The problem seems to be though, that while the company may have tools to detect abuse, if they're choosing selectively when to enforce things it defeats the entire point
anyway, i only said the company needs to encourage investigations and reporting, not discourage them. this has nothing to do with people at all - it is the company's attitude that i am talking about.
It actually is companies that do this stuff, in that if the company had sufficient monitoring and oversight in place the people working at the company wouldn't be able to do it.
That would of course require them to strive to provide the best product or service they can rather than towards maximizing their profit, though.
I think you make a valid point here - there are not a lot of companies willing to expose something like this. Even less so second time around.
[meta] I would REALLY love for people down-voting something
to explain why they do this. Maybe as HN feature for the first 200 downvotes, you have to reply to the post or upvote one below that explains it...
You're of course correct that it doesn't justify the questionable actions. But it shows that it's a much bigger problem than one company... Is there some reason such issues happen all of these multiple companies? Can we do anything about that so that other companies don't also start doing this?
It's probably something they're not really aware of. My company does something kinda similar. We're an aggregator of sorts. We have all sorts of quality and safety rules and we de-list things all the time for violations. As long as we aggregate 95% of what's out there, our users are happy, so we don't have massive incentive to spend lots of time manually working with rule violators, especially when a good chunk of them are actually scammers manipulating the system and harming our users.
True. This is only going to get worse unless technical people in these companies put a foot down.
Maintainers do not have the resources to pay for a legal defence (companies know this), the community has shiny-object-syndrome and so it's up to internal employees to show resistance to these immoral policies.
Fair share? Abuse? It is a criticism made against a corporation. It deserves scrutiny and a critical eye whenever it fails, regardless of what it's competitors do.
I hate to say it because I abhor the word, but this reeks of fanboyism.
Sure, but who is going to have a fair look? Someone who is employed by the company or someone who is independent?
VW faked their emissions - EPA uncovered it.
Google is harming people with bad AI models - Google is uncovering it?
This works if the company is actually interested in finding the mistakes (i.e. MS finding security bugs in Windows), but not if the findings threaten your business.
MS has an interest in fixing security bugs, because it makes their product better.
No big corp has an interest in fixing their ethics, it's usually bad for their profit margins.
It would be nice to know we're not just beating up on them because it's trendy and perhaps hold them accountable on the same level as other software companies.
It's possible that they were in the right by announcing an issue, rather than ignoring it.
Yes, the bad behaviour is well distributed allover the company. You cant blame a single gear for the functionality provided by the human-meat-grinder 40000.
If you really feel the need, blame the dedicated person for blaming, who gets a fortune for doing the Jesus Christ story as CEO.
Assaulting single persons, might be the only way to squeeze a touch of responsibility from a modern company. Touching a nerve is okay, when it leads to a thoroughly rotten teeth - like the pseudo moral everyone in the software world displays in this endless resultless discussions.
Oh, btw, in the next thread somebody is calling for goverment action against addicting games- and all those "abuse is evil" posters, will take a firm libertarian stand there.
If you systematicall disempower people, until only building a howling medieval mob remains- congrats, you reaached your destination.
I also think once these fixes are implemented, that the same should apply to trademark and patent infringement notices. Those also see widespread abuse, it's just not as prominent because the targets are small businesses.
It's a legitimately hard problem. It's also something that they would rather not deal with and don't make any money from. Plus, it's basically unregulated and platforms mostly don't disclose any stats on how they're doing, so there's no real accountability.
One way to think about it is guilt vs shame. Guilt is where you feel bad because you've violated your own standards. Shame is where you feel bad because somebody of standing has called you out. Platforms generally feel shame but not guilt, so most of their actual improvements in anti-abuse and TOS enforcement come from PR messes and other things that trigger shame. But when the heat is off and it's just you reporting something, they're not going to be particularly bothered.
Its not they let it happen, its the fact that it designed to happen.
These companies use highly automated services, if the approach feels inhumane then you are noticing the fact that it is inhumane.
Its not a malicious act for these companies to do this, its a by product of a set up circumstances that are designed to trigger a response to catch people abusing the product.
Naturally a person from time to time will trigger the automated response and appear to use as a cruelly treated victim, but what you don't see is the thousands of other people that systems like this catch. To them the system works extremely well, innocent victims here and there included.
Why it appears to suck is what is mentioned above, users are not customers, you are a product being sold. Hence they want to spend the bare minimum on user support, they want to maximsie the profit per product. On a personal level they have no interest in you.
Like a farmer to cattle. You have to treat the cattle well enough so you have sell it, but the farmer has no personal attachment to a cow as such (pets aside), they are just a product. To keep a cow healthy sometimes you have to spend some many on vet services, but you don't bring in the vet to inspect every cow, thats bad business.
Google has great customer support by the way. If you want to spend large sums of money they will send a man to company to discuss exactly how you spend it.
Edit: downvotes from shills
reply