>talk to Google
Is that even a thing?
Google doesn't seem to want to be talk'n to outside of my information and in some cases credit card.
Is that even a thing?
Google doesn't seem to want to be talk'n to outside of my information and in some cases credit card.
1. Get lucky and some googler sees your official bug report
2. Know a googler who can file a bug internally
3. Make noise on social media till someone at Google notices
My brother is disabled and hadn't logged into his Gmail account for a few months.
I helped him log in, which somehow triggered some kind of security system. It thought we were hacking the account. We got stuck in an infinite loop of "verify your 2FA, answer personal questions, wait for customer support to review the situation, repeat".
It was hellish. We tried over and over again for months to get back in. I still even had access to the Gmail account that sent him the original invite. But when no human will review the situation, you can't break out of the loop.
The only way we got his email account back was by talking to one of my friends who works at Google.
Expecting something for free is exactly what leads to being ghosted, whether by a person (see the lament of the GNOME Calendar maintainer that was up here earlier) or a company.
If you can’t support a service, don’t offer it.
How can I be clearer.
Repeating something does not make it clearer nor more convincing.
The relative badness between paid and free is irrelevant.
Have you honestly never seen one of the stories about how badly google treats paying customers, and specifically how automated it all is? I can do the job of searching that if you need me to, but I'm not going to argue about free vs. paid because that's not the topic at hand.
Furthermore, sporadic blog posts/tweets here and there are not indicative of how the vast majority of users feel about this service. Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
It’s worth remembering what email was like before Gmail came around. With their spam analysis they basically fixed email and moved the world towards a simpler web ui for email (as opposed to hotmail etc. of the day).
I do not work for Google or any Alphabet company.
And excuse me, your comments gave me the impression that you were.
What’s more, the lack of humanity is completely unrelated to lack of legality and lack of desire for income. Both of which Google have mostly adhered to (unlike e.g. Facebook, Uber, AirBnB).
You were asking about free vs. paid in a way that would provide no value to the discussion except to discredit a particular anecdote. But that's a distraction from the real problem, the inability to get good support, and that anecdote was just an example and not necessary as proof.
I say your criteria are irrelevant because the answer doesn't change the root complaint at all.
> Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
Adding value to what? I have doubt in that argument for email which usually costs a couple dollars a month. It's not a thousand dollar product that excludes amateurs. And the problem is not the typical user, it's the one that gets banned suddenly. If that happens the more value you're making by doing business over email, the worse it gets!
And none of your points about gmail being useful are relevant to support either.
Beyond just that point I think a critical dependence on these services, mixed with a general tech illiteracy and an uncaring corporation is a dangerous situation to be in. One could argue that it's the user who is responsible for maintaining access to their email account, but the reality is that the vast majority of users are not educated in these areas and absolutely need help. A corporation that won't help them use the services they provide deserves to be replaced by one that will -- unfortunately, Google is so dominant that the chance of someone seeking out and finding ProtonMail or rolling their own server is tiny. It's hard to compete with Gmail, even when you have options like ProtonMail which provide excellent customer service (with phone numbers!)
I'm just thinking out loud. It seems like a problem to me. Dunno how to solve it.
In that particular case, I would've paid $1,000 for a Google investigator to spend 10 min verifying the account.
None of those options are available at any price.
And every paid service I've ever used has at least email support. Gmail has nothing.
We have our own internal list in case we have a major issue. It's just something we keep in the toolchest that's cheaper (and faster!) than poking the lawyer or relying on a blog post to go viral. They don't want to act like a normal company with regular support and escalation channels, so we have no intention of treating them like a normal company.
I need to start thinking about proper storage system for my pictures and other data.
Though local control of your own data, plus reliable and secure off-site replication, helps a lot.
I'm strongly partial to git-based publishing tools -- SSGs and markdown hosted on the site of my choice, though GitLab and GitHub are both convenient options.
The fact that everything is in Git makes rehoming vastly simpler. And I've been bit a few times too many by service shutdowns, with about three consequential projects still in process (the earliest, Readability's shutdown, is over 2 years ago, and I'm still digging out).
When I was as Tumblr we were just as helpless and subject to the whims of Googlebot as a mom and pop. One day Google decided to ramp up our Googlebot rate ten times. This significant because they were already a double-digit percentage of our traffic, so going 10x placed an unexpected and worrisome strain on our backends. They only way we could get them to throttle back was through personal contacts people had with people over there. We didn’t want to tweet out to them and advertise we were under stress because it would bring out all the weirdos to ddos us (we even had to adopt rules to not talk about company holidays and offsites until after they happened because people would monitor our blogs and ramp up their bots when they thought we were out of the office)
Adopting Kubernetes at my current employer we had many discussions about going with AWS or Google Cloud. What it always came down to is AWS has support where we can write/chat/phone someone at any time and get a solution to your problem, and Google Cloud can only offer our account rep’s email address.
On consumer side, if you buy Google drive you get phone, email, and chat for all questions. Google Fi is the same.
But, some years back when I discovered problems with an online service of theirs, I cold called the switchboard, asked for the VP of the business unit, who picked up on the first ring, chatted for a few minutes, told me to expect a call from the product manager, who rang within 15 minutes, and worked with me for 6 weeks as they addressed (and I monitored) the problem, to satifaactory resolution.
Entirely unlike Google.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_at...