Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

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Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfortunate corner case of a tool trying to protect against scammers.

I can totally understand how in a flagging tool with a false positive rate of 0.01% some innocent publisher got caught by mistake, and got its app banned. Is that publisher important enough so it's worth manual review time? What's the risk to expose the internal heuristics to make EVERYBODY happy? Oh, wait, you can't make EVERYBODY Happy.

I can tell you this shit happens EVERYWHERE. It's just the way the law of large numbers works against you. If you want to make ALL your customers happy, your only choice is a bespoke dev type of thing, because you then to deeply cater to your each customer.

It's the same shit everywhere, and you're interested in working on large bits, it doesn't really matter where you go. Google, FB, Amazon, everywhere you're going to have people that are unhappy with your product/service/decisions. So if it's the same, why not go to the ones that pay better/got more perks/look best on your CV?

This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with a law of big numbers or the difficulty of making everybody happy. The adsense scam Google is running, if the description provided here is correct, is just fraud.

Both is just Google being evil.

> nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it"

You can be sure that happens as well in every organization of that size. It's just another reason you have to have a proper appeal process in place, not the automatic dismissal system Google has.

How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?

Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy.

On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.

> [...] to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?

It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?

Play Store developers are not users - they are customers for the Play Store product. Nobody is forcing them to develop for Play Store; or to use Ad Sense or any other Google product.

When you're starting your relationship, it's very clear (in the ToS) that they can reject your apps or terminate the relationship however they choose. If they would start quitting developing for Play Store because of these opaque rules, perhaps Google will listen to them. But reality shows that this problem doesn't happen often enough, so the opaque filters work as intended.

So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).

When I said "users", I was referring to their rationale for killing off this developer's account and applications. One of the cited policies was Violation of Deceptive Behavior, which referred to users.

> So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).

If you don't like the rules (or their behaviour when supposedly applying them), you can also:

1. Criticize, explain why the behaviour is bad and spread the word about it. This is what we are doing now.

2. Regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence.

>> How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev

If you cannot discern the two you shouldn't offer a service that claims it can... And if you do nevertheless, the operators of the service should at least acknowledge that errors happen and offer the possibility of a recourse

How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev

It’s weird how Google knows everything about you when it suits them, and nothing when it doesn’t

Nobody said it was easy to solve these issues without collateral damage.

The point being raised is that when you become a statistic, you have no recourse. Sort of like "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company"

If this were some small fledgling start-up, that is to be expected. It costs money to get things right for everyone.

But this is a huge, profitable, mature company. And one that is playing a key role in our society. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than they are now. Or else, in the end, society will make them.

How about Google stops using dark patterns in order to dissuade users from using alternative app stores or side-loading then? They can police their own app store any way they feel they have to, but then let's foster the culture of having multiple places to install applications from.

The real world is also hard and you also cannot make everyone happy.

Which is why we invented DUE PROCESS.

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