[he_is_legend]

> but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user.

This seems to get trotted out often whenever Google providing support gets mentioned. But I don't think anyone is asking Google to suddenly offer support for every customer question under the sun. Maybe they just need to provide a little support for some of the big problems: like algorithms banning people from all of the Google services that they have used for many years, for non-discernable reasons with zero comebacks. They spend plenty of money getting people on board their services (and extracting as much data as they can from them) but none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong.

[sofixa]

If they offer support for some cases, especially complicated cases like those, they'll get bombarded with all sorts of questions anyways (if you've never heard an IT person get asked about coffee machines "because they're tech" or to help out with somebody's personal phone/PC/whatever, i suggest you visit Reddit, more specifically r/sysadmin and r/talesfromtechsupport. It makes for fun, albeit sad reading.

And discarding that, it's a tough balancing act between helping users recover accounts without helping malicious actors takeover accounts and/or helping malicious actors keep malicious accounts. It'd take effort to train personnel and establish policies to do all that properly.

And regarding customer loyalty, why do you think Google care about that? It really doesn't seem like they do, and financially, their revenue per customer is negligible for that to make a difference.

[tmaly]

Why don't they just do something like that Whitehouse website where people can vote on things. If enough votes go to a particular issue, address it.

This would be a nice middle ground between no support and having to support everything.

[gerikson]

> none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong

Textbook monopoly.