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Comment by buscoquadnary | Hacker News Reader

The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing.

If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.

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Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.

This is good. It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.

I agree. A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.

Google has many processes that are broken for everyone and don't get fixed. That's why monopolies are bad.

> A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.

OK, but the only processes that are broken for everyone are processes that are mandatory for everyone. Using a different process is a perfectly workable way to get around a broken process.

Agreed. The current state is the most awful for the powerless. At least this change evens the playing field a bit so that when $HUGE_CORP gets burned they will raise enough hell to (hopefully) fix the process.

Occasionally this happens, see Epic Games, and then the $HUGER_CORP has their security teams look for spurious "vulnerabilities" and then uses their PR team to have them dragged through the mud, etc.

Just speculating, but another possibility may be a new kind of business popping up: Google App Store experts who can somehow prevent these problems and/or make them go away.

Similar to Google-SEO consultants, or college-admissions consultants who help rich kids get into universities they normally couldn't.

There is already this service which works to get your Facebook account back:

https://hacked.com/

Every time I get fucked-up support dead-ends like this now I go to war against the management of that company. I pay to get hold of all the home phone/cellphones/personal email addresses of the highest position employees I can find and bug the shit out of them until one of them capitulates and gets a minion to fix the problem.

I just harassed the C-suite of a unicorn that wouldn't give me a refund for something that wasn't delivered. "We can't give you a refund because FedEx says it was delivered." IT WAS DELIVERED TO SOMEONE ELSE AND THEN FEDEX COLLECTED IT AND RETURNED IT AS YOU CAN SEE IN THE TRACKING LOGS. "Thank you for your e-mail. As the package shows that it was delivered you will need to take this up with FedEx. I cannot help you further with this enquiry." A weekend of texting and emailing the management and now suddenly I have them giving me their corporate email addresses and a promise to have it fixed after the holiday.

There could be an app for that -- a clearing house that lets you submit an issue and have it taken up by an employee, with anonymity, for a fee. It could be the Uber for access to insider support.

Oh, I've no doubt that's happening in all the major tech companies.

Amazon employees got caught doing this.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/six-indicted-connection...

Stuff like this does happen at the big companies, but it's also rooted out (when you're that big, you can afford to have internal security teams that investigate this stuff) and the offenders get fucked by legal (and fired, obviously). Usually quietly because of the PR damage it would otherwise cause.

That would almost certainly violate some contract you signed when you were hired.

Most definitively, but at least people who do not have connections inside of google could stay in businesses. Which speaks to just how big of an issue all of this is.

What is astonishing is that despite the scale at which they operate we rarely hear about the problems. False positives seem to be ridiculously low.

Is it really rarely? I feel like I'm hearing about it all the time. The comments in this thread reenforce this feeling. Having to make it to HN frontpage to get support from Google seems also a much too common occurrence.

My assessment would be false positives are way too high and customer support is close to non-existent. And we're hearing only about a tiny fraction of the problems with the majority being stuck in customer support hell.

HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem to believe that bashing this company publicly will somehow change how they operate.

Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community. I suspect folks might be disappointed to see how things turned out at the end.

Well, yeah. I too am in the bubble of realistic experience of having apps repeatedly pulled out from underneath me.

Excuse me for being in that bubble.

It's almost as if over a decade or more if time that people can see the result of behavior they didn't see as problematic initially.

Or that google might have changed how they operate in small ways as they are steered differently.

Expecting any one person to still have the same opinion of any one other person a decade later might be asking a lot. It's nothing strange that a community of people would have differing thoughts on a whole company of people and product and policies.

Google was a hedge against Microsoft which was a hedge against IBM.

The tech world is always running from one monopoly to another.

People should think differently about Google because it is different and now has become the monopoly.

> HM is a bubble with bias against Google.

It seems that way to you because the front pages of Reddit, HN and Twitter are Google's only support channels.

> Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community.

For example, back in the day Google search was useful. Things change, darlings go to the most hated list.

We hear about problems on here all the time... and that's probably about 0.01 percent of the problems that actually happen.

Given the diversity and sheer boneheaded stupidity of the problems we do hear about, there's no chance that they don't have a ton of false positives... especially among apps developed by people who haven't yet learned how to work around whatever stupidity currently obtains. But you can't learn definitively, because they keep changing the stupidity.

After my app got some traction due to a reddit post i made, admob instantly disabled earning for 2 weeks due to "suspicious activity" or something like that.

I tried to reach someone to at least get a clarification...am I not allowed to have a surge of ~100 real users? but there really was no way to present my issue to anyone. It really is bad, there was nothing I could do. If this wasnt a hobby project I would have been really frustrated instead of being just disillusioned.

Its a remake of an old 90s game that is also offline so there is not much risk in it.

I suspect there are a lot of these stories never shared.

It seems to me what people are complaining about isn't the false positives, its the fact that there aren't proper channels to address the issues - and your basically a hostage till someone at Google decides to take pity and talk to you.

This. Reality is going to cause false positives. While you can try to minimize them you'll never get rid of them.

The measure of a system is how they are dealt with. Note that this is not limited to Google by any means. I'm thinking of the police throwing some people in jail as terrorists because they pinged on a geiger counter. Cancer patients, not terrorists. Compare that to what happened when my wife tripped a detector in China. The officials knew it was almost certainly a false positive and were looking for why rather than playing gotcha. (However, I think they went too far in the other direction--it was due to a nuclear heart test, but they didn't even doing the simple test of seeing what the distribution of the radioactivity was.)

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