[Others]

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.

[tmpz22]

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]

>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]

Amazon has competitors, Google doesn't.

[allendoerfer]

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.

[dylan604]

But how long would it take for a human to look into an issue and apply human logic instead of the algorithm. 10 minutes? Also, what percentage of users actually need or request support? Everyone pays in, but very few use the service.

[username90]

Subtract all the costs of video hosting and development etc and you are left with almost nothing.

[justinclift]

References please. ;)

[maceurt]

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.

[donmcronald]

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]

> 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]

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.

[Razengan]

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.

[michaelt]

> made very few improvements to it,

Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video, and only in an Adobe Flash player.

All of which changed after the acquisition.

I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days, and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.

[simcop2387]

> ... only in an Adobe Flash player

To be fair with this one, this was the only reasonable way to do video in a browser for a stupidly long time.

[Mirioron]

>they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators

This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the creator gets 55%.

[dannyw]

70/30 sharing on the ad platform side is common. Take away that, and you have YouTube taking another 21% for hosting, engagement, and tooling.

It’s actually really cheap if you’re thinking about it.

[chii]

vimeo has a $55/month cost for 5T of videos. Most youtube channels that are businesses make way more than $55 per month, and youtube keeps way more than $55 of their ad revenue.

I dont think the major reason creators choose youtube because it's "cheap" - it aint. It's the only game in town where there's sufficient advertiser demand to pay out money. And youtube knows this, and thus, can charge the 45% split. The "free" aspect is also keeping out new competitors - the business moat is huge. There's a reason why microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game.

[d1zzy]

> They bought an existing service, made very few improvements to it

Huh? AFAIK the Youtube Google bought wasn't profitable and it had much fewer viewers and content creators. It even lacked transcode options! Other than the basic functionality it provided (you could upload clips for free, you could watch other people's clips for free) it isn't comparable to today's Youtube.

[theelous3]

Given the many years all of that took, I don't think it's reasonable to compare what exists now with what it was when it was bought.

It's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that it would have been as good or better feature wise.

Also, saying it didn't have a big userbase? Compared to what? It was easily as much of a giant relative to the competition then, as currently youtube is to its competition.

[wolco]

Youtube had a lot of users but dailymotion, myspace and google video had a fairshare of marketshare. Now youtube is so much bigger than facebook, dailymotion, vimeo in terms of videos.

Google has introduced many great features that would not be possible without google or google ai. Muting songs but not background sounds is a cool new feature. Identifying and categorizing videos and presenting similiar videos is better than anywhere else.

For years youtube couldn't make money. Without google figuring this piece out a site like this would still be too expensive.

[Mindwipe]

> 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.)

"Staying in business" was an improvement that literally would not have happened without Google (or at least Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft). The site was literally doing bankrupt, and down in flames. It needed Google to sustain the losses, and someone with that much of a warchest and legal power to muscle into collective agreements with enough music collecting societies to survive.

[beamatronic]

When Friendster and Orkut and MySpace were around, the same argument (So Big) prevented me from creating my own social networking site.

[joering2]

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.

[nl]

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.

[throwaway2048]

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]

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]

I never said building the connectivity was free, In fact I said the opposite.

[ALittleLight]

I've looked at 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.

[bdcravens]

For a large number of Youtube content creators, it's not the platform, it's the monetization opportunity.

[CapricornNoble]

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]

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.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Vimeo? DailyMotion? LiveLeak?

[xvedejas]

Facebook?

[fsflover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

[malka]

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.

[d1zzy]

> 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).

[Mirioron]

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.

[AlphaSite]

Because then someone who doesn’t have Google’s money could actually compete. It wouldn’t become a huge exercise in dumping.

[barry-cotter]

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]

It hurts anyone where the product doesn't meet their needs, and their needs would be met if there were several healthy competitors.

[malka]

it gives too much political power to Google. If google decide to ban you from youtube, you become non existent.

[nextweek2]

> If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more YouTube

You have to look back at Microsoft's Antitrust case around Internet Explorer, the were bundling the software into the operating system for free to kill any competition.

It maybe a loss leader but it plays into an overall corporate strategy.

Splitting YouTube off would not trigger it to go bankrupt, market forces would come into play, they'd have to seek revenue and others players would come into the market to offer a competitive offering.

[vikramkr]

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

[zarriak]

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.

[dylan604]

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.

[nl]

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.

[amiga_500]

This is why they don't have to care. They have an effective monopoly.

[Non24Throw]

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]

If a business can't survive treating humans like humans, perhaps it shouldn't exist.

[Non24Throw]

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

[d1zzy]

This is what I try to point out every time someone tries to say that ad-based revenue models should be made illegal because of various reasons. It is ignoring how useful and accessible ad-supported web products are to pretty much anyone that isn't living in a first world country having easy access to credit cards.

As someone that has grown up in a second world country, barely having any money to pay for food in college, nobody I knew had even a debit card not to mention a credit card, I was very much grateful to have access to Google Search for "free" and the quality of the results it returned and I continued to be grateful and enjoy the products later developed (Mail, Maps, etc).

[kortilla]

The people who can’t pay tend to be pretty low-value to google anyway when it comes to advertising. If they had to, they would quickly find a way to charge a very little amount to those people if advertising had to go away (e.g. agreement to charge cell carrier).

[trasz]

It’s not Google vs paid service, it’s Google vs another free service. They already exist, it’s just that Google has monopoly due to network effects, despite providing inferior product.

[thelittleone]

Would be interesting if governments (perhaps the EU) started mandating levels of support.

[thelittleone]

An example in Australia is consumer protection law. This saved me recently. My AppleCare has expired. I had raised a support case with Apple before that about a flickering screen. I live in bali where we have no Apple stores and authorised service centres take 5-6 weeks to do screen replacement. But after opening the case I call support to discuss this open issue and going to Australia to get it fixed. The supper guy said sorry your AppleCare expired and doesn’t matter that you already opened a case before it expired. But I went to australia and Apple Genius Bar and the guy said well your still covered under consumer law.

[exikyut]

To clarify, you bought the device in Australia and thus had an Australian warranty on it, right?

[thelittleone]

That’s correct.

[cloudking]

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

[zeeZ]

What do you do if you can't access your Google One subscription because they've terminated your Google account for posting an emoji in a YouTube live stream, for example?

[app4soft]

YouTube Pro Tip: "Do NOT post an emoji in live streams"

[cschep]

which emoji? :)

[Dylan16807]

https://www.businessinsider.com/markiplier-youtube-fans-heis...

[rangibaby]

A person (people?) got really angry about the eggplant emoji a few years ago:

https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/8

https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3xtep0/socj...

[101404]

What??

Can anybody explain to me (non American) why a fruit is offensive? And why people who find a fruit offensive are taken seriously?

[Consultant32452]

Words and symbols sometimes have multiple meanings. Just because it looks like a fruit to you doesn't mean that's the message that was intended to be communicated by the author.

I don't support any kind of censorship, but if you can understand why a company might censor sexual harassment, threats of violence, or any other kind of message, it's pretty easy to understand that language/emojis/etc can be re-imagined to convey those types of messages.

[RadiantUnicorn]

It looks like a dick. Especially if you add (water spurt emoji) afterwards.

[TuringNYC]

I'd think it would be easier to just s/n// that emoji on all incoming text rather than banning users.

[tartoran]

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]

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]

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?

[roryokane]

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]

No, we should not shut up at all.

[lonelappde]

http:// Begthequestion.info

[IshKebab]

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