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Comment by bilalq | Hacker News Reader

This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've had an Android app get payments blocked and had to deal with repeated back-and-forth resending of the same documents over and over before they unblocked it. I never did get an answer on why any of that was necessary or why it was impossible to ever speak to anyone about the details related to the issue.

It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.

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It's mostly because:

A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it.

B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money.

C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable.

D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems.

edit to add:

E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.

Let me also add a counter-point to my own point:

Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive.

The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks.

But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.

What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.

Google has a net income (aka profits) of $34b/yr and Youtube revenues ($16 bil) are about 12% of google's total revenues ($135 bil). If they sunk 12% of their net income (one year of net income growth) into hiring customer support and allocated 12% to youtube, that would be $490mil. Or around 5,000 account reps (avg cost of $100k/yr). At 1800 hrs/yr, that's around 9 mil man-hours they could put towards decent youtube creator relationship support.

My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it.

Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case.

The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.

Nothing other than Google is obsesed with automating things with half baked machine learning solutions and thinking they don't need a service desk with humans.

Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.

Well, maybe not Twitter? I've used their hidden platform team contact form about 4 times and I've never heard a response from them.

I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.

I had a spare account hijacked and banned, recovery took about a day from memory using their contact form. This was sometime last year.

How many other companies operate at the scale of Google and are not accused of the exact same problems?

Do you have any examples?

The main difference is traditional large companies aren't nearly as valuable or profitable because they employ a increasing number of support and customer service staff.

The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.

This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.

Surprinsingly I got in contact with a human in Youtube to look into my blocked channel, after no avail I finally asked him to delete my account, but he refused. Why keeping it blocked forever? Seems like a blackmail scheme.

Let's be much, much more specific about the counter-point to your counter-point. We have concrete, hard evidence they aren't doing enough to protect their users: they're massively, enormously profitable.

If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.

That sounds like a problem that is ordinarily dealt with by having human beings, who don't operate on a script, on the other end of the line. You can't automate everything, google.

> C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable.

The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry.

One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued.

[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57

[2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20imag...

The way people get around this apparent "shadowban" behavior is by creating a separate legal entity of some form to be the publisher of each app or extension or channel or whatever. It seems that once you are shadowbanned, you are shadowbanned forever. This of course increases the cost of publishing your project, but this is a monopoly we're dealing with and so we have no recourse.

I've been reading some Kafka this month. Issues like this article are the 21st century realisation of his pessimism.

The Castle, and The Trial particularly.

I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?

I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.

This is my default stance too, and the advice I give to everyone that asks. If you're no big fish enough or you don't have contacts, you can have a serious problem.

I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.

This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.

In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.

So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.

Big contracts too, surprisingly. We had a dedicated team of Google engineers supporting us, and we still ran into this !@#$%. Many, they could facilitate. Some, they could not.

Or their free email.

If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?

I managed to get myself temporarily locked out of a 10+ year old gmail account 2 months ago. I managed to get it back easily (finding my old phone sim and resetting).

But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life.

I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!

Another option is to control the domain. That is what I recommend for any account that is used to make money in any way. In the event you have a dispute with your email host, you can simply change the domain MX records. You may lose a few hours or a couple days of email, but your name doesn't disappear out of thin air.

Agreed. Own your domain and store your email content locally (or at least have backups locally if you love the provider's web interface).

What happens if you have a dispute with your registrar?

That can happen for sure. You should do as little business with your registrar as possible. No hosting, just a domain and a couple DNS records.

Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted.

If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.

Just make sure you don’t forget to renew the domain.

And that your registrar is secure. GoDaddy had a lot of issues with social engineering a few years ago.

Eh, Microsoft at least has a good track record of not killing services. Product quality is sometomes poor. Support is not.

Free email is fine. Just make sure to own your own domain and MX records. Worst case you switch to somewhere else and keep on mailing.

I'm using a custom domain and a paid email provider.

My rational is to align my interests with the company running the infrastructure for a fundamental component of my digital life.

Free email is fine most of the time. Until it's not. I want to limit my "until it's not" exposure.

I use my own domain, but now I'm scared I'll miss a payment instead.

I prepay for three years, but it's not like they'll just suspend your account with no warning, they know how important email is.

prepaying doesn't really solve the problem, it merely delays it. you need to set a reminder or something.

It automatically renews, it's not like I need to be reminded, but they email you anyway.

Is it actually possible to own as opposed to renting?

Not if using the regular popular DNS and want a domain name because you are just paying some entity for the right to include you on a list of addresses and nothing more. However you can own IPs and you can run your own DNS. Though you might have a hard time getting your IP routed to if you dont let it be managed by some ISP.

IP addresses are rented too, e.g.:

https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#ipv4-ipv6-...

Are there free email providers that let you bring your own domain?

I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox. The tool is so painless I suggest more people should use it. The only ongoing maintenance I have had to manage is rebooting it to apply updates. The whole thing is backed up with a built in backup tool that rsyncs the data to my home server.

The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.

> I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox.

How does it compare to ISPmail:

* https://workaround.org/ispmail

mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.

How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?

Mailinabox is very much automatic. You run an install script and it asks you for a hostname and domain and thats about it. It also manages updating, backups, certificates all for you.

I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.

Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.

> mailinabox

How bad is life without that filter?

Its not really then end of the world. It just means I need to unsubscribe from newsletters manually rather than letting google dump them in the trash automatically. I would like to see server side email filtering though since my thunderbird filters are useless when my desktop is off and I check with my phone.

I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.

Yeah this is an interesting side effect: I just use the recommended defaults in spamassassin with my self-hosted mail server and it does a much better job than gmail of properly sorting mail between inbox and spam folders.

ehh, no thanks, not quite keen on emails being sent into the spambox.

Mailinabox configures everything in the way gmail likes. Unless you start your vps on a tainted IP address it should be no problem. I send to gmail and outlook emails fine.

Depends on your hosting provider with Outlook still right? I run a mail server on Linode and I had thought that Microsoft was still blocking all their IPs.

I'm using vultr for my vps and it has been fine.

I was using G Suite on a personal domain, and woke up one morning to discover that google refused to let me IMAP into my account any more. The error message pointed me at a browser verification page which I did multiple times, to no avail, so I moved to a different email provider.

Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.

Well thanks to using rclone and gmvault (even though it is dead project it still keeps backing up my email) I am hoping it would be very minimal data loss.

I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time.

And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days.

But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.

If someone can't run their own mail system, what do you recommend? Are there better options?

If you have a domain name you can forward *@yourdomain.tld to a free mail service and mark the mail service as an authorized sender.

I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains.

If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.

Thank you SO MUCH. I'll do this.

I've enjoyed using Proton Mail https://protonmail.com/pricing

Same. I have been using it for a year now (I know, I'm a Late Adopter) and it's been completely smooth. No complaints.

https://fastmail.com

Yep, I blacklisted them as well and exclusively use Azure. It’s great and I know Microsoft makes its revenue on people like me, rather than on ad networks.

> I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.

It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to.

It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.

> actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call

This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design

I’ve seen this type of behaviour before. To be completely honest, I have associated the release of new Google initiatives with headlines that say they are shutting down 12-24 months later.

I worry for all the youtube channels I enjoy who have gone all in and made it their full time job. If anything were to happen they'd be done. There's no realistic alternative.

Exactly this reason I avoided firebase at all costs. There is quite a few services now that I wouldnt have minded paying google considerable sums of money for, if it weren't for their long history of this kind of nonsense.

Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.

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