Hacker News Reader

Comment by neonstatic | Hacker News Reader

The terrifying part is how much one can be dependent on services from a single company, that may at some point simply decide to not do business with you. Whether they have good reason for that is secondary. I moved away from relying on Google a while ago when I noticed, that I have zero recourse in case something happens. Turned out to be a sensible decision. I still use my google account, but only for things I wouldn't miss if I the account was nuked.

View on HN

I thankfully learned that lesson about twenty years go. Google had a product that allowed you to park domains with them for ad insertion to generate some revenue. Owning over 400 domains at the time I though, why not?

The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.

A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.

Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.

That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.

Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.

> I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else.

Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them

But it's the kind of business, where recourse is not needed

Do you not value relevance in your search results???

Of course I do, my point was I don't need a way to email / call a human being at Google when something is wrong with a search result.

Again, why not? Do you not want the results to have less seo garbage? Or not have AI hallucinate in your face blocking useful results?

I don't get it. I mean, I understand that you don't have recourse now, but I don't understand not needing one given how important search is

One difference to something like email is that you can change search providers with minimal effort. There’s no server-side context to back up or migrate, no third parties involved: you just use a different URL.

When you get bad results from a search engine, you refine the query. Maybe try a different search engine! You have options. When it's your personal email address you don't have options. You are at the mercy of said email provider. You can run that email yourself, sure, but that isn't for everyone. Does that explain the difference?

Yes I do, that's why I pay for Kagi instead of having ads injected into the top of my results page and a company who's business model is based on me clicking on ads instead of actually finding what I want.

> Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them

That's a gross misinterpretation of what "doing business with" means.

Not everyone is aware how Google operates in cases like these until it happens. . Whether Google don't want to do business with people breaching some rules is one thing but to lock away all their data is something that does not make much sense to me, only highlights how their service should not be depended on. Also to ban all people who may have logged in from a device but who have done nothing wrong is bad policy. From do no evil to this...

My comment focused on Google because that's what OP is about, but I wouldn't single them out here. I think it's largely a matter of scale / compliance. There have been many posts here on HN about individuals and companies "begging" (their words not mine) Apple to reconsider a decision regarding their account. I don't have any experience with Meta, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was also a fully automated, no recourse black box.

For this reason I’m as diversified as possible while still maintaining some level of convenience

I try and not depend on a single vendor for everything and I don’t use the same email for all services - with auto email forwarding and password managers there’s just no reason to

My services are spread across Apple, Google, and other third party services for other email, storage, music, etc

I’m trying to think of what it would be like if this happened to me and it’d be annoying for sure, but not catastrophic

I do recommend having your own domain for email for certain accounts - I don’t do it for all services because sometimes it’s just easier to say email@gmail.com vs risking typos etc with a custom domain

I still use main stream services of course, I’m not that hardcore and like convenience like I said, but so what I can to avoid these types of headaches

Reply on news.ycombinator.com