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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

> Now, it's a shame Google couldn't let them know what was the issue. However, it's a safe assumption that the vast majority of people Google support deals with are spammers. And there's a lot of them. If Google gave a detailed explanation to all of them it would mean a ton of additional work – which would create an unsustainable situation at this scale.

I don't think that's reasonable. What if most are spammers ? Better let a few spammers in than treat someone unjustly. Why would it become unsustainable ? I've seen this argument repeated ad nauseam, but have yet to see proper proof.

In this particular example, a copyright violation was detected in a image, so an automated response "someone else's image was used without permission, violating copyright" seems entirely plausible.

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Google has the scale to do this, but they also have a large enough monopoly where they don't have to, so they won't. It's not that it's unsustainable, it's that it is entirely sustainable to continue doing things this way.

Can you elaborate? I can see how Google can scale this automatically. But I don't see how Google can terminate, say, one million apps a day, if each termination entitles the spammer a one hour conversation with a technical representative.

Make the person but the hour, say $100. It's a very different value proposition for some one saving their business vs some one trying to game a system.

Why does it need to cost them an hour conversation?!

Look at the tone-deaf example this employee just shared. All they had to do was say in the same email that they used to ban someone "you have copyrighted images".

The moment they find an infraction they could literally take a screenshot, say "the problem is X" and email it, which would incur the 5 seconds it takes to add a screenshot and say the problem you already identifies, but make a world of difference for developers.

This nonsense about "it's to stop spammers" isn't about the cost, the laughably bad logic Google uses is that by identifying what rules you broke, spammers will get better at not doing stuff Google catches...

As if the spammers don't already know what they did to get caught!

> In this particular example, a copyright violation was detected in a image, so an automated response "someone else's image was used without permission, violating copyright" seems entirely plausible.

Google should not be enforcing copyright in the first place without at least a report of infringement by the copyright holder - and in that case they should pass the report along to the developer.

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