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Comment by omnifischer | Hacker News Reader

It is disgusting that no one from media asks Sundar Pichai touch questions like:

1. Non human (AI) usage for termination google accounts. 2. No repeal process

At least some employee from Google here in hn must do things and understand mentality of other people.

It increasingly looks like - well... we employees live in bubble but if you are unlucky then you are screwed. Do not ask us?

What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.

You are human - so is some one that was affected by your code.

Amen

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So it's easy to think with a human customer service agent, all will be well. But then I think about all the customer service calls I've made or emails I've sent, and I almost wish that they did not exist so I don't get my hopes up and waste my time. Most customer service is worse than a computerized flowchart.

And even if they do understand your situation, and have authenticated you, and aren't just reading a script, then most of the time they can't offer you anything else besides what's possible on the website anyways. Sometimes we just like having someone to complain to.

That's not my experience of call centres. While they are generally reading from a script and often they have no more information than you do, they crucially have the ability to recognise when things aren't working right and escalate your issue.

With Google's bot approach that can never happen. The only way to escalate issues is to be famous and write a blog post or tweet about it.

Sure thing, but I still prefer to talking to the worst human, than the best KI avaible.

Also, I bet no one think all will be well, without KI, but it will be better dealing with incompetent, overworked and underpaid call workers, than dealing with a "smart" KI, with you cannot talk at all. In the first case there is at least the hope, that someone escalates the problem to someone with more knowledge who can finally solve your problem.

>>What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates

The Human mind has an infinite capacity to justify any manner of things as "just doing my job" or "just following orders"

This has been seen in all industry, in all types of roles and at all times in history

There is nothing more dangerous than a group of people "just doing their jobs"

Also hubris. Hubris is a hell of a drug.

Not surprising, given the amount of so called "engineers" they hire, some of whom don't really have a background in CS, just studied for the interviews, or came from a coding school. It's astonishing how many fresh code bootcamp grads that companies like Google pick up and pay 6 figures for.

I just created a Google Voice account for the first time. A few hours later I asked 3 different friends to send me a text message to see if it worked. I didn't get any of them or any warning that it takes time for the number to activate.

I tried again the next day, same results. That was 4-5 days ago, and still nothing. I'm abandoning Google Voice because I assume Google has abandoned it. It's not like there's anyone I can ask.

This is just an inconvenience to me. I can't imagine what it's like to have a service I actually rely on and then lose it.

Gaslighting is the worst.

It's getting more common, too. Just the other day I found out that posting links in a youtube comment makes the comment invisible to everyone else. In hindsight, disallowing links is almost certainly a good policy and it's easy to understand and appreciate why it was put in place, but why the gaslighting? Just pop up a box explaining that links aren't allowed. The gaslighting isn't going to fool spammers for long enough to be a meaningful deterrent, but it is going to trip up legitimate users enough to meaningfully degrade their experience.

Time to visit my bitwarden and port another account off gmail (my late new-years resolution is to port an account off gmail every time I get myself worked up about something google did -- funnel the useless frustration into something worthwhile.)

I think the term is shadow banning

They invented the term shadow banning because "gas lighting" has very negative connotations.

Shadow banning is 100% a form of gas lighting, and IMO should be considered just as unethical. If you are going to ban someone, words, or actions be upfront and clear about the rules and bans

Shadow banning, hellbanning, slowbanning, error banning -- it all falls under the umbrella of gaslighting in my book.

Happens on other platforms, too

I had a Firefox plugin that would tweet all my bookmarks. Years later I noticed all the tweets were hidden from search

Shadow banning is a form of gaslighting because users expect their comments to be seen and responded to, however they are invisible. This is confusing and an abusive practice.

I have had hn accounts shadowbanned without explanation or opportunity for appeal (I did try and was ignored) and largely stopped participating here because of that.

It's completely fair to stop participating as a result.

That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that in small communities admin time is at a premium and gaslighting, even if it's occasionally abused, is a force-multiplier that can make the difference between a community having enough moderation to survive vs spinning off into toxicity and turning into a ghost town.

What I object to is that it seems to increasingly be used as a "best practice," to be applied universally without weighing pros and cons, rather than as a shitty reality to be applied minimally. For instance, in the case of youtube, we can place a very low upper bound on the value they're getting out of this tool, because it's being used to enforce an automated blanket policy that everyone already knows about (certainly everyone intent on link spamming, in any case). HN's shadowbanning is going to be good or evil on a per-instance basis, which makes it difficult for me to judge, while youtube's shadowbanning (as it relates to enforcing obvious automated blanket policies) cannot be good and is therefore much easier to judge.

gaslighting doesn't mean hiding.

Hiding = post is invisible to you and everyone else

Gaslighting = post is visible to you, and unbeknownst to you, invisible to everyone else

gaslighting also doesn't mean lying, or cheating, or fraud. it involves some of these things, but that doesn't mean that all hiding and lying is gaslighting. to quote wiktionary:

To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. The verb sense derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment.

in what way does hiding one's post cause them to "question their own memory, perception and sanity"?

>To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance.

I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they've been auto moderated or banned? It's not like it will result in additional support being required - Google already make a point of ignoring their users.

while this is arguably true, it has nothing to do with the misappropriation of the original word. something can be terrible and yet not justify using words commonly agreed to mean different things. it reminds me of the recent trend to use "assault" when referring to all types of harassment, regardless of whether physical violence was carried out or even implied. you can argue that shadow banning is bad, but if you go say that it's "literally raping their identity" or something like that then you just sound like an idiot.

Google is a proverbial a jack of all trades, master of none.

If you need to depend of them for a specific service, don't. Go with an actual business that cares and have the focus on what's important, and more importantly a customer service that listens.

I went with a dedicated VoIP provider, and the service has been excellent

Can you suggest an alternative to Voice? I need SMS and voice, and prefer data being optional (Voice can forward to a dumbphone, or even a landline). Happy to pay, just haven't found an obvious direct competitor.

Perhaps I'm missing your actual requirements (based on what's been suggested below), but I've been using voip.ms for years now. They support voice and SMS, and even my bank's SMS "2FA" works with them now. They don't support MMS, however (though you may have meant that when you said SMS).

SMS is available as a FLOSS app (I use the F-Droid voip.ms app), or through another portal - able to be sent/received through email, another number, or a web interface.

I honestly have only good things to say about them (despite being a consumer of their seemingly B2B product). As a disclaimer, I don't work for them, have no affiliation with them, and made a point of not using any kind of referral link.

I like the Unlisted app https://www.unlistedapp.com I got it a few years ago and haven't had any problems. I think it might be iOS only. There are plenty of other burner phone number apps which work on both Android and iOS.

Thanks for using and recommending Unlisted! We added an Android version last year and both apps are under active development. I'm happy to answer any questions (or receive feedback about what we could do better) - erik@unlistedapp.com

Dialpad is useful for this. They're one of the few alternatives I've found that allows for routing calls over POTS.

Voice was a really frustrating product for me because it was so clearly years ahead of its time and also ignored by Google for so long that everyone else caught up and passed them.

In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.

What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.

This went unsolved for years.

Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.

Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.

> What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.

One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence.

Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

The problem is not mainly with how Google treats their employees (though there's definitely something wrong there), but with how they treat their customers.

I was referring to the use of a union to give employees say about the products they make. They provide collective leverage far more broadly than in the negotiation of work conditions and compensation and can negotiate directly with the board, who would normally go to great lengths to avoid speaking to their own employees (in my experience).

Hell, I’ve met more investors footing my salary than board members per se, and they definitely have zero interest in employee negotiations—that’s what management is for.

Its true - they believe themselves to be so damn smart they behave with rank condescension towards everyone else as the "top 1% of intelligence".

If they were so smart their lunch wouldn't be getting eaten by the likes of Amazon.

> including many with an anti-corporate streak.

So basically the worst form of slacktivist hypocrites.

I was not looking to start an argument; you are entitled to your opinions, at least.

I’m not arguing either. But dude, google? Google!? Its business is selling ads for corporations. A google software engineer can get a job at countless places including nonprofits sometimes making close to google money, but even if they made half that income they would be living more comfortably than 3/4s of the US.

Anti corporate soapbox or google job, please just pick one.

Nobody who get a Google paycheck has a sincere "anti-corporate" streak.

An anecdote: I was running my bootstraped company with 5 employees when in 2013 I suddenly started getting Google recruiting emails about once every 4 days. They wanted me for a "role" of a SRE, probably because I asked stack overflow sysadmin questions. I never responded.

> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

I'm pretty pro-union in general but I don't follow your reasoning. Cops are unionized, and when they murder innocent civilians in broad daylight, the unions are right behind to pay for their legal defense. Unions don't bring reason to a workforce; they merely represent that workforce.

The problem is that regardless of the number of programmers that refuse to implement the whole thing, you only need one to ever say yes to get it.

So every bad idea eventually gets implemented.

The absence of an appeals process for online forums and stores is one of the great threats to public life today.

Most societies actually have something to solve such disputes: courts of law.

The real tragedy is that we decided to let corporations grow so big that they can say "fuck you" to courts and people alike with no repercussions. Twitter is famous for this, ever tried to appeal a ban?

I fear this is overstatement...people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown. Only if the agreements were written in such a way as to define such a right, would a court of law even be involved.

This isn't about companies being too big, it's about an absence of rule making. If there were some rules defining the rights, then the courts could, indeed, be involved; but courts can't be brought into something just because it is "wrong". People agree to the ToS when they submit an app to the store; and the ToS more or less say, it's Gapplsoft's platform and they may do what they like.

> people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown.

In Germany, people and political parties have obtained court judgements to unlock their Twitter and FB accounts. Generally the principle behind these decisions was that Twitter and FB are a public venue for discourse and therefore it goes against free speech to ban accounts for acceptable speech.

The only downside is that it are mostly hardcore actual Nazis which obtain these rulings, e.g. from the NPD party: https://www.belltower.news/gerichtsstreit-facebook-muss-seit...

That is a Twitter account, not an app.

It is unlikely that any common law jurisdiction would apply freedom of speech so broadly but it is uncertain. It could be that even Germany only applies it in cases where it is clearly a matter of political speech. How broadly do you think this precedent applies?

The odd thing is that they can't even make a cost argument for this. If they charged a cost recovery fee for human redress of these sorts of issues, it would not cost them anything, and that's assuming they don't lose money from improper automated enforcement, which they almost certainly do.

It's pure incompetence.

Why would I want to keep paying google for their shitty AI’s mistakes?

The alternative is being disappeared without recourse, if you have to pay 40 bucks when they screw up, it is what it is, and you can make a decision.

That is (morally) wrong on so many levels. It’s basically what regulations were invented for.

What would your brilliant regulation entail? Forcing companies to publish software for free when their automated systems think it's malware?

Could you even summarize a piece of legislation that doesn't amount to "describe Google, then make everything that annoys us about Google illegal for companies fitting that description"?

Apply anti-trust law as is currently written for starters. Standard Oil and Ma Bell were split for less egregious offenses than we've seen from Alphabet/Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In Standard Oil's case, vertical integration across markets was enough, and pretty much everyone in Big Tech is guilty of this.

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