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by tpxl 2139 days ago
Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees.

The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.

2 comments

Somewhat ironically, the very site at issue has long claimed that content moderation at scale is impossible[0].

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at.

Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.

From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.