bank are.

https://www.experian.com/consumer-products/identity-theft-an...

$19.95/mo

That would be a protection racket payoff. Better classified as a victim or a putz in this case than a customer.

> I don't know that any tech companies are good at this?

I’ve found Amazon has always been generous and easy to deal with from a customer support perspective. Apple is pretty good as well though you often have to pay for it (maybe not for web services, I only have experience with hardware and device software issues)

Amazon feels like it has gone downhill lately. The last few times I've complained about them not meeting their Prime shipping guaranteed delivery dates, they've been fairly rude and unhelpful.

At least in Germany, they are still fine (though AFAIK they also don't have the counterfeit product issue they seem to have in the US). I was asking how to handle some DHL shipping problem, they said they can't help me but they are sorry and I got a free month of prime.

Amazon. You generally get a very polite human on the line in seconds.

Jet.com was surprising generous too when I chatting with support.

Edit: my bad, it wasn't clear in your post that you were promoting your tweets using Twitter.

Wait, what is? The $10 or $20 was money I was paying directly to Twitter for their advertising services, not to some third party doing shady stuff.

At the rate you spend, if you're on live human support calls for a total of an hour a year, twitter might break even on you.

They'd rather lose your business, than lose money talking to you.

They don't act like robots, they design auto-emailers because nobody is forcing them to support their customers. Google's support strategy is so deliberately-negligible they could substantially improve their tech support by acquiring Comcast.

The Comcast part made me laugh. But yes, sadly even in my experiences, Comcast has better customer support than Google.

Unless you are huge corp buying ads by the bucket you are not "really a Google customer", are you?

Near as I can tell, the only way to make progress there is to know someone on the inside.

Not true. Having thousands of followers and "going viral" is an equally good method.

That's like saying being born rich or winning the lottery is a good method to make money

If she's under 13, it's likely that's the reason.

Even if you're paying for G Suite, you can't have someone under 13. There is a special, limited type of Google account for sub-13 kids: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338

Maybe Google should have put that in the explanation instead of not giving a reason.

I wouldn't be shocked if the lawyers say COPPA means they can't, as they're not supposed to have any info about the child, including a) that they exist and b) that they're under 13.

Then you'd think it would be easy for Google to have said that instead of giving him no reason beyond "yep it's legit"

Google typically won't give reasons because people use that information to get around blocks.

They don't have to disclose how they inferred the age but they can absolutely say that they'll ban anyone under 13 from streaming. The rule must be made transparent and clear - how they measure it and its boundaries can be somewhat opaque to aid enforcement and prevent reverse engineering

> The rule must be made transparent and clear

The rule itself is transparent and clear.

Whether the rule in as the basis for the action here is not.

It clearly would generally be required (as due process) to make that clear, too, if Google was the government of the US or one of it's states, but they aren't. Absent a contractual obligation I have seen no evidence for, I don't see why they would be obligated to explain this, even if I might find it prerable if they would.

Aren't we all talking about how we would like it to be and not what is legal or contractual? I thought so at least. If we are talking about contract, it's all stacked against us. We have no bargaining power. We have no rights whatsoever. Google absolutely has the right to do what they want within legal boundaries. These discussions and the noise we generate is how we are flexing our muscle and accomplishing what we want from Google.

> Aren't we all talking about how we would like it to be

“Must”, in the post I was responding to, seems to clearly indicate otherwise.

It is possible that word was poorly chosen.

That seems ethically like a slippery slope explanation. Good thing the legal system doesn't behave this way when one is arrested (in most places).

It does, at times.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather...

> In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.

In the case of COPPA, the slippery slope guidelines of being deliberately opaque come straight from the FTC:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/com...

"If you choose to block children under 13 on your general audience site or service, you should take care to design your age screen in a manner that does not encourage children to falsify their ages to gain access to your site or service. Ask age information in a neutral manner at the point at which you invite visitors to provide personal information or to create a user ID."

I see your point, but I don't read it the same way you do. This is referring to the age screen test (similar to Steam's on PG 13 or R games). But the poster above was spurned by Google support.

I think the real reason he was spurned is that Google support isn't that effective or responsive in a lot of cases, full stop.

Doubly not relevant for a paid g-suite organization. It’s not like his daughter can just go sign up for an account and lie about her age, the admin has to add users.

The admin is not asked for a birthday. IIRC, it's largely optional - YouTube will require it to watch a violent/sexually suggestive video, at which point you may get locked out if you give a sub-13 one.

For example: https://sunpig.com/martin/2011/07/03/google-made-my-son-cry/

Right, so

>you should take care to design your age screen in a manner that does not encourage children to falsify their ages to gain access to your site or service. Ask age information in a neutral manner at the point at which you invite visitors to provide personal information or to create a user ID

doesn't have anything to do with this. There's definitely no age screen for the kid to lie on, and it sounds like the admin doesn't even provide an age either

But he also has YouTube Premium family. Family members are often sub 13.

You can't just spin up a regular 13+ G Suite account for those family members, though.

Yes, and there are special types of accounts for under-13 family members.

https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en

Having a Family plan for YouTube Premium (or other Google services) doesn't suddenly make it okay to use regular Google Accounts for young children. There are laws that apply here, and Google has special accounts designed to comply with those laws.

Wait, what about that Ryan kid (who's a proxy for his parents) who does all the reviews for kids' toys and makes millions. Is he in danger of getting nixed?

It depends on who owns the account. Kids under 13 can appear in videos posted by their parents' account.

That is a possibility, however it would have been helpful if they had said that. I assumed with my permission that she would be able to live stream. She also likes to play Roblox, and I had setup OBS for her. She was honestly pretty sad about it seeing that there are lots of other kids live streaming that appear to be her age.

Then how do kid streaming shows like Ryan’s toy review gather millions of subscribers over several years?

I had a similar experience where I contested two $2 charges (so $4) a month at the beginning of every month.

It happened for 2 months and the only contact I could get was an automated reply saying that me or someone in my family had done this purchase. That wasn't the case at all.

After 2 months, this 1st of the month expense disappeared on its own.

I no longer have any paid services with them because trying to get a human to respond was impossible.

Unless you've also ceased usage of Google search, maps, and YouTube they didn't lose your business. You're still helping deliver 84% of their revenue.

True. It is hard to disconnect from them entirely, but at least this way I'm not giving them my money directly.

of those only youtube doesn't have what i would consider a viable alternative.

For that particular person, no. Subscription users are more valuable, so 84% is on average.

It’s no different with App Store submissions. For all the hate and talk of how stringent Apple is with their process, they at least provide very detailed reports and are quite good with feedback whenever things do go wrong. Google on the other hand? It’s often a crapshoot trying to track down what went wrong. Their responses are often too generic and getting a live person is an exercise in patience.

Crappy customer service is one of the hallmarks of a market dominated by a monopoly.

Had you heard about Sergei Brin obsessed about speed of page load on Google and could accurately tell how many seconds passed to a decimal? I'm using Google Music on iOS. It is by far the slowest app on device, sometime literally taking half a minute to perform an action. This was the time I realized billionaire founders must have left the building and Google is not what it used to be. Sure enough, I recently read article that Page and Brin went through divorces of their own, now spending lot of time staying out of the office basically leaving the company on auto-piolot. Pitchai et al may be good managers like Ballmer & Cook but they are far from visionaries. Fortunately AI is rising and search would be the biggest upcoming disruption.

Wait, you have gSuite and were able to use a YouTube Family plan?!?! Is this really possible now?

My YouTube family plan is separate from my G Suite account.

Ahh, I ended up doing the same and have painfully migrated everything over to a regular Google Account (except mail for which I'm still considering my options) just so I could use the Family sharing for Music, YouTube, Drive/One.

3 reasons:

- they are too big now. No one care, no one is paid to care, and no one has any incentive to change that.

- they are too big now. Tpoo many customers, with too many dumb problems. Just sorting out the real ones from just the idiots would cost too much. It's more economical to just reject in mass, and loose a few clients, when you have the monopoly.

- they are an easy legal target for huge sums of money. If they tell you why they blocked you, you can fight it in court. If they don't, you can't.

Your comment is completely irrelevant to the article.

That's another side effect of large monopolies - when you have millions of customers, most of which are already locked in through one way or another (Chrome, GMail, YouTube etc), there's no particular incentive to care about them that much. It's likely that the cost of losing you as a customer was deemed less than the cost of changing their policies.

That does seem capricious. At the same time, I’m not sure how old your daughter is, but it might be better that she’s not performing for an audience when she plays with her toys. I’m not convinced that sort of thing is healthy for a child’s development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com