[4ggr0]

As much as I appreciate people like you doing new things, the same will happen to your project if it grows.

There will be a point that your service will simply have too many users to handle all of their requests in a satisfactory way.

If you disagree I'm interested why you think y'all can make it differently.

[mnvrth]

I agree, scaling support is a hard problem. But Google has set an extremely low bar, they've just given up, and they can just blatantly do that, because of their effective monopoly/duopoly.

I'm sure we (if not us specifically, some other project like us) can do better.

[tjoff]

Why?

If it is economically viable at small scale why wouldn't it be more so at a larger scale?

Google thinks their algorithms for suspicious activity is more important than their users data. Just removing access altogether.

[4ggr0]

> If it is economically viable at small scale why wouldn't it be more so at a larger scale?

Well, because of scaling. Let's say 1% of your users create a support request every month (no idea if this is way too high or too low). Trying to KISS.

If your service has 1000 users, that makes 10 support requests per month. One person can handle them alone, probably.

Google Drive alone has 1b users, but let's cut that by 50%, after all this is the number which Google reports themselves. Still, with half a biillion users you would suddenly receive 50 million requests. Let's be even more generous and say that these requests are opened over the span over a year, not month. That's still 4.5 million support requests per month.

Don't even know if my calculations serve any purpose, what I am trying to say is that the amount of users and support staff your service needs do not scale 1:1. At a certain point(no idea what the cut-off is) your service will create so many requests that it will become impossible to handle them all with care and humans. To add to this, the more users your service has, the bigger your infrastructure has to be, meaning that you need more people maintaining this infrastructure.

Maybe I am to pessimistic or whatever, could be. Just my 2cts.