Question here then, is when will we see a competitor enter the market who both cares about getting it right and is actually able to compete with google maps
Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.
I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.
Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).
Now, I'm enough of a fan of decentralization and the destruction of these massive sites with way too much control to say that I'm perfectly comfortable saying that they should be mandated to handle these things more sensibly and with more humans. That such a plan would have the side effect of breaking them up into vastly, vastly smaller pieces, causing an technological Cambrian explosion of various sites and diversity resulting in the parasites no longer being able to focus all their firepower on a very small set of targets, is for me a bonus, if not the main goal. However, I, and anyone who agrees with me on this, is rather clearly in the minority.
In the meantime, if we're going to have things the size of Google or Facebook, there simply is no solution where we all get human review whenever we ask for it, because instantly every spammer and abuser will ask for the human review. There just isn't a solution. It looks like there is an obvious solution when you consider "how will Google review this one application" but that's not the landscape Google faces. They have to solve the problem of how to deal with the entire landscape of requests they face at once.
"Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported $112.1 billion in profit for the three months ending in June."
Ah yes, they definitely can't afford it.
I genuinely cannot grasp how someone who is capable of 1. finding hackernews 2. creating an account 3. writing a coherent English comment, can come to such an absurdly wrong understanding.
Scammers generating things in fractions of a second is an incredibly well understood problem that affects every single surface of the earth that has a "submit" button. Even completely anonymous services have largely managed to solve this. Google Maps requires a verified account, meaning it's entirely solvable. It's a non-issue.
Give me $112.1 billion every 3 months and I'll solve it for you, no worries.
Which doesn't seem like such a bad idea now that I've said it out loud.
But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through