Comment by esja
5 years ago
The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.
5 years ago
The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.
Counter-example - Amazon. You can reach someone at Amazon and they are ginormous too.
Counter-counter example, even if you do reach someone at Amazon they're not necessarily going to do anything useful.
I've had a problem with my Amazon account for years now, after Amazon billed me (on my seller account) for something they shouldn't have.
After I complained, they agreed to refund it. Except the refund never arrived.
Asked many times over the years "WTF?", and someone always promises to look into it after agreeing they can see the problem.
Never to be heard from again. Same pattern has happened every single time (many times). Obviously, something about it puts it in the "too hard" basket... :/
Needless to say, I don't use Amazon's services much at all any more unless required for job purposes. And I steer people away from AWS for the same reason too.
Have you ever tried escalating? You can do that at Amazon, but not with Google.
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Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?
I agree: not true. The advantage of automation is you can do more for less which extends the reach in wealth and services available to the human race. Automation is a beautiful thing and gmail being too big to service with human support is not understanding that we'll never have enough intelligence power to police every square inch of existence + the net if we rely solely on human intelligence.
Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91TRVubKcEM
Automation is a form of capital. In an economic system that has conditions for a runaway positive feedback loop of accumulation of capital, in the long term, it benefits primarily those who own the capital. Specifically, it allows them to collect more economic rent from it, and share less with the rest.
Taken to its logical conclusion, when everything is automated, the people who own the automation don't actually need the rest of the population at all - it becomes redundant. Of course, the "redundant" population might have different ideas about itself...
I don't think anyone is proposing that moderation rely solely on humans. The question is about machine learning with human backup/appeals vs. Google's approach of machine learning with no appeals.
Depends on how much of that wealth is captured and how it is distributed after it is captured.
If a huge amount of wealth is created and 90% of it is captured and the vast majority of it is distributed in share price/dividends then increasing inequality can really fuck up society even while GPD rises.
But you'll have the option of switching to one of those other companies.
You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.
That's like saying a restaurant can't choose not to serve a billion people even though it only has enough capacity to seat and make food for 20: if you can't provide legitimate service for everyone, you need to not allow more people. The core problem here is that users keep signing up for Google services without being informed correctly ahead of time why that's idiotic, and the only fix for this is going to be regulatory: either Google needs to change how they handle banning people (there should be some law that if they accepted responsibility to store someone else's data that they have some minimum retention time for it letting you access it or something), come up with a working appeals process (and ensure that they have enough employees to handle the expected appeal load before either signing up new accounts or banning old ones), or they need to be forced to have a giant sticker on the box with a skull and crossbones on it which says that the moral equivalent of the surgeon general needs you to be informed of the serious risks that are associated with using this ridiculous service offering.
Then lets regulate size if the market is going to push companies towards inhumane choices.