Comment by benlivengood
5 years ago
> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.
They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages.
Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam.
Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world.
So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places.
How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
I don't think there are a lot of development world people posting on HN so it's all good /s
> How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level.
For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.
> There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is wasted trying to re-register their new email with every single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer, youtuber, etc.
The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more humans or not.
The problem is no different than their content moderation problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.