Are You a Human at Google? | Hacker News Reader

Are You a Human at Google?

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67 pointsdsr1216 comments

Google’s approach to customer service is completely appalling. Amazon is equally enormous and complex and I can talk any time I like with a human via chat on their website.

"Please, first tell me what shape is this <>, just to make sure you're not a chatbot. Thank you."

That's because to google, you aren't a customer, you are the product. Amazon treats you well because you are their paying customer. Google treats their customers ( the ad companies ) well.

Shouldn't perpetuate this myth, especially to excuse their behavior. Google took money from Play Store developers to publish apps, and they take payment in many other areas of their businesses too. That's exactly what a customer is in most modern economies.

You can actually see them paying lip service to some customer obligations, like the self-serve refund button on the Play Store when you buy apps because in modern economies it can be illegal to refuse all refunds as policy, and their fake support system would make that defacto policy.

Steam got fined $3 million for that just in Australia which represents a small percent of their users and modern economies, Valve were denying refunds globally for years and made drastic changes to their refund policy to avoid further liability.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/350574/valve-fined-3m-in-australi...

I found they treated their ad customers rather poorly as well.

I really don't think so because I've had equally awful experiences trying to contact a human being with regard to adwords, etc.

One if the Twitter updates alluded to it, but they can make a repository for F-Droid and have their users use that to get the latest updates

I'd really rather do that anyway than put up with Signal's self-updating nag-screen process.

There's an entire genre of posts on HN which amount to someone telling a terrible customer support story about some FAANG-y company, with the result (and likely intention) that the attention forces the FAANG to turn around, generously fix the problem, and offer the author profuse apologies and freebies to show how nice they are.

Not only is it sad that the same thing is now being done by a well-known company, but what makes it even worse is that this post probably hasn't gotten enough attention to make Google care.

Isn't this getting out of hand?

I mean, this should be a symbiotic relationship because these platforms grew thanks to the creator's content (apps, videos, etc) and creators grew thanks to the network effects of these platforms.

When it becomes unbalanced, shouldn't these platforms have the responsibility towards their content creators because they were given the tools to make their livelihood on it?

We all know it's a problem of scale, it would be extremely hard/expensive to have human customer support after a certain threshold - but maybe, just maybe, if that threshold is reached doesn't that mean that they're too big to give a proper support, therefore they're too big for a platform?

What's the benefit of a massive platform for users and creators if there's no proper support/control?

I just think regulators should look at this. Not to break them up (could be a solution), but to make them accountable for what they've created. Maybe AI will one day take care of it all, but currently it's not cutting it, and this trial and error approach to fine tune such systems is more damaging then anything else.

The pros of "oh it will be great in the future" do not weight more then the cons of the status quo.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I've witnessed waves of this, and came to my awareness upon the media outrage of brands ads being displayed in ISIS propaganda and stuff. It was quickly patched when it got to Google's pockets (though it still have flaws, yet media investment is pretty much assured now). What about the rest?

They get 30% if the revenue, how can they not be able to afford the support. The just don’t give a faang

The more Google behaves like this (slow, lumbering, unresponsive to devs, privacy issues etc), the more I start looking at alternative OS phones. Google Maps, Bing Maps, Uber, Insta etc. all have robust web apps these days, and unlike apps that silently grant themselves permissions upon install/update, a web app has to ask the user each time.

Storage is a factor too!

Unfortunately their humans are not much better either, where I've found that they have a "I don't give a sh*t" attitude. The best way I've found to get through to Google is to go directly to the person who is responsible for the product, in which case they will just log a ticket and hope for the best.

Too bad I have to agree with this one. Their process of manually checking is really very poor. Looking at Apple their process I never thought it was that hard, but I'm wrong. It is just very complex.

But as an indie dev that has 50% of all apps currently suspended for bogus reason, I'm frustrated, angry and looking for a more stable platform.

This is the height of absurdity. Google get your shit together.

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