What is happening with Google? Seems there have been quite a number of
"Google broke it" stories flying around - or am I just seeing
confirmation bias as my negative experiences of Google increase
daily. Search is awful. It can't deliver mail reliably. Is Google
broken inside and turning into a hostile entity?
Among other things, what's happening with Google is the same thing that happens with Facebook and Apple and so on. They got too big, and they don't care, so there are few to no humans involved in human-facing, human-affecting decisions. Humans don't scale well or cheaply, so they automate. Things go sideways as a result. No one cares, because they're too big to have to care about this anymore, and they've switched into parasitic extraction of revenue instead of caring.
And, of course, because they're so huge, any problem that affects a "tiny fraction" of their user base affects a whole lot of people.
They have the resources to not have these problems. That's the bit that should be leading to barbarians at the gates, but, isn't.
> They have the resources to not have these problems.
I'm not sure they do have the resources. We're talking about companies with a user base larger than literally any country on Earth.
The basic problem is that these companies are taking on problems that nobody should ever take on. "Mass curation" is not a problem that can be solved by anyone, and not a thing that should be attempted by anyone. This is why we need personal freedom and not global gatekeepers.
Well I said X because it doesn't really matter. I'm very confident that my argument is true for X=100, and it's probably true for notably smaller numbers. I don't need exact statistics to know that it's much much less than 3.5 million.
And this isn't about a deep check for every single update, this is about deeper checking in case of blocks and bans, which happen at a much slower rate.
Of course as the number of apps that are coddled or given special treatment gets smaller, the easier it gets to coddle or give special treatment to apps. But how does that help the Play Store overall? How is it fair that a few developers are given special treatment, while everyone else still suffers from the same arbitrary rejections?
Besides, the small decisions are collectively impactful too. Take 3 million apps, and add up all of their users. Multiple smaller apps may collectively have more users than 1 larger app.
It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
> It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
That's what they do now. I'm suggesting a massive expansion on what apps they treat better, because 'famous' is a very small group.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't treat all apps well. It's just that it's less clear how much that would cost.
What's clear right now is that they aren't even trying.
Also we probably shouldn't have 3 million apps to start with. I bet a lot of those are below even the lowest reasonable quality bar.
The AI dream we dreamed of is actually this kind of nightmare in ignorant hands.
If you are a false positive for Google bots, then you're toast.
Your ad income will vanish, you app will be forgotten and even your very email and associated data underneath is on the brink of lifetime ban.
This is the very essence of Google. If you are big enough as Google, you can swing a huge f* you gesture to the whole world of software developers.
"Don't be evil" - yeah right.
The very first thing Google makes use of their fat cutting-edge language models is banning ordinary people from the whole ecosystem for their tiniest fixable mistakes.
Google scales evil before they scale good. Always have been, always will be.
We as little software developers don't have any significant resource to sue the hell out of Google and they can get away with this pure evil every single day.
It seems like they are the worst example of the stereotype of a software developer. They make out that they are the best examples of technical prowess but not only are they not but they also have no people skills.
Just tried reporting a bug on Android Auto and the submit button is disabled with no error message or tooltip.
I guess their model is to do stuff for "free", don't really provide any useful customer support and keep your costs down. If people don't like it, they are in the wrong and are free to go elsewhere.
Eventually "free" loses its value when everything else is done so badly.
They are the other big player. So of course things happen there as lot of entities or nearly all of them actually deal with them. Doesn't mean their decisions or products aren't getting worse for users.
> Doesn't mean their decisions or products aren't getting worse for users.
Or at all, relatively. It can take only one heavy impact issue and the public will not care how large any of the numbers are and well things generally go (or, conversely, how poorly, i.e. coal power). Of course with a company at Google scale, there is gonna be a lot more than just one heavy impact issue in no time, and any human only has to really conflict with one of them to be thrown for a loop.
People are just really bad with big numbers and very empathetic with individual cases. The later is actually a really cool feature in humans, but it is an issue when it conflicts with the former.
That is all not to say that Google is doing right, here or in any other set of cases. You decide. I just noticed that the way people arrive at their judgement often suffers from the aforementioned dynamics.
Have you ever heard of fake competition? That's exactly it.
1. Have evil corp MS
2. See people getting negative vibes about it
3. Create a "don't be evil" corp
4. See people flee there
5. Close the cage.
In my anecdotal experience, there have been a few outrages a month over something Google has f-ed up on HN for years now. I'm not too happy with them, either, but you also have to factor in Google's size - at a billion users, they're bound to have a lot of unhappy ones, even if they would be perfect.
Lastly, HN has been successfully used for contacting Google support in the past, so this also increases the number of posts.
>also have to factor in Google's size - at a billion users, they're bound to have a lot of unhappy ones, even if they would be perfect
Sure, but the things that Google does to make some of their users unhappy and the total lack of recourse Google makes available to them are decidedly far from perfect. That some people are going to be unhappy no matter what is beside the point.
