>The core reason it happened... this place doesn't qualify to be on the map in the first place and it thus confuses the system.
>The secondary reason... the name of a feature is supposed to be the name and nothing more.
>A real estate agency qualifies to be on the map. Google also lets certain professionals to be on the map, with realtors being one such professional.
>This is neither of those, this is a "team". It's not allowed on the map anymore than the team or shift I'm on at my job.
>Here's the exterior. As you can see the name of the agency is "Summit Sotheby's International Realty", that's on the map at https://goo.gl/maps/cVEtvvRqCnJq5aEJ8.
>Other than the agency, all that then qualifies to be at this location are listings for individual realtors. So a listing that says "Cindy Wallace" and nothing more in the title is allowed. Instead we have her trying to keyword stuff her listing with Park City Utah Real Estate - Cindy Wallace Team. She also uses the category of Real Estate Agency when she isn't one, she needs to use the Real Estate Agents category. Probably doesn't work the trend of trying to represent your "team" as it's own agency.
>It's pretty common for people to not follow the rules and then complain that the algorithms don't do what they want. Follow the rules and the algorithms will then work.
If what this reddit comment is saying is correct, it seems to me to mean that Google's business reviews are unreliable information.
The complaint is not that "The Fisher Group" should be on the map instead of "Summit Sotheby's". The complaint is that reviews which used to be attached to one agent (Stan/Ben Fisher) are now attached to a different agent (Cindy Wallace). Apparently this happened because two different Google Business accounts (one that Stan/Ben Fisher had had for years, and one that Cindy Wallace just created) got merged into one. That seems to me to be a problem for two reasons:
(1) How can Google not comprehend the idea of multiple business accounts at the same address?
(2) How can Google merge a newly created Google Business account with one that has existed for years without checking with the owner of the one that has existed for years? Saying "well, the person who set up the new account made a mistake" is not a good answer.
Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not customers, they're just users whose data Google wants to sell. But maybe if enough people get the idea that Google is simply incapable of providing accurate data on businesses and reviews, and stop depending on Google for that information, and word of that gets around, Google might start thinking that maybe they need to do something. (Not that I'll be holding my breath.)
> Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not customers
We’ve been told over and over and over and over again we are somehow paying with our data even after they refuse any other form of payment, so this seems like a meaningless distinction.
You definitely do pay. Your data is used to target yourself with ads, which advertisers pay a lot for.
Even if you don’t click on ads, anytime you search for something to buy, those ads you see force the merchant you ultimately purchase from to have to buy defensive ads. Those costs get passed back to you in a roundabout way. So google gives you free stuff with one hand and reaches into your back pocket with the other. It’s great because then you have no idea the true cost of that free thing you got.
I think the meaning of OP was they are not paying explicitly, and in that don’t have much contractual entitlement to receive support.
“Paying in data” is a euphemism that we are used for the positive externality we provide when we allow being surveilled on our usage of their system. This is not an explicit transaction, and buried in information asymmetries, corp-speak, abstract terms-of-service banners and whatnot.
Right, so why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect? You won’t even allow me to pay for my own fucking ad slots to get you out of my computer? Seems like... not very neighborly behavior.
Anyway you can see the lack of “support” with the black hole they call end-user product feedback.
> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect
Because "respect" in this case costs money. And because they can, since precisely the transaction is so tacit. It might take a few more decades until we can make explicit the nature of data and surveillance based transactions. Imagine if your grocery store's loyalty card was used in a way that required saying "do you want to sell the information of what you bought today for $x.xx?" or "you are paying %x more today for this product because we were able to calculate it with the data you or people like you provided in the past, which shows you would pay for it".
I think it is obvious the billions of profit ads businesses are making is not matching their value to the humanity or the productivity of the company. It is a monopolistic game with economies of scale on these little externalities, unpriced transactions that creates that sweet margin. In that scale, you are almost nothing, while "respecting" you doesn't work well. Unless there is PR pressure or a reduction to product usage, there is absolutely no incentive to be better in that regard, while there is all the incentive to grow the userbase, grow the margins, grow the surveillance.
> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect?
The people they are treating with such disrespect are not customers, just users. That's because Google refuses to even give them the chance to be customers, even though, as you say, they are making Google a lot of money.
Them not being customers doesn't seem like it absolves Google of responsibility. If Google decided to always replace Pepsi with Coke or something similar they'd be in a huge controversy with possible legal ramifications even absent any formal relationship with Coke.
> Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not customers, they're just users whose data Google wants to sell.
It might sound different, but it's really not. For years the Norwegian state colleted data on certain groups and individuals for Communist activity. When some of them understood what was going on, they naturally wanted to see the information being collected. Soon it became a campaign called "I want to see my folder."
And this is essentially what Google has. They have folders on people whose information they have mined. Perhaps they may sell it, but it remains questionable whether they even have the right to sell other people's data, due to confidentiality.
Now, of course, perhaps Google has acquired some permission to do this, and perhaps even user permission, but then it should be obvious that Google is indeed getting the assets from a voluntary customer, and that some kind of exchange is going on, that should be valuable for both parties.
Even if Google has the right to mine those data, the people being mined are obviously "paying" Google, or being useful to Google, which the act of paying essentially is. Thus they're essentially giving up something, to get something else. That should entitle them to at least some measure of support, and some measure of fairness when it comes to your own data and how your organizational structure is modelled.
That's facile. The system is designed so that in the aggregate, users will not treat this review information as unreliable. It doesn't matter that a tiny percentage of users have the wherewithal to assess it properly.
The users will not treat the review information as unreliable, you say. But that is no indication of the information's actual reliability, is it? Like saying an unreliable politician is seen as reliable by the people. Yeah, he fooled the voters. Yeah, he's still unreliable in truth.
The local yellow pages made the business pay about €1000 to be listed (could be quite a bit more depending on the category). Google may have numerous issues but it doesn't require you to pay one month of income.
Once upon a time I had a business phone line. It came with a free Yellow Pages listing in the category of my choice. If I wanted a display ad it was more, but the listing itself was included in the slightly higher price I paid for having a business line instead of a home line.
I don't know about minimum effort. Some of Google's product teams have focused their best work on limitations that don't make sense. An example: It takes a lot of work to build an entire app ecosystem for Android Auto, only to disable the whole f'n thing if the end user disables Google Voice.
Exactly, Google prefers to automate this sort of thing. Youtube has similar problems and it's equally as impossible to reach a human being to get the problem sorted out.
But it didnt need to be updated too much since the data had integrity in the first place. Sure, updates are needed since ... changes in the real world so there were yearly issues for that.
Regardless, we live in a time with more possibilities, we can do updates but why loose corectness? With Google it’s not just an isolated case
And it will be users, not business owners, who decide whether that matters. So far users have accepted everything from Yelp's bullying to DoorDash's grabbing of online real estate, to Amazon's army of fake reviews.
Seems like a procrustean ontology ill-suited for describing the how the actual world works. I'm disappointed that Google would try to jam people into these pre-designed groups.
Sure, why not? It’s not like Google cares what you put on your company’s homepage so why should they care what’s in that little panel? This group could call themselves a “full-stack acquisition service provider” (as so many companies on HN do) and that should be up to them.
Here, this team description is how they want to think of themselves, and how they want customers and potential customers to think of them. You could argue that doing something unusual differentiates them or you could think it makes it harder for customers to find them or know how to work with them but that’s their issue not Google’s.
I don’t think Google’s being malevolent here, but I don’t think I they are doing the right thing.
Perhaps another “Myths programmers think about...” is needed.
There is already a place for totally free-form user-defined data: web sites. This team is free to buy a domain, do SEO on it and put whatever they want there. It certainly is Google's issue when it's their database of business listings and related info.
I think this case demonstrates that it’s foolish for G to try to decide how businesses should represent themselves if their objective is to maintain a useful database.
It’s like having an address database and requiring that each address has a number and street. We have a post on that on HN every six months or so, and I’m glad for it.
Software is supposed to be designed for humans; humans shouldn’t have to contort themselves for the sake of software.
Why does that demonstrate it's foolish? I think the only thing it demonstrates objectively is that Google's business listings restrictions don't satisfy 100% of people, but there is no configuration of this service that would please 100% of people, including the configuration where there are no restrictions at all. This is a useful service because it organizes data, and enforces some data quality restrictions (no duplicates, no keyword-stuffing), not in spite of it.
This doesn't prove that people are having to contort themselves for software any more than that would be proved by Amazon not letting me list a ceiling fan in the video games category.
Once again, HN is the last-resort customer support line for Google. Oh well, upvoted. Embarrassing the company is the only way to get any slightly complex issue resolved.
I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015.
From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations.
One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. They automate the crap out of it and the automation mostly works (scrape structured data off websites, Google My Business, various aggregators, etc.) but it means there's no conceivable way you could provide customer support that will keep up with the volume of support requests because the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer... and there are only a dozen engineers on the team that owns stuffing all this data into Maps. And those engineers are supposed to be doing mostly feature work. Over time accuracy got better, but 95% accuracy, to say nothing of 99.9% accuracy, is unachievable to the point of being a non-goal.
One of this team's bigger time sucks was just other Google engineers complaining about inaccurate data. Someone would go to their favorite restaurant, notice the hours were off, or the business category was wrong, and file a ticket. Then the team would sometimes manually edit the listing to fix it. Sometimes they'd say "no, you have to deal with the same shitty data as all our customers". But that was just the requests coming in from a few thousand users who had access to the internal ticket system and new which component to file stuff under. (Incidentally: this is the origin of the Maps feature where you can now just directly edit a listing and if other users, agree, it gets published.)
So, yeah, there isn't really a scalable way to manage support requests. But HN works for some subset of cases, and I too upvote the cases that get complained about here.
EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.
I find a part of the problem to also be that it simply doesn’t have a good channel for many of the problems I find on the maps themselves.
Got a typo in a business listing, wrong opening hours, &c.? Sure, you can fix that.
Got a road segment slightly wrong? OK, you can straighten it out.
Any other case where the underlying map data or presentation is wrong? Nope, you can’t report it, and any attempt to report the issue by the channels that are available will fail to have any effect.
And that’s the problem, Maps just doesn’t seem to be interested in providing, y’know, maps. It’s focused on being a business directory instead.
Take https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australi... as an example: that pin and label on the map is almost 5km south of Navarre, because they seem to have taken the entire suburb area (which in rural areas is regularly many kilometres across) and picked a point on its boundary—I dunno, maybe the furthest point south, maybe just the start position of the polyline—rather than taking a sane point that represents where the town actually is (e.g. its post office) or even a midpoint in the suburb area.
When you look through rural areas you find a substantial fraction of the labels are wrong by several kilometres. Head south to the next town, Landsborough, and it’s marked 4km down the road from where it actually is. I’ve seen some places 10km off the mark.
I’ve attempted to report the Navarre case six or seven times over the last few years while living there, by three different ways (none of which is properly applicable), and it’s still stubbornly in the wrong place.
(Yes, I’m mentioning this here on the off chance that someone relevant will see it and pay attention.)
This might be the right time to suggest OpenStreetMaps. I turned to it after not being able to fix things in Google and endless advertising. OSM data is flaky... but you can fix it!
Amusingly, OSM apps can suffer from similar problems, because the way things are done vary across the world, and the software tends to at least start by being designed to work best with the way things are annotated in a particular area. I filed https://github.com/QwantResearch/qwantmaps/issues/65 because Qwant Maps was resolving “Navarre” to the centre of a rather large administrative boundary by that name, so that it’s 20km away from the village node that it should be using instead.
(That particular issue is partly resolved by OSM data changes that have happened since: it’s still using the administrative boundary, which is the wrong thing for it to do, but seven months ago someone added an admin_center to that boundary so that Qwant Maps drops the pin on the right point rather than the centre of the boundary—though it still zooms to include the whole boundary, which is much wider than it should zoom.)
One of the fundamental reasons Wikipedia works well is there's no profit in changing what an article says. Any time there is a motivation, the system falls apart and the article has to be protected and actively monitored.
Update: it worked! My brother just pointed out to me that Navarre is in the right place now, and Landsborough is too. Others that I didn’t mention aren’t fixed, though. As an example, Tooborac is labelled 6km south-west of the actual town.
you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations
If Google was a scrappy startup with a few dozen employees, people might be more sympathetic. But Google has hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal to fix the problem. It could purchase a small country and employ every person in that country to fix its problems. But Google won't admit that people can do what algorithms can't, and that's what causes Google to get so much hatred from the public.
As a person who works for a similarly-endowed company, let me tell you: no amount of money you can spend right now can give you qualified engineers you need to make every function of every business work perfectly. Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge.
And this is for positions that would increase the run rate or help make a business more profitable! But when it comes to businesses that are not profit centers - like maintaining business listings - I would expect those to run pretty lean. Google isn't a charity, after all.
> Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge.
As a happily employed engineer who has FAANG recruiter friends and gets scouted fairly regularly, I think you also forgot "and is willing to jump through the hoops you put in front of them".
Also, this doesn't sound like it needs to be an engineering problem. A customer support team could alleviate the workload. Even if its an internal-only, non-public support team, just people whose job it is to do the manual data scrubbing.
This sounds like a possible revenue opportunity as well. People would probably pay for the ability to ensure accurate data for their Places, which could also serve as a way for G to ensure the Place data is valid and meets their editorial guidelines. Don't know if this already exists or not but it sounds like it should.
Engineering is the resource you apply when you want to scale, as Google always does. The engineering they already have is doing the work of thousands (or perhaps orders of magnitude higher) of customer support people.
Paying people to manually scrub data is possible, but extremely expensive at scale. I assume that the folks in charge of the business are looking at the numbers very carefully to see what justifies that kind of very expensive personnel investment and what doesn't. Also, I suspect that a lot of people will be angry that they have to pay to correct Google's mistakes, especially if their competitors don't. That's not the kind of business model I'd want to be involved in.
I assume, then, that you would like to pay for long distance phone calls by the minute again, so that you can have a printed yellow pages that is about as accurate as Google is when it goes to press, but less accurate the day it's delivered?
The only businesses who care about the accuracy of their data are ones who depend on it to make money. In order for this to make sense, one has to deeply understand incentives.
It's kinda funny and sad that the reaction to "these companies shouldn't try to solve everything with software and invest in actual customer support infrastructure" is "but it's sooo hard to find engineers to solve all this automatically!". Which is exactly the point the parent comment made.
If I may ask you, because that's something I've wondered many times with Google: why are the docs and self-help support option so basic on most of these things?
I understand the idea of "automate it, it must scale", but especially then I'd expect the systems to add/correct/delete info to be super streamlined, the documentation to be very thorough and covering all business cases etc. Yet it feels like the opposite is true: the GUIs are generally sub-par and feel like "okay, we have a great API. Can you throw some GUI on it?", the documentation is short and often either outdated or did not cover certain cases in the first place, and "what to do if this doesn't solve your problem" is rare.
Is that "we want to be a platform, not a service provider" and meant to discourage end-users from using the system directly and pay a professional agency instead that handles the support issues? Because that's really the only explanation I've heard so far that makes some sense. It feels like Google is putting more manpower in developer relations than in customer relations and I've never understood why.
I've seen dozens of articles on this site about hiring practices from large technical companies, and Google in particular.
I don't remember seeing anything suggesting they even verify that the people they're hiring are capable of writing basic documentation, let alone that they appreciate the importance of it being complete, correct, and up to date.
Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes.
> Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes.
This just seems to be companies as a whole. Documentation is a low-status activity (no promotions or raises available for doing it) that still requires decent cognitive function, so it is not something you want to do when you are energized and ready to go nor something you can do when tired and not in the mood to work.
There are no automated tests to tell you that the documentation no longer works, so the engineers would need to periodically check. We have automated tests in code because engineers won't comprehensively check everything.
In my org we frantically document when an engineer gives notice. Otherwise, we can't even keep the URLs updated or maintain a running list of configuration variables.
There's a virtuous circle with documentation: if you start with something that's complete and correct, then when you make a change which is visible to the code's clients you can go and change the documentation in the same patch series, and check that this happens as part of the main code review.
Digging yourself out of the hole where your documentation is already wrong or incomplete is much harder: when you go to describe a change you might find that the thing you're changing isn't mentioned, or is described wrongly, or there is no terminology for the thing you need to talk about.
So you need everyone to take care that standards don't slip, which is why it's important to make the importance of documentation part of the company culture, and make sure every programmer is capable of doing their bit.
I don’t know about that. At my last employer we had one guy on DevRel and a big part of his job was making sure we had good documentation. When other teams complained, we first checked to see if the docs were good: If they were, we pointed them to the docs. If the docs were wrong, confusing, out-of-date or missing we’d apologize and fix the docs.
He didn’t get a promotion, but he did have a lot of positive visibility. When there was a round of layoffs, other teams lost engineers but we got to keep him.
There's a startup idea there. Be the company that makes excellent docs. Get all the other companies to pay your company to make and maintain their docs.
Once you start letting anyone edit, you have to solve a bunch of other problems: various kinds of spam, non-spam low quality edits, deconflicting manual edits with other data sources. The easy/default solution for most things is to have a trustworthy sources only (official website, Google My Business page, etc.) and a decision tree for choosing which one wins.
The Maps feature for editing listings was a ton of work spanning a bunch of teams over several months, but that kind of investment is made only after every other option has been exhausted because it's so slow and expensive and scales poorly relative to just ingesting more data and throwing ML at it.
Sure, giving everybody direct editing access isn't a good idea. I'm just surprised that so many somewhat user-interaction features feel sub-standard. The maps or gmail gui are super polished, so obviously there are people who do that kind of thing, but others feel rushed, like they were given to an intern that really wanted to leave for the weekend.
E.g. the Knowledge Boxes on SERPs. When I was invited to add/edit to them for a notable client a few months back, it was barely documented, cumbersome, error and response messages were vague and it felt like a proof of concept.
I guess I'm just wondering: is that by design, has someone tested that and figured out "if people feel like they're using ebay's dysfunctional interface, they'll spend more money on ads", or is it just that somebody gets a task "hey, add a form to edit that, please" and they're like "well, they didn't ask me to make it pretty and I really need to leave soon"?
Oh yeah I'd bet crappy UIs are just laziness/sloppiness/prioritization rather than malice. The glamorous frontend work that gets lots of design attention is the stuff that has billions of users.
I saw some A/B testing for ad engagement that drove UI decision making, but it was always short-term and related to search -- like, "we updated the model today, and users click on the ad 1% more often in the treatment group".
FWIW I was pretty much at the bottom of the totem pole so if there was some nefarious plot to provide crappy UIs I wouldn't've been in the loop anyway.
I wonder how much better Android would be as a platform if Google interviewer for good taste in API design and communication skills rather than whiteboard logic problems and advanced CS skills.
Did you think to check whether the new hire who can write a regex parser in his head can also design a library that other people want to use without screaming?
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth.
And why is that? Google is not a poor company, can't they add a separate data support team for Maps which is a pretty important application? Is Google that cheap?
Why should feature engineers work on data support? I understand they implement automatic validation for data, but in addition to that there should be a separate data team which checks data manually.
I can imagine. Google is a company of engineers that want to engineer things. The people that work there don't want to run a business, they want to make enough money to be able to engineer things and not worry about how to pay for that.
The idea of needing to roll out, manage, moderate huge teams of people to manually review data and make judgment calls would mean needing to take responsibility for the listings and needing to care about micro-accuracy. Google doesn't want to be the "documentation team of the world," they want to be the "automated documentation generator for the world." Because that's an interesting engineering problem. As soon as it becomes primarily a people problem, Google individuals would just rather work on other things all things considered.
Even if there is a business case for making this information more accurate, it's just a fundamentally different mindset. You can't hire your way into getting that work delegated very easily either when the mindset of "solve it once with code so that you don't need to solve it 5 billion times by hand" permeates the culture.
Anecdote: I once went to a mini golf / bar place and the Google Maps listing said it was closed for today only. I went in and the owner said they’re open. Once I got in, I saw dozens of Googlers were doing a team building event.
I suggested a edit to revert the “closed today” hours and sent a picture of the hours. The edit was somehow rejected immediately.
As a “local guide” who volunteers to improve listings of local businesses, this left a sour taste in my mouth.
I also don’t believe that out of the 50 Googlers who were there that day, not one tried correcting the “error”. This leads me to believe it was malicious.
The business owner probably put "closed for private event" or some such in structured data on the website or in Google My Business. Your edit was rejected because it conflicted with a highly credible recent update (the one from the business owner).
A lot of times, I would agree with you. In this case though, things might be a bit different. I'm not sure if you agree, but Google Maps has revolutionized physical location for a large portion of people today.
Democratizing a thing mainly involves scaling it, and scaling things rapidly is a difficult task. Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
> Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
So what you're saying is, there is this hugely valuable application that has "revolutionized" things for a large fraction of the population, but it's perfectly normal that Google can't be bothered to put more than a piddly number of people on it?
If it's really that valuable, Google should not handle it in this half-assed fashion. They should charge money for it, just like any other business that has something it knows is hugely valuable to a large number of people. But instead, they prefer to sell everyone's eyeballs to advertisers. How does this make sense?
Fuck no. Jesus Christ, thank god Google PMs have their heads on straight and don't listen to random people on the Internet. There is absolutely no way I'm going to give Google my annual W-2 for them to determine how much I should pay and if I'm not going to do that then whatever price they ask is going to be too high for a lot of people for whom this is useful.
I'm going to say this as a user. Google Maps is fucking fantastic. The team responsible for it should be proud:
* Free
* Great data - almost always accurate
* Editable - I can contribute
Genuinely an amazing product. And all these people on the Internet saying it's shite. No fucking way. It's fantastic. If you ever listen to these people for even a second, go and listen for half that time to folks on the street. They love your shit.
> I am with you on not being willing to pay anything for the service.
What if it were not offered for free? What if you had to pay a subscription of, say, $10 a year? Would you pay for it then?
If your answer is yes, then it's not that you're not willing to pay anything for it; you are simply taking advantage of the fact that right now you don't have to. But the fact that you don't have to is a side effect of the ad-supported business model, which IMO is doing a lot of damage that could be avoided if only Google would take the simple step that businesses have taken since time immemorial, of charging its users directly for the services they use.
If your answer is no, then evidently this application is not as great and wonderful and useful as people are claiming it is, since it isn't even worth a $10/year subscription, i.e., about 1/10 the price of Netflix.
Google Maps is universal, dude. The fact that you can't even comprehend $10 being a lot of money is amazing. Truly truly amazing. But I must say I fully expected it.
> The fact that you can't even comprehend $10 being a lot of money is amazing.
The fact that you can't even comprehend that to anyone who is posting here on HN, $10 is not very likely to be a lot of money, is what I find truly amazing. Not to mention your blithe acceptance of something like Google Maps being "universal, dude", as though it were a law of physics that such complicated and useful applications will just appear for free, or that there couldn't possibly be any downsides to such a state of affairs.
Not really, they are comparing them in relative terms to a service that loses some capabilities for increased accuracy.
They are also complaining that someone wants to run a public utility and be the centralized point for information but also doesn't want to pay enough to make that public utility accurate.
Not saying that its even feasible to do so, but that's why we pool funds for utilities - we all use them and we all have an incentive to make them not shit.
There's a pretty good argument for making Google Maps a utility, but not for a long while yet. Maps adds new features at a pretty impressive clip. Once it's in maintenance mode in a decade or two, it should be nationalized ;)
"Almost always" when you have billions of data points means millions, or even tens of millions, of wrong data points. That doesn't seem great to me. It certainly won't seem great to all the people and businesses whose data is wrong and who have no way of getting it corrected. Which is exactly the point of the article this discussion is about.
> all these people on the Internet saying it's shite
We are saying no such thing. I agree that it is a hugely useful application. I just think it would be even more useful, not to mention less damaging to all the people and businesses that are hit by the "almost" above, if it had at least some of its users as paying customers instead of being solely driven by Google's ad-supported business model.
Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money.
Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up).
> if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money
There's an easy solution to this: what economists call price discrimination. Basically, people who can afford to pay more, pay more, and people who can't afford to pay more, don't.
It looks like the Contributor program you describe could have been set up to do this.
This easy solution sounds very difficult. Also the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent. It's no longer a secret that they are the product, even non-technical people see Google as big brother now, but people still prefer not to have to use their credit card.
> the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent
Yes, I get that Google and Facebook and Twitter and friends have gotten people accustomed to having all these wonderful services that everyone loves to use somehow magically appear on the Internet for free. That doesn't mean it's actually free. It just means that the costs are hidden.
Which is all fine in and of itself: if everyone else wants to hand over their private data to be sold, sure, go ahead, do it. I don't even have a Twitter account, and while I have a Facebook account I almost never use it and have entered zero data beyond my name into its profile. I can't quite say the same about my Google account, since I do buy books and apps from Google Play, but it's as close as I can get it to zero data in its profile. So I at least have some way of limiting how much I am participating in the great selling of personal data.
However, I don't have a way of getting better service from Google for things that could be better services if those of us who want the better service were allowed to pay for it. That's one of the standard ways of doing price discrimination, and should be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with cloud services, or indeed anyone who has used an app with a freemium business model: service tiers. The lowest tier is the free one; the other tiers are progressively more expensive and provide more added functionality. But Google can't be bothered to do it for its hugely useful apps like Maps and search, and then they tell us how difficult it is to staff these hugely useful apps with enough engineering resources. It doesn't add up.
The vast majority of people in HN prefer free, too. It's frustrating to see whenever a relevant article from the WSJ or the NY Times is discussed, a significant number of posts are complaining about the paywall. Get all your news from spam-blogs if you want, but don't complain about people who are willing to pay for slightly better (in some dimensions at least) news sources.
> the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer
it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to make these changes. Fixing these kinds of things really shouldn't be something that engineers should have to do manually.
There are various ways for businesses to tell Google stuff -- structured data on their website, working with aggregators, Google My Business, etc.
The problem is that (a) business can mistakenly enter wrong data (b) businesses can lie (c) businesses can fail to enter any data (d) businesses can fail to update data.
Google can't let any random idiot with a smartphone edit Google Maps, and they also can't let any random idiot waste a potentially unlimited amount of customer support time on what might well be an erroneous change. So they came up with a thing where you can edit Maps but the edits only apply if some conditions that can be automatically checked are satisfied (recency, user edit quality track record, agreement among users, stuff like that). But building and validating that was a big project spanning quite a few teams and several months. The opportunity cost often isn't worth it for that (I don't know whether it was in this instance, either... but it is really cool IMO.)
> EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.
If we looked at a breakdown of whose info was accurate and whose was incorrect, there'd probably be some harmful biases in there, is that right? Isn't there some sense of responsibility here? Like, it's understandable how difficult it is to do this in a way where there aren't a small fraction of people being harmed, but that's not really a defense that they aren't causing harm. It seems like a defense along the lines of "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys."
There's no way around the precision/recall tradeoff. Every map and business listing ever created has this problem; either you carefully vet listings, in which case you miss lots and by the time you publish they're out of date anyway, or you publish whatever you've got and a lot of it is crap.
You have to pick some balance of precision and recall. The yellow pages and paper maps did the same thing. They were handmade so they aimed higher on precision and lower on recency/recall. (Imagine opening a new business the day after the Yellow Pages has gotten dropped off at everyone's front door. You're screwed for the next year or whatever.) Maps hasn't picked the wrong balance; it's just a different balance that as a user you have to understand and account for.
A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and letting people fix issues when they're being harmed by google maps's mistakes. When I said "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys," I wasn't arguing that it is in fact possible to do it the way google is, just better. The argument is that doing it with a different business model or just not doing it are also options. Who knows what emerges? Maybe there's an alternate universe out there where google introduced an automatically gnerated encyclopedia and wikipedia was relegated to an openstreetmaps-like background, while people on alternate-HN argue about how alternate-google simply can't do any better because of how fundamentally hard the problem is (and it is fundamentally hard, no argument there).
Google provides lots of ways for business owners to fix their listings, and even lets individuals directly edit Maps. The case in this post happened to slip through a crack. Cases like this can (and sometimes do) lead to improvements to the automation and tools available to businesses. But if Google had a help line for people to call, they'd incur a huge opportunity cost in engineering time that could be better spent on valuable new features than minor improvements in data quality.
There's a second dimension, cost. Google is essentially in the same business as the ancient yellow pages directories, just almost infinitely more automated and cheap. Those predecessors didn't just select a different trade-off, they had high quality vetting baked into their expensive manual process without even trying. But the customer who could in theory choose between the cheap and the vetting isn't the victim of substandard vetting, so there is no market mechanism to slow that race to the bottom.
I wasn't there so I can't argue with your experience, but the fact that engineering is so heavily involved seems like the crux of the issue.
These are fundamentally product and data management issues.
Why would an engineer need to be involved in updating a phone number?
Sure, in some cases a support issue may call into question fundamental architecture issues and require engineering to get involved.
But a good product management process can look at the volume of support requests and say "90% of these could be solved with features X,Y,Z and training a support team."
> From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations.
I mean, from one perspective, sure, it'd be nice if there were a team of thousands to handle this problem.
But from another perspective, you just said there were a dozen people staffed to handle a single feature of a single product. Out of how many features, out of how many products?
My first job was at a start up back in the comparison shopping era where our goal was to get every product for sale on the internet into one place. For several years, I was responsible for all of indexing and search; another engineer was responsible for everything related to the front-end, another for everything related to crawling and scraping, and a forth worked on a variety of projects. Four engineers to cover every store's inventory in the world.
So, you know, coming from that world, the idea that there are a dozen people responsible for just business hours is crazy.
(For completeness, our engineering team fluctuated as high as a dozen when the company was flush with investor cash, down to four for a long stretch when the company went bankrupt for awhile, and then up to a half dozen or so when the company was profitable for a span.)
Usually at Google, small teams are the norm (~5-10) people and they completely own features and products. I think OP mentioned their team was responsible for all data ingestion in Maps, not just business hours. That's not a small problem by any stretch of the imagination because of the consequences of getting it wrong.
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth.
This wouldn't matter if Google weren't a de facto monopoly.
If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing.
> If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing.
Yes, because businesses struggling for cash invest in support for people who aren't paying them...
Before google maps, there was yellow pages, tomtom, etc. Solutions in the market existed. If google wasn't subsidizing maps, the map-making race to the bottom might have found a different business model than "support people who aren't paying them." But google offers maps at a loss and now there's dramatically fewer viable business models in the space.
Businesses struggling for cash need to improve their product to cater to their customers. The users may be the people that go look up real estate agents. The customers are the real estate agents.
Google gets away with the quality level of their services because they are the information discovery monopolist.
Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail?
I think those two services are incredibly strong products and gmail is additionally a positive equalizing force, allowing much closer to everyone to participate in modern communications.
It’s maybe technically true that these problems would disappear if maps had to feed itself, but I think that would be a net negative for the world.
> Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail?
Hard to say for Maps. There were maps freely available before Google Maps, but they didn't look as nice and they didn't have Streetview and the routing services, and you couldn't embed them on your Website for free (well, paying with you visitor's data, really).
For Gmail? I feel like emails were more reliable before Google decided that any email is likely Spam unless it's sent by one of a dozen commercial providers. Gmail didn't jump ahead in features like GMaps did vs the existing systems, it had a nice web interface and came with a lot of free space in exchange for reading your emails to create a better profile for targeted ads, but that was pretty much it.
While gmail spam filtering was tightening, spam was also getting 50-100x “worse” as well.
I used to have no spam filtering at all on my mail (other than human visual grep). That was ok through 2003 and barely tenable up until about 2007. I then tried to run my own with SpamAssassin and the like. Around 2012 I folded and switched to running inbound mail through gmail. Life immediately got massively better. I almost never see spam and my own domain mail (outbound self-hosted, no commercial provider) gets through to gmail users just fine.
Yes, I get some false positives (ham categorized as spam). I probably have undetected false positives as well. It’s still 100% worth it as email was getting difficult to use previously.
Yes, spam was an issue, though at least for me commercially available filters made it more than manageable. Today, even with my addresses being on public sites for close to two decades, dnsbls and Thunderbird are enough to bring spam landing in my inbox down to 0-5/day, and about half of those are using AmazonSES, Sendgrid, Mailchimp etc (only mailchimp seems responsive to complaints), with something like 0-5 false positives per quarter.
Google false positives on the other hand are a pain in the butt. Even sending from one GSuite account to another on the same domain does not ensure delivery (but makes it much more likely than using a dedicated server that has low traffic to Gmail). I've adapted and now use my own Gmail account if I need to send email to Gmail users that is somewhat important.
> Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail?
Yes, because "free" collapses that entire market and makes it hard to ever get anything else, all while granting a massive amount of power to a company that is happy to break the ecosystem. GMail 1. makes it hard for any new email companies to get off the ground by making it hard to get income, while 2. making it hard for anyone (not an established major player) to successfully send email without it getting blackholed. That is, I blame GMail for the fact that I can't spin up my own mail server and send email and have people actually get it.
Perhaps put better: GMail and Google Maps did improve on what was then available, but in a way that also makes them dead ends for the entire industry, unable to improve beyond a certain point because of how they work while at the same time preventing anyone else from being able to make something better.
Yes, everyone who deals with Google keeps hitting this issue over and over again. It's impossible to get help for certain things. Two cases:
I have a bar/restuarant where we been waiting for the verification codes for over two months now. Been trying five times to receive the verification codes for "Google My Business". No one is receiving the codes, there is no other verification codes, emails go unanswered and there is no other way of contacting a human over at Google. Our business still has outdated details and we can get no control over it.
Second case is a friend who has a store next to a market. Someone added their phone number to the market, so since about a year ago, people phone her thinking she is the market, asking for information. She receives at least one call a day and have been trying to remove her number from the market since it happened the first time. She also tried everything, but to no avail.
It's so frustrating to deal with, but there is really no alternative...
Someone ported out my google voice number after getting my business card at DC24. I couldn't get anyone at google to help me out. Finally went thru my contacts on linkedin, found a guy I used to work with who was at google now. He was able to get someone to contact me at google about the issue and I got my number back.
Yelp exists?
Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly. Google should be free to deal with their properties as they see fit. If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize.
> Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly.
True; what makes them a monopoly is that they use their dominance in one market (web search) to make themselves "unfairly" dominant in other areas (maps).
> If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize.
Except that others are handicapped by Google. Example: Average customer wants to look up a business. So, they open their browser (Chrome, 70% of market) and search, which will go to Google because that's the default (ironically, using their dominance of browsers to push their web search), and search for the business, which will then pop up a nice big box at the top showing results from Google Maps. Of course, maybe Google Maps has bad data and Yelp has better data, but since Yelp isn't a Google product it'll be at best somewhere down in the normal web results, not pushed front and center.
Monopolies are not about market share; they're about what you do with that market share.
I am half serious: maybe HN needs a “tech support” feaute, kind of like “show hn” and “ask hn” exist now. If people are going to use HN for last-ditch tech support, there should at least be an official method.
Even though I love Google, this is increasingly getting scary. More than hackers getting into my account, I am actually more afraid of getting locked out by Google one day.
An year or so back I created a Google account for my five year old daughter to be used on a Nexus 7 2012 (yes, it still works). Recently, I reset the device and tried logging in with my daughter's account but had forgotten the password. In spite of giving the recovery address correctly and entering the OTP that was sent, Google kept telling me it couldn't confirm if I was the owner of the account.
Since this is a new account I don't have a problem but what if this happened to my main account?
The current internet giants got huge monopolistic like power that many dictators of many countries would envy. The set their rules, execute them, and judge them.
Even having a decent map listing is sometimes make it or break it in competitive industries such as hotels or restaurants.
I believe once you become a platform there should be an independent nano-courthouse where you can appeal. Today being rejected or having listing hijacked on Apple, Amazon, or Google platform is equivalent to the economical death penalty for many individuals.
It should be possible to pay $100 by individuals and appeal to an independent nano-courthouse if the original platform rejects or blocks you. If you win, the appeal fee is refunded and the platform has to cover the cost. If you lose, your $100 is gone.
One of the main problems with these giant mega corporation is that they don't have the bandwidth to interact with people and there is no recourse for people when things to wrong. Corporations are negligent by design and the worst part is that the government allows them to keep sweeping problems under the carpet at no cost to them.
Because of their scale, corporations are harming millions of people in thousands of different ways through their neglect but because the level of neglect is subtle when mentioned in a court room setting, these corporations are not being punished for the real damage that they cause.
This is not a "giant mega corporation" issue, it's a Google issue, because they simply do not prioritize customer support at all.
Now I'm neither an Apple fan nor Microsoft fan (don't like their business decisions at all), but I have been required to deal with their customer support at times. It's actually possible to get your hands on a real human to get support, so you can solve stuff.
> Now I'm neither an Apple fan nor Microsoft fan (don't like their business decisions at all), but I have been required to deal with their customer support at times. It's actually possible to get your hands on a real human to get support, so you can solve stuff.
Did you actually get customer support for Apple Maps? Because they've been completely ignoring my updates to their mistakes in my area and have been pretty much the same as Google in that respect. Except that at least Google Maps are correct.
It is, because they have almost a monopoly on maps. Apple maps can be an alternative, but only to iOS users, which is far from the majority of people on earth.
So they don't actually need to prioritize customer support. Why would they, there is no real alternative ?
They literally own half the internet but they are too cheap to give any kind of support to paying customers. What is all the technical excellence good for when they're unwilling and unable to present a human face?
When you do manage to reach a real person though, more often then not you get to a point where even that real person is constrained by the system within which they operate and they are not able to help you.
At this point Google has a monopoly on the search business.
When their algorithms hurt a business when you try to search for it, and they are not willing to change it or help, why is this not libel?
They should be responsible for supporting this monopoly, and they should have competent support people that can either explain what’s going on or can fix it. They have neither and businesses really do suffer.
I think a class action lawsuit should be started against Google until they start investing in support services and that can adequately fix mistakes. If not a class action lawsuit, then I fully support legislation and regulation that forces them to spend on support.
This has happened so many times across so many of their platforms, it’s obvious what they are doing. They have created a monopoly and then their entire ecosystem depends on them, but they spend almost nothing to support their ecosystem. That’s how they remain so profitable.
This is the reason I hate google. No customer support at all. They will just provide link to forum. I will go with Microsoft anytime for business software than Google. I feel like it is company built by nerds with zero business sense. If your KPI depends on building new products, there ain't a reason to improve existing ones. Classic case of Goodhart's law.
It's not like Microsoft is pure as the driven snow, either. It's a massive corporation with all sorts of warts. Just to name a few from the past few months:
The discussion here is largely about how it's impossible to be really correct at Google scale, and this is something that terrifies me about where the industry is going. When there's a task that can be done by people, we can always correct issues. Going down to 99% correct could also mean cutting costs by like 90% through automation, so the business is going to be happy, except that now there's no one for the consumer to turn to but the bots when things go wrong.
In the future, if your name is Scunthorpe [0], you're out of luck, because it's impossible to not have these issues at scale, and apparently scale is inevitable.
The “x is impossible at google scale” (where x usually means customer support but in this case information correctness) argument falls flat to me. If x is impossible at their scale, then their scale needs to be cut back. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to be so large and all-encompassing and monopolistic that they negatively impact society because x is impossible at that scale.
You’re right. Yet currently there is one major normativity in action and that is the normativity of the market. Market rewwards economies of scale and monopolies more than anything else. Unfortunately there is no working institution left to bring in the normativity of societal good for balance. One might hope for state to make a move, but big tech pays the most lobbying money currently, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Of course. I agree that market pressure is pushing companies that way and there's little that can stop it now. But that still doesn't make the excuse a good one, certainly not for us, the people.
Searched for lawyer both in the post and this comment section and got nothing.
You'd be surprised what a lawyer can accomplish, even with no real law backing you up. You want an actual response from Google? Get a lawyer involved...
Some may be sympathetic to Google not providing enough customer support for tricky issues.
But here's a much simpler problem I've had.
I have a Google My Business account which was long ago properly authorized and verified for a business at a particular location. Verified by landline phone, photos, etc.
One day some random member of the public put in some incorrect information.
I didn't notice the change for about 6 months.
Now, even though I created, control, have verified etc, the Google My Business account for that data, and theoretically I'm the only person with that level of control over the business listing... I'm "not authorised" to correct the information via Google My Business itself.
Wtf?! Isn't that what it is for?
I can still login to Google My Business. I can edit some fields - I'm still regarded as the authority for sensitive things like phone number. So they haven't removed my special status (nobody else can edit the phone number).
Rather, some things in Google My Business which are editable fields and the UI invites me to edit, give "not authorised" when I submit. That was surprising, I thought I was the authority.
After trying every option, I tried Google's online support from Google My Business. It said I'd get a response in a few days; in reality it took longer than a month to get a terse and useless reply. I sent a few messages in that time, basically asking "is there anyone there"?
Eventually I did speak with someone at Google about this. They told me that I needed to go through the whole "prove your business is what you say it is and not what a random member of the public said it is" verification rigmarole all over again, with photos, etc. In the circumstances I was not able to do so (I wasn't on site enough any more, and our office wasn't as visually distinctive any more).
I'm asking myself, what is the point of a verified Google My Business account if randoms can override the business owner and lock them out anyway??!
That was last time.
Before that, it took 2 years to remove an incorrect address and location for the business.
I don't think that can be put down to "limited staff for customer support".
I put it down to poor & misleading system design. What is the point in telling people to get, verify and maintain Google My Business account, only to subtly not mention that it still isn't authoritative data for your listing, and the owner may get overridden by randoms. Probably without noticing for a long time.
I know that this makes it to the front page because it is symptomatic of frustrating and frightening things that affect society as a whole. I won't comment on those things because I don't know the answers.
But insofar as you want to solve your particular problem, there is a simple answer that seems not to have been suggested here. Get a lawyer and sue them!
I do not know for sure if this is related, but it definitly tastes the same:
Back in 2010 [1] I logged into google using chrome on my mother's device. Removed the account from the device afterwards. Today, many devices later, we still were not able to stop my mother from receiving autofill entries, contacts and such originating from my account.
Long story short: I am tried to vouch for the existance of non-layer-8 trouble leading to "shared accounts". Neverending fun.
Yep, still, this happens once, twice, thrice a week, if we multiply these for (say) x1000 (to take into account those that do not land on HN), that is 3,000 cases (most of them extremely simple to solve, actually no-brainers) per week.
Assuming that these kind of issues can be solved in next-to-no-time by any employee (i.e. there is no need to have top notch programmers and engineers to solve them) and that any employee can solve 20 (probably many more) of these little problems per day, all that would be needed is 30 people + maybe a coordinator.
30x60,000 US$/year + 1x150,000 + 50,000 other expenses = 2,000,000 US$/year, a lot of money but you need to put it into perspective.
So it revolves around - as always - greed Google/Alphabet had a net income of $6.8 billion in 1st quarter 2020:
So, with as little as 2/6800=0.03% of their net income they could solve these little issues and have not this public bad naming, so this "we won't fix it" attitude cannot but be a voluntary choice.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
People are downvoting you in good faith, and they're trying to disagree with you and send a message. If we look at your comment history, your comments are you plugging your own personal project. And you keep getting downvoted because you are hijacking the conversation and redirecting it to something you built, that people did not explicitly ask for or express interest in. And so when you keep doing that, people will feel like it's spam. To make matters worse, instead of taking the subtle cue of a downvote to mean that you're doing something wrong, you seem to deny that and instead conspiratorially deflect blame and personal responsibility towards someone else.
My suggestion is to submit your product as a new post. If people do not express interest in it, that indicates an issue with how you have designed your product, or marketed and positioned it. Take the reception that you get there, whatever it is, in good faith. It's clear you have a lot of ideas around your project and what motivated it that pertain to society at large. That leads me to my second suggestion:
Try to consider what your values and beliefs are and how you would respond if you were not working on this project. This is your null hypothesis. Try to think about your project the same way others will, which is that without momentum it will likely fail. Make conversation based on that. And then, if you find that people are interested in what your values are that lead you to start this project, maybe after they express interest, gently plug your project. But if you try and shove something people want down other people's throats, you're just going to alienate others and drive them away. And then your project will fail, as it should, because you didn't build something that people truly wanted.
I am not trying to shove anything down anyone’s throat. Rather, I am insisting that people who disagree with me simply verbalize their thoughts so we can have a discussion and I can understand better the other side. It seems to have partially worked, since you commented. Unfortunately, your comment doesn’t get us into the discussion we are actually supposed to have.
Consider this... various person constantly complains publicly of the symptoms of lead poisoning, or smoking. They say this is a terrible issue for many people in their community, but their solutions are all missing the core problem — the lead poisoning. You try to respond every time that the real issue is lead poisoning, and what’s more, there are alternatives. They should really consider them.
I’ve tried mentioning OTHER projects instead of my own. Then I was accused of shilling them!
If all you want is commisseration and platitudes then that’s what will happen. I have been on HN for over 10 years and have seen the same exact complaints over and over. People need to realize they are all related and there is a straightforward solution.
I am not the one complaining of the side effects of the problem. I am simply replying and describing the real problem and what is the correct solution. And I don’t want to copypaste a wall of text, or say too much in here so I have to link to something. To what? Well, I have written materials that explore every facet of this problem, and to software that has solved it. Here are some others:
Matrix
Mastodon
Inrupt
MaidSAFE (my favorite)
IPFS
Dat
I have tried posting links to all these projects and get downvoted every time I do.
I am totally fine with being downvoted, or people disagreeing with me. In fact I am looking for a discussion in which I get to learn something. But none of that follows. It’s always the same. Comment about decentralization = upvote or neutral. Comment followed by links to actual solutions of any kind, which are absolutely free and open source = heavy, heavy downvote. No discussion. No reply. Just silent downvotes.
So I have started explicitly asking for the downvoters to simply engage in substantive discussion.
>It seems to have partially worked, since you commented. Unfortunately, your comment doesn’t get us into the discussion we are actually supposed to have.
No, the discussion we're having is the discussion we're supposed to have, although I don't think it's the one you would have liked. You are generally not having discussions on this forum that reflect that you understand its conventions.
> Well, I have written materials that explore every facet of this problem, and to software that has solved it.
You clearly don't have a community already invested in what you have to say about the state of the problem, never mind your solutions to it. So I'd say take a step back and prove that you can build a community that cares about the problems you are trying to solve, whether through a mailing list, IRC channel, slack group, twitter list. Once you have built that community, it's a lot more likely that you'll have a group consensus to what the problem is, which is a necessary foundation for you to build any kind of a solution.
If you did have that foundation, you wouldn't be spamming project links on hacker news. Forget about your software. Focus on the foundation it will require to be successful. Focus on discovering what you can write about that will actually win people's hearts and minds, with evidence. Focus on what things you think and you express that resonate with a community, that they'll go to bat for. This is extremely hard and failure-prone. But if you can't do that, you'll never successfully build a solution that gets adoption. You do want the solution you build to be used, right? Then focus, really focus, on community building first.
You clearly don't have a community already invested in what you have to say about the state of the problem, never mind your solutions to it. So I'd say take a step back and prove that you can build a community that cares about the problems you are trying to solve, whether through a mailing list, IRC channel, slack group, twitter list. Once you have built that community, it's a lot more likely that you'll have a group consensus to what the problem is, which is a necessary foundation for you to build any kind of a solution.
Thank you, this is very good advice.
And yeah, I have a bad habit of "doing the hard things" and taking risks to engage smart people in conversations, sometimes stupidly (because I walk into a group which has been conditioned against, say, cryptocurrency, and try to present my case). I do it to improve my own communication skills and also understand the dynamics on "hard mode".
I've focused on the foundation. I just didn't want to mention it here. I wanted to see if smart people would talk about the real problems for their own sake, and not just getting on the bandwagon of something already successful. But, I've learned over the last 10-15 years that this is largely a waste of time. Time could be better spent actually building the thing you're talking about.
I'll try to be a bit smarter about it in the future. It's the same impulse that makes people get into Twitter wars for no reason and waste time.
> And yeah, I have a bad habit of "doing the hard things" and taking risks to engage smart people in conversations, sometimes stupidly (because I walk into a group which has been conditioned against, say, cryptocurrency, and try to present my case). I do it to improve my own communication skills and also understand the dynamics on "hard mode".
Treating life like it's a video game or an exercise in contrarianism is adolescent and borderline antisocial. Just don't do this. Trying to convert people is incredibly hostile, presumptuous and condescending and presumes you know better than their existing notions without even asking them about it or any kind of discussion or successful convincing. It's an easy way to lose the potential trust of acquaintances who have very little incentive to listen to you unless you earn their attention. I'm not saying not to ever approach things this way, but know when it's not appropriate. If you have to ask, it's probably not.
I know I said that you should try your hand at building a community, but that's hard and it can fail as well too. Perhaps it's worth at least proving to yourself that you can function as an active member inside of a community without getting regularly downvoted.
Don't malign "the bandwagon of something already successful" as if it's so trivial. They're succeeding and you are not. There was a lot of work and cleverness involved in them building that territory. They will remain on top until they are out-executed.
For the record, i didnt downvote you, and i agree with the basic premise of centralization being the problem. I suspect the downs may be because your link is only indirectly related to the thread topic. When i skimmed the page it was too nebulous to really teach me anything concrete, and i can see how people might feel that your post was an attempt to shoehorn links to your company on HN. People are rightfully pretty sensitive to that. Anyway just my guess since you asked
Yeah, far to many distributed projects fall into that trap. At least on pages you link from places like here, don't write a page on how centralization is bad with no details about what you specifically propose. I know it can be really tricky to drill down on a concrete example because you want to talk about all the opportunities, but you'll loose a lot of people if it is just handwaving.
Thank you for the feedback. I feel that’s fair, even though I am a bit at a loss as to what you feel is indirectly related. The link was a
supposed to be a blog post from around this time last year which described the terrible news/issues resulting from centralization from the last month alone (Russia clamping down on free speech, Cambridge Analytica and anger at FB, etc.)
I would def welcome any constructive suggestions on how to make it more relevant. I want the problem and solution to be clear.
Ok assume for a moment that I want to solve the problem of centralization. When people comaplin of its symptos, what can I do without mentioning it?
1. Just write some text with no deeper details
2. There is a ton to say. And I have said it. But the links go to my domain
3. I have tried linking to other domains - youtube, other projects - the result is the same. Downvotes and accused of shilling those projects
My man question is: how can I properly link to more information and the actual built solution without pissing people off? Every time I do, many people explore it and it is a net positive. But many people are pissed off.
I agree I am too enthusiastic given the mindset on HN. That’s because I’m trying to make a clear case for what I see is the real problem and solution. If I only cared to describe the problem, I’d get massive reshares. Been there done that.
Just look at the news — problems in society are all they are about these days. But how many news about everyday solutions are reshared? Not anything revolutionary, just basic things? That is considered as “sales”. Even if the project is open source and free.
I am just sort of doing this to get feedback / sociological research on a site with a lot of smart people. Yes it is very meta. And I don’t want to break the rules too much. I think I am going to stop asking for a discussion — but since I have done so above already, let’s have one. I am looking to learn about how to deliver actual solutions properly to communities who are accustomed to reject bad faith actors.
DNS is good but it is a federated database, and thus the root is controlled by one one organization (ICANN) with 7 keys. And below that, the tlds are controlled by organizations — .org was recently almost sold.
But that’s not really the main issue. The main issue is this whole way we think about the Web is propped up by DNS.
Facebook.com is the root domain for a lot of brand pages and profiles. Why? They built the software and you don’t have it. Then they ran the server farm and infrastructure. You would not think like this is we used hashes and DHTs instead of human readable URLs prefixed by facebook.com
There’s a “well-known” Bill Gates and he’s the “real, verified” Bill Gates. We can email him at billg@microsoft.com ... why? Why should he get all this SPAM from being famous?
The alternative is just having a Distributed Hash Table / Kademlia type routing (“magnet links”)
DNS is only good for quickly getting you to a tiny subset of resources on the web, namely the front pages of sites that are easy to spell. That’s just a glorified search engine. It can have competition. In fact, many non technical people typethe domain into the google search box.
Any resources can be addressed by QR codes, hyperlinks on the Web or Javascript variables containing links. Titles and metadata can be cached. And so on.
The PKI may still have to be a federated system for now but the search engine doesn’t have to be.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Maps and am speaking for myself, not my employer.
I am normally very sympathetic to HN complaints about Google customer service. They're normally about Cloud or GSuite, this one is a bit different.
Does anyone here think it would actually be possible to have a free (or even cheap) comprehensive maps service that also has customer support? How many dedicated support people would you need to make fair human decisions about every place, road, and business in the entire world?
Maps are just really really hard, especially as we expect them to be so much more than the simple maps they replaced. It's a database of everything there is to do in the world. And we don't pay a dime.
I hope it's not controversial to say that if your ambitions are to be the whole world's middle man on something, you have some responsibilities regarding how to do it.
Google doesn't have a "hey, these are scraped and only have like 80% accuracy" disclaimer or anything like that when they direct customers to businesses. I don't know where the line is but Google has some level of basic ethical requirement to not try to be the middleman when their failures (or in google terms >80% accuracy) cost others rather than themselves.
It's presented as correct, not as a best guess. I get that it's impossible to be 100% correct at this scale, but then just don't present it as authoritative. Or let people correct mistakes that are harming them. Or something besides just driving traffic to their own product and saying there's nothing they could do.
Is there ANY company that will do that? Can you sue the yellow pages if they're wrong? Or a wrong map?
Or even your own projects - are you willing to put your money and perhaps even criminal record on the line if your company sells data that's not accurate for a percentage of customers?
>>A Pennsylvania caterer had an outdated phone number placed in his ad. The phone number, used briefly in the past, had been assigned to someone else. The result: The caterer lost a ton of money and eventually filed for bankruptcy. He sued the phone company for negligently listing the wrong number. The jury awarded him $200,000.
I don't get this comment. The parent said nothing about suing anybody.... let alone committing crimes(!?).
They spoke of ethics.
If Google posts information to the web[0], and that information can harm my business, don't you think the ethical thing to do would be to provide some sort of avenue for correcting it?
This isn't some scrappy startup. It's one of the worlds biggest and richest companies.
[0] I'm not talking about search results here, where someone else posts false information. That's a whole other ball-o-wax.
How is it free? Google sells advertisements on Maps. This is a business customer that Google tries to convert into a paying advertiser, not a random consumer. Google Maps is also a paid API product.
I don't know, then maybe add paid listing support? (Or don't push your product through search and OS dominance so better quality alternatives have at least a theoretical chance?)
If their profit from maps is say 1$/year per user and 99.5% of users don’t need support in a given year that’s 200$/year per user who needs support which is plenty. I am not saying that’s their exact situation, but how many people need to change anything on a map? Worse, support would actually be directly improving their product for normal users.
Google has crap support because their a monopoly not because they can’t afford it.
Google has a shitload of money and a wrong entry in their product can make or break a small business existence. I hope they and others will someday be regulated.
>The core reason it happened... this place doesn't qualify to be on the map in the first place and it thus confuses the system.
>The secondary reason... the name of a feature is supposed to be the name and nothing more.
>A real estate agency qualifies to be on the map. Google also lets certain professionals to be on the map, with realtors being one such professional.
>This is neither of those, this is a "team". It's not allowed on the map anymore than the team or shift I'm on at my job.
>Here's the exterior. As you can see the name of the agency is "Summit Sotheby's International Realty", that's on the map at https://goo.gl/maps/cVEtvvRqCnJq5aEJ8.
>Other than the agency, all that then qualifies to be at this location are listings for individual realtors. So a listing that says "Cindy Wallace" and nothing more in the title is allowed. Instead we have her trying to keyword stuff her listing with Park City Utah Real Estate - Cindy Wallace Team. She also uses the category of Real Estate Agency when she isn't one, she needs to use the Real Estate Agents category. Probably doesn't work the trend of trying to represent your "team" as it's own agency.
>It's pretty common for people to not follow the rules and then complain that the algorithms don't do what they want. Follow the rules and the algorithms will then work.