> When I look at that list, Jeff Bezos is #1. The first woman on the list is at #10 and inherited her wealth. Are you looking at a different list?
I think the comment does refer to Jeff Bezos. Here is the relevant section from Wikipedia:
"At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19.[17] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing baby Jeff along.[18]"
IMO a 17 year old attending night school is pretty low in terms of economic status.
Also I am sure there are other cases but I know about #17 (Mukesh Ambani) and his father was a petrol bunk attendant - pretty low down even by Indian standards.
Disclaimer: Worked on the google anti-abuse team that handled this a while back.
We know this and its not as far fetched as people might think - happens very frequently. The systems are designed to handle this appropriately. Fun to see how people try to game the system though :)
So all of your statements basically say that you think Google reviews are pay to play because you dont trust them to do something right. Sure, you have the right to that opinion.
Discalaimer: I used to work on the Google team that worked on anti-abuse for comments/ratings.
>> So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review
No, it is possible to get something removed if it violates Googles policies that are designed to make sure reviews are on topic and legitimate.
>> The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.
Not true at all. I have personally told many clients who spent XXX million dollars with Google that reviews can not be touched if they follow Google policies. The customer is not the business, it is the users who trust these reviews. Google can do just fine without monetizing the reviews but will not survive without user trust. It will take 2 hours to become a global headline if Google did something like this. And if this was true no business would every have bad reviews.
I thought the part about "only internal systems" would imply that external parties can not remove reviews. But if not then let me clarify, yes there are anti-abuse mechanisms that can remove reviews. But these are not based on customer complaints or how much they are paying Google for ads, they are based on Googles own internal policies which are designed to make sure the reviews are legitimate.
Absolutely not true. Worked on this team for Google at one point and other than internal systems nothing can get reviews removed. Firms cant do anything, they are just swindling people out of money. Some of them will get fake reviews to try and drown out negative ones but its very short lived.
You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible.
If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess.
Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.
We will never have anything if we decide only perfect things are allowed to exist.
Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.
That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.
Youtubes revenue is not its profit. It has significant expenses in terms of paying creators, hosting and bandwidth costs and the cost of all the engineers it takes to run the systems.
In addition you do not factor in significant complexities like the ones below:
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. If it was a problem that could be solved by spending a few tens of million dollars a year, it would have been solved.
[disclaimer] I work at Google, all opinions are my own. I don't deal with Youtube but have had exposure to moderation operations. It is not an easy task.
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is.
In my opinion it is a huge net positive. Its not the popular opinion on HN but I do think it is.
Its personally been instrumental for me. Coming from a solidly lower middle class background in a developing country - Google was the only reason I could get better at my work and eventually do well financially. It gave me access to information that I could not afford otherwise, books were too expensive for my families income.
Even now I see how much services like search and Youtube help people learn. Youtube created a vibrant community of content in a local language that has helped many of my friends learn things. I recently spoke to a teenager who learnt to repair household electronics by watching tutorials on Youtube - in our local language.
Google has a lot of problems. I mean a lot. But its certainly a net positive in my opinion. While its fun to participate in (legitimate) first world discussions on web standards being killed by Google, it has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions of people from my home country.
Just like people, companies have the ability to do good and bad at the same time. For me the scale for Google is pretty heavily towards good.
The equivalent of "medicare for all is impossible" would be that an approach saying "anti spam is impossible so we wont do anything". That is not the case. While I do not know about amazon reviews I would bet its a fairly likely case that they do have teams trying to fight this spam.
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake.
Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.
You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.
It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.
I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.
I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.