Comment by Someone1234
1 day ago
I've found that if you attach any pictures at all: rejected.
So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.
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
Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.
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).
This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.
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.
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It isn't about making a better product at this point. It is about cracking into the mindshare that makes people reach for software like google maps reflexively in the first place. That is far harder than the technological challenge. Almost impossible in the current era, arguably, with all the astroturfing.
Before Google maps, map services used to be super expensive. You can't compete with free beer. You would need to disrupt Googles main business first in order to even out the playing field.
Apple Maps maybe?
Apple Maps is much better in my experience. I've never had an update rejected.
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At least in my personal experience, Apple Maps is much worse at up to date business information than Google is
But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through
They are absolutely awful and won't accept even a correction of opening hours - when you are the owner of the business and registered as such with Apple.
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Apple Maps has Apple Ads and Apple Ads are awful.
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A competitor would be sabotaged by both Apple and Google, the masters of the only two mobile platforms we are allowed, and who collude.
Why would they fix it when you guys find workarounds to get it done anyway?
I bet they'd care if their data started going stale because nobody bothered to update it.
Because most people would stop on the first blockage.