I see your Hanlon's Razor, and I raise you Hanlon's Handgun of mine:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."

I'm not sure what makes Google so different that it should be exempt from general trends around reviews. Businesses have their interest aligned here: removing negative reviews and faking positive reviews are beneficial to each individually, and can't be directly weaponized against competition. Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest; regular users will not replace Google Maps with OSM over a review issue, while a business might want to stop paying Google if they get bad experience on the marketing front.

> Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest

Have you actually thought about this at all? Why on earth would ANYONE bother reading reviews that they know to be categorically fraudulent? Without keeping the reviews honest, at least to a degree that the general public considers them honest and legitimate, Google Maps Reviews becomes worthless and a dead product. Fake reviews are a very real threat to their product's value and Google arguably has very good strong incentives to keep reviews honest so people keep using them.

Why does anyone read Yelp reviews? They're gamed, and also used to extort businesses. Why does anyone read Glassdoor reviews? They're completely gamed by the employers[0], and the company itself recently pivoted into brand management - which translates into fake reviews being their core product now. Why does anyone read Amazon/eBay reviews? They're gamed too! Why does anyone read reviews on random small e-commerce sites? Those often aren't even reviews, they just look like them!

It's because most people don't pay attention and didn't figure out yet that on-line reviews in general are worthless, thoroughly gamed bullshit. Those who did figure it out - they don't stop using Yelp/Glassdoor/Amazon/eBay/Google Maps anyway, because those services still offer enough value to customers compensate for broken reviews.

So if regular users will be there either way, and manipulating reviews - or allowing them to be easily manipulated - increases retention of paying customers (businesses), which way the incentives blow?

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789865

That saying has it limits, most pf these excuses are sounding very improbable, like: "oh i didnt mean to rob the place, i found the door unlocked and walked in to give it a good clean."

When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?

How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?

Its almost certainly an anti spam system. The system marked the review as spam, for whatever reason. And it doesn't publish the results. The system doesn't tell you this because otherwise the first thing you will do is keep trying again in different ways until it doesn't tell you it was marked as spam.

Google drops reviews for a few known reasons. When a location gets negative coverage in the news, thousands of negative reviews from people who have never visited the location. Google then drops the reviews since review bombing is not useful.

Who knows why OPs comment was flagged, but its easy to see how this happens without a big conspiracy going on.

Yes, in fact, if there's some delay in processing reviews through the anti-spam system, the OP might have triggered the failure themselves by then posting the exact same review under another (their wife's) account. If I'm writing an anti-spam system, duplicate reviews from different accounts are like the most obvious heuristic imaginable.

Right, but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone, you first have to create the whole system to do so... So they weren't 'stupid'.

It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.

> but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone

Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?

But not "accidental" because they had to create and maintain it. Stupid would be them intending but failing to make post visible.

They intentionally created a system which resulted in a user being unintentionally shadow-banned. Creating a shadow-banning system isn't malicious. Creating a shadow-banning system that accidentally shadow-bans legitimate users is pretty obviously more a case of stupidity than malice. Just because they created the system intentionally, doesn't mean unintended behaviours in the system are intentional malice

The maliciousness comes in with the self-interest. They're lying to you because they make more money when you don't know to complain.

They aren't like baby killers or anything, but they are certainly prioritizing their wallet over your consumer good and even safety.

Imagine if HN charged to post and shadow-banned users.

Hmm, that's interesting. If I was writing a review moderation algorithm, it would leave only one copy up if there were multiple substantially identical reviews. Those are likely to be written by bots that mutate a common review and post, or even if some entity circulates a "review" to its crew of minions who write fake reviews based on that template.

I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.

I agree. That's why I said "I wouldn't be surprised if..."

I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.