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I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they harvest my data. But to have such terrible support for their services is absolutely ludicrous. I'

by Others 6y ago

I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they harvest my data. But to have such terrible support for their services is absolutely ludicrous. I've seen too many stories of people losing their content, email addresses, services they rely on, or livelihoods. All because Google is too cheap to provide a reasonable way for customers to talk to a person about their problem. I understand this is expensive and hard, but to be a company worth 100s of billions, and still neglect this is unacceptable. I think that there is a social responsibility that comes with running such a large and important web service, a responsibility that Google is neglecting.

maceurt 6y ago
It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.
- amiga_500 6y ago
  This is why they don't have to care. They have an effective monopoly.
- malka 6y ago
  youtube is a huge moneysink. not only would it be hard to build, it would never bring money. Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    To do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    > Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied. If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today. So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).
    - AlphaSite 6y ago
      Because then someone who doesn’t have Google’s money could actually compete. It wouldn’t become a huge exercise in dumping.
      - barry-cotter 6y ago
        If Google is subsidizing everyone else’s consumption of video, pricing it below market, that’s a good thing. Someone giving you free money or a discount you b didn’t even need to ask for is a good thing. Dumping out selling below cost harms no one but the seller.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        It hurts anyone where the product doesn't meet their needs, and their needs would be met if there were several healthy competitors.
        malka 6y ago
        it gives too much political power to Google. If google decide to ban you from youtube, you become non existent.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      I think the argument is that YouTube is keeping the "price" artificially low which makes competition untenable. If at some point YouTube "raises their prices" (starts paying out less/takes significant extra money from creators) then you could argue that they were engaging in predatory pricing. I don't think it's true, but if you squint right you might get that impression.
  - zarriak 6y ago
    How are you going to enforce antitrust upon something that costs 0 to consume and pays some people who post upon it? I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it? I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.
  - nl 6y ago
    Of course it's not a monopoly or moneysink. It's highly profitable ($5b a year in revenue and not huge costs given their peering agreements). TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    As a monopolopy punishment, they should make any video that is available on YouTube and other platforms (Vimeo, etc) redirect to the other platform. Now, all of these other sites get an influx of users. We'll see who built the better infrastructure. sorry, my alarm clock is ringing, better wake up from the dreaming.
- Razengan 6y ago
  YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for. They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.) Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.
  - joering2 6y ago
    Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5 billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don’t provide net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is “only” 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Use Youtube without an adblocker, they have a lot more than just simple text ads. Also, bandwidth is essentially free for Google beyond capital costs due to the fact they are peered with practically every ISP on earth (traceroute Google.com).
      - d1zzy 6y ago
        If it was "free" then everyone could do it. The fact that very few people have the capability to provide the connectivity Google provides points to the contrary.
        throwaway2048 6y ago
        I never said building the connectivity was free, In fact I said the opposite.
    - nl 6y ago
      Google has backbone peering agreements because they bought huge amounts of fibre in the 2001 and 2008 crashes. They don't really pay for bandwidth in the way you are thinking about it.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  I don't think Google is too far ahead. You don't have to compete with all of YouTube. I think LTT has the right idea with FloatPlane. If you can siphon off premium users that are willing to pay for premium channels you're getting the most valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users). IMHO anyone starting or running a video content business should be viewing YouTube as a great way to externalize costs while starting up and as a way to generate some revenue off users that aren't willing to pay once you're established. The goal from day 1 should be to build a following and then to move all your premium users to another platform.
  - chii 6y ago
    > valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users). doubt. The most valuable part of the system is the large audience. Youtube's advertising dollars is vastly bigger than any of the premium content from other places. Unless the new premium platform is also powered by advertising and tracking, and selling of demographic data about the audience for targeted ad campaigns. There's very little that can currently compete with short-form video content for the masses.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    Microsoft tried to siphon off the gamers with Mixer. Paid significant amounts of talent, built a reasonably good technical platform, leveraged Xbox, and gamers and game livestreaming are definitely one of the most profitable parts of YouTube for Google. It didn't succeed. If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  For a large number of Youtube content creators, it's not the platform, it's the monetization opportunity.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Vimeo? DailyMotion? LiveLeak?
  - xvedejas 6y ago
    Facebook?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I've looked at https://lbry.tv/ https://lbry.tv/ recently. It seems pretty decent for YouTube replacement. One thing that they have is an automatic system to copy over your YouTube catalog and upload it to lbry.
- CapricornNoble 6y ago
  The people behind PornHub need to make a "PeopleHub" site for hosting non-pornographic content. Use the same business model, which seems to work well for the "Pro-Am" content creators on PH. That, or BitChute needs to finally release a mobile app.
  - dbspin 6y ago
    BitChute is a cesspit of genuinely hateful and extremist content. That alone keeps away a majority of creators and viewers. It's like a silo school for kids who've been expelled from all the other schools in the area. Only in this case the bad kids are advocating genocide and racewar.
- fsflover 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
cloudking 6y ago
They have Google One subscription which gives you direct support. It's hard to scale free support to billions of users.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Yes but its not that billions of users have this kind of problem or at least of this magnitude. But do they care? Probably not... they are an basically an advertising platform with chaotic products that suddently are cut off and so on...
- falcolas 6y ago
  This begs the question: should they be offering a service they are unable to support? Or perhaps we should shut up and be content they offer the service at all, no matter the impact to a “minority” of lives?
  - thelittleone 6y ago
    I just went through password recovery for my 10 year old sons gmail account. They ask a few security questions then ask for the recovery email address. It sends a login code to the recovery address. I input that code back on gmail site and it says “sorry we could not recover your account”. Why send the code to the recovery email address if it’s not going to work?
    - qroshan 6y ago
      10 year olds can't have gmail account. If your son entered the correct date of birth, it is permanently lost
    - roryokane 6y ago
      There is a dead sibling comment by qroshan that gives a likely reason: > 10 year olds can't have gmail account. If your son entered the correct date of birth, it is permanently lost
  - pixl97 6y ago
Non24Throw 6y ago
I’m not speaking on behalf of Google and I’m only speculating, but I think what you’re proposing could increase the per-user cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate their entire revenue model and put them out of business If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months because their Wifi is down and they think it’s Google’s problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue) Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a paying relationship directly with the customer, so it’s trivial to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a minor and unarticulated fee
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  If a business can't survive treating humans like humans, perhaps it shouldn't exist.
  - Non24Throw 6y ago
    Again not speaking for Google and only speculating without any inside information on the details of this subject, but: If Google didn’t exist because only customer-paid business models were permitted for the services they provide, you would be cutting the vast majority of humanity off from essential communications and information services, and they would only be available to the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nations People in the Philippines for example have the same access to Google that you have (assuming they’ve paid to load enough data onto their phone that week, which some of them can’t afford, or they have access to wifi, which most of them don’t), and I think that isn’t just amazing but is one of the greatest boons to humanity that we’ve ever seen That would never have happened if Google was required to provide human customer support to every user, and if that changed today Google would very likely have no choice but to scale their entire business back to only being accessible to the top n% wealthiest people (or go out of business) There are a few billion people in less-wealthy nations who wouldn’t even be capable of paying Google, not only because of poverty but also for simple lack of the required financial infrastructure that you and I take for granted
justAnotherNET 6y ago
You love them, and they see you as little more than a data source to be farmed.
tmpz22 6y ago
What's interesting is this generally doesn't happen with the federal government. You can always call someone, or go into an office somewhere, or find someone up the chain in municipal / local / state offices to get something solved. It may take a very long time, but it gets solved. And that scales to at least 300 million users. Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet).
- Mirioron 6y ago
  >Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet). Even if they could, they would randomly discontinue the money 3 years down the line. But I think comparing Google and the government in this sense isn't quite appropriate. Google is trying to make a profit. They try to keep their costs low. Automating customer support is one of these things, even if this customer support is poor. I'm just not sure this will work out in the long run. People know Google has bad customer service and I'm sure this has limited them in some way. I'm also sure that it's going to limit them more on the future. Would you want to jump on board this new Google service if there's a good chance that the service might get discontinued or you might have trouble with your account and no way to get help? I think Amazon is a much better company to compare to. Amazon has somehow made it work. Their customer service is great and this means that people won't worry as much about trusting things to Amazon.
  - myopenid 6y ago
    Amazon has competitors, Google doesn't.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  The federal government has 330 million users and tax revenues of about $ 3.5 trillion, while YouTube has 2 billion active users and only $ 15 billion in revenue. So $ 7.5 per user for YouTube, but $ 10600 per user for the US federal government. Edit: If you only look at the number of channels, which is only 31 million, you are at $ 483 per channel for YouTube.
IshKebab 6y ago
Yeah they can get away with it because for 99.9% of people their services work fine and they don't need support. But it is pretty annoying when gmail starts randomly losing emails and all you can do is join a thread on their support forum with 100 other people saying "yeah this happens to me too, it's definitely a bug in their software and it's easily reproducible." with no response from Google. https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016 https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016

by Others 6y ago

maceurt 6y ago

It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.

amiga_500 6y ago
This is why they don't have to care. They have an effective monopoly.
malka 6y ago
youtube is a huge moneysink. not only would it be hard to build, it would never bring money. Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  To do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch
- d1zzy 6y ago
  > Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied. If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today. So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).
  - AlphaSite 6y ago
    Because then someone who doesn’t have Google’s money could actually compete. It wouldn’t become a huge exercise in dumping.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      If Google is subsidizing everyone else’s consumption of video, pricing it below market, that’s a good thing. Someone giving you free money or a discount you b didn’t even need to ask for is a good thing. Dumping out selling below cost harms no one but the seller.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        It hurts anyone where the product doesn't meet their needs, and their needs would be met if there were several healthy competitors.
      - malka 6y ago
        it gives too much political power to Google. If google decide to ban you from youtube, you become non existent.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I think the argument is that YouTube is keeping the "price" artificially low which makes competition untenable. If at some point YouTube "raises their prices" (starts paying out less/takes significant extra money from creators) then you could argue that they were engaging in predatory pricing. I don't think it's true, but if you squint right you might get that impression.
- zarriak 6y ago
  How are you going to enforce antitrust upon something that costs 0 to consume and pays some people who post upon it? I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it? I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.
- nl 6y ago
  Of course it's not a monopoly or moneysink. It's highly profitable ($5b a year in revenue and not huge costs given their peering agreements). TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.
- dylan604 6y ago
  As a monopolopy punishment, they should make any video that is available on YouTube and other platforms (Vimeo, etc) redirect to the other platform. Now, all of these other sites get an influx of users. We'll see who built the better infrastructure. sorry, my alarm clock is ringing, better wake up from the dreaming.
Razengan 6y ago
YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for. They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.) Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.
- joering2 6y ago
  Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5 billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don’t provide net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is “only” 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Use Youtube without an adblocker, they have a lot more than just simple text ads. Also, bandwidth is essentially free for Google beyond capital costs due to the fact they are peered with practically every ISP on earth (traceroute Google.com).
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      If it was "free" then everyone could do it. The fact that very few people have the capability to provide the connectivity Google provides points to the contrary.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        I never said building the connectivity was free, In fact I said the opposite.
  - nl 6y ago
    Google has backbone peering agreements because they bought huge amounts of fibre in the 2001 and 2008 crashes. They don't really pay for bandwidth in the way you are thinking about it.
donmcronald 6y ago
I don't think Google is too far ahead. You don't have to compete with all of YouTube. I think LTT has the right idea with FloatPlane. If you can siphon off premium users that are willing to pay for premium channels you're getting the most valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users). IMHO anyone starting or running a video content business should be viewing YouTube as a great way to externalize costs while starting up and as a way to generate some revenue off users that aren't willing to pay once you're established. The goal from day 1 should be to build a following and then to move all your premium users to another platform.
- chii 6y ago
  > valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users). doubt. The most valuable part of the system is the large audience. Youtube's advertising dollars is vastly bigger than any of the premium content from other places. Unless the new premium platform is also powered by advertising and tracking, and selling of demographic data about the audience for targeted ad campaigns. There's very little that can currently compete with short-form video content for the masses.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Microsoft tried to siphon off the gamers with Mixer. Paid significant amounts of talent, built a reasonably good technical platform, leveraged Xbox, and gamers and game livestreaming are definitely one of the most profitable parts of YouTube for Google. It didn't succeed. If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.
bdcravens 6y ago
For a large number of Youtube content creators, it's not the platform, it's the monetization opportunity.
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Vimeo? DailyMotion? LiveLeak?
- xvedejas 6y ago
  Facebook?
ALittleLight 6y ago
I've looked at https://lbry.tv/ https://lbry.tv/ recently. It seems pretty decent for YouTube replacement. One thing that they have is an automatic system to copy over your YouTube catalog and upload it to lbry.
CapricornNoble 6y ago
The people behind PornHub need to make a "PeopleHub" site for hosting non-pornographic content. Use the same business model, which seems to work well for the "Pro-Am" content creators on PH. That, or BitChute needs to finally release a mobile app.
- dbspin 6y ago
  BitChute is a cesspit of genuinely hateful and extremist content. That alone keeps away a majority of creators and viewers. It's like a silo school for kids who've been expelled from all the other schools in the area. Only in this case the bad kids are advocating genocide and racewar.
fsflover 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

cloudking 6y ago

They have Google One subscription which gives you direct support. It's hard to scale free support to billions of users.

tartoran 6y ago
Yes but its not that billions of users have this kind of problem or at least of this magnitude. But do they care? Probably not... they are an basically an advertising platform with chaotic products that suddently are cut off and so on...
falcolas 6y ago
This begs the question: should they be offering a service they are unable to support? Or perhaps we should shut up and be content they offer the service at all, no matter the impact to a “minority” of lives?
- thelittleone 6y ago
  I just went through password recovery for my 10 year old sons gmail account. They ask a few security questions then ask for the recovery email address. It sends a login code to the recovery address. I input that code back on gmail site and it says “sorry we could not recover your account”. Why send the code to the recovery email address if it’s not going to work?
  - qroshan 6y ago
    10 year olds can't have gmail account. If your son entered the correct date of birth, it is permanently lost
  - roryokane 6y ago
    There is a dead sibling comment by qroshan that gives a likely reason: > 10 year olds can't have gmail account. If your son entered the correct date of birth, it is permanently lost
- pixl97 6y ago

Non24Throw 6y ago

I’m not speaking on behalf of Google and I’m only speculating, but I think what you’re proposing could increase the per-user cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate their entire revenue model and put them out of business If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months because their Wifi is down and they think it’s Google’s problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue) Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a paying relationship directly with the customer, so it’s trivial to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a minor and unarticulated fee

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
If a business can't survive treating humans like humans, perhaps it shouldn't exist.
- Non24Throw 6y ago
  Again not speaking for Google and only speculating without any inside information on the details of this subject, but: If Google didn’t exist because only customer-paid business models were permitted for the services they provide, you would be cutting the vast majority of humanity off from essential communications and information services, and they would only be available to the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nations People in the Philippines for example have the same access to Google that you have (assuming they’ve paid to load enough data onto their phone that week, which some of them can’t afford, or they have access to wifi, which most of them don’t), and I think that isn’t just amazing but is one of the greatest boons to humanity that we’ve ever seen That would never have happened if Google was required to provide human customer support to every user, and if that changed today Google would very likely have no choice but to scale their entire business back to only being accessible to the top n% wealthiest people (or go out of business) There are a few billion people in less-wealthy nations who wouldn’t even be capable of paying Google, not only because of poverty but also for simple lack of the required financial infrastructure that you and I take for granted

justAnotherNET 6y ago

You love them, and they see you as little more than a data source to be farmed.

tmpz22 6y ago

What's interesting is this generally doesn't happen with the federal government. You can always call someone, or go into an office somewhere, or find someone up the chain in municipal / local / state offices to get something solved. It may take a very long time, but it gets solved. And that scales to at least 300 million users. Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet).

Mirioron 6y ago
>Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet). Even if they could, they would randomly discontinue the money 3 years down the line. But I think comparing Google and the government in this sense isn't quite appropriate. Google is trying to make a profit. They try to keep their costs low. Automating customer support is one of these things, even if this customer support is poor. I'm just not sure this will work out in the long run. People know Google has bad customer service and I'm sure this has limited them in some way. I'm also sure that it's going to limit them more on the future. Would you want to jump on board this new Google service if there's a good chance that the service might get discontinued or you might have trouble with your account and no way to get help? I think Amazon is a much better company to compare to. Amazon has somehow made it work. Their customer service is great and this means that people won't worry as much about trusting things to Amazon.
- myopenid 6y ago
  Amazon has competitors, Google doesn't.
allendoerfer 6y ago
The federal government has 330 million users and tax revenues of about $ 3.5 trillion, while YouTube has 2 billion active users and only $ 15 billion in revenue. So $ 7.5 per user for YouTube, but $ 10600 per user for the US federal government. Edit: If you only look at the number of channels, which is only 31 million, you are at $ 483 per channel for YouTube.

IshKebab 6y ago

Yeah they can get away with it because for 99.9% of people their services work fine and they don't need support. But it is pretty annoying when gmail starts randomly losing emails and all you can do is join a thread on their support forum with 100 other people saying "yeah this happens to me too, it's definitely a bug in their software and it's easily reproducible." with no response from Google. https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016 https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016