For a while I pondered if I could use my ability to change their behavior by changing my rules, to get them to actually create a set of behaviors that would unmask their C&C servers but not enough free time for that.

With the lightweight processes, the cost per should be very, very low, and basically make it easier to Turing tarpit the scammers.

Wouldn't those data be useful for fraud detection and prevention?

I'm guessing they're not. Google has had hundreds of really smart engineers with an effectively unlimited infrastructure budget working on Maps spam for a decade. If it were easy to solve once and for all, they would have.

1. Require submitter to be legally traceable and identifiable. Establish fines/fees for misuse of your property and charge their bank accounts for cleaning fees. Blacklist them for life.

2. Once a submitter is identifiable and legally traceable, charge exponentially higher fees for number of submissions unless they want to show up as chain business in which case charge reasonable fee for validation and background checks.

3. Detect and avoid autonomous mass submissions except for highly trusted entities such as big chains.

What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately capture the world as it exists around you right now. That means understanding what parts of the world around you you care about and understanding what level of accuracy (as opposed to promptness of updates) they should optimize for. Given Maps' extraordinary success as a product, they've done this quite well. But, yes, it has failure modes that users should be aware of and that Google tries to combat without compromising the main goal.

Accepting content without verification certainly has a side effect of getting businesses on board the instant they open, too, but that's just a happy accident.

Customer service, not going to happen. Having Youtube Kids actually have appropriate content for kids, unlikely. Being a trustworthy source for businesses on maps, no way.

Because it's actually billions of users. It's a billion of users for Google Maps. It's two billion of users for Youtube. It's nearly a billion for GMail. And the requests for those different products have to go to different support personnel.

In areas where there's significantly less users they do provide human support, for example in GCP.

Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection in support. Users tell us what we're doing wrong, and what we need to do that we're not doing, and where we need to improve --- but only if you listen to them.

Different companies and different products are different. It looks like many Google products are good enough to attract many users without support.

There's resilience in diversity.

How do you imagine Google Maps achieving that? Telling people "oh, sorry, can't serve you today"?

I challenge that. I do not believe it is true. Google wants to be the go-to directory for spatial queries so that they can display their ads and make tons of money. The quality of the data is irrelevant after a certain level, as long as there is no viable alternative or people just blindly trust Google. Google Maps' data is quantity over quality by a wide margin.

I agree about quantity over quality -- the product strategy boils down to "collect lots of data and build models with it". In the short term, each new feature has middling quality data with middling quality models. But over time they get better and better. It's just Maps keeps adding new features that are at that early, kind of crappy stage, and you forget how much the really polished ones used to suck.

> The Maps mobile app has had this for at least 3 years -- they ask you questions about places you know. You can also suggest edits on Google Maps which are sent to others for review But not that many people use either feature.

Yeah, okay sure. I'm sure all the engineers working on this product at google have never considered anything you wrote before.

If there was a cheap, easy way to block spammers and meet all their other constraints, I'm sure they'd have done it by now.

No matter what you do, if there is money involved, the scammers will eventually work around whatever you have in place to stop them. It is a constant, never ending game of whack-a-mole.

I gather there's a number of selfish business reasons for it instead. Google no longer gets my benefit of the doubt in these situations. They won't solve it, because solving it costs money.