I think it only seems like it would be crazy because we've allowed companies to get away with not doing it.

Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.

I think we've just come to begrudgingly accept that outsourcing, automating everything is okay. It's okay now to let the customer find your support phone number, navigate your phone tree, spend 30 minutes or more in a phone queue for, in the end, no real help.

Doesn't mean we have to excuse it.

> Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.

Those services were a lot more expensive to their users as well. If everyone paid $xx/mo to YouTube I’m sure the customer support would be a lot better. But then most people wouldn’t be users in the first place.

So, this business does things that take away people's rights, but it is OK because otherwise their cost of business would be too high?

Exactly! Won't someone please think of the helpless capitalist!!

Understanding and respecting that (I made a similar case within the past day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29421420), there's still the rejoinder:

If you can't provide a service safely, equitably, and predictably at a given scale, maybe the answer is "don't do that".

I'm failing to understand your logic. Google could put a call center in every country to handle local user's requests could'nt they ?

Your ISP can afford to do so...

But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.

Yep. And it doesn't even have to be a call center, manual verification would be enough.

I pay my ISP a lot more than I pay Google.

Just because it's hard doesn't mean they should get away with not doing it. Google 2020 revenues were 181 Billion, you can build a VERY big call centre with that.

I hope you are being sarcastic. These companies were fortunate to be ahead of the curve in automating content delivery but, despite their best efforts, have failed in automating service delivery. Human connection should be mandatory in running a modern business. If you want to deal with humans, you should be required to reciprocate.

> I know it's awful and true, BUT, can you blame them?

Yes, I can.

Youtube knowingly traffics and sells stolen goods and services. Youtube's officers and directors know it. The key words there is knowingly. Arrest Youtube CEO as a head of a criminal enterprise. Bust her door pre-dawn and drag her out into the slammer. There's zero difference in how we should deal with Incs be that Mafia, Inc. or Youtube, Inc.

The mere prospect of that will quickly solve all the technical problems. It is all about motivation. Youtube's executives currently are not motivated to solve the problem. The government needs to provide the motivation.

If even a regular ISP can afford a call center so can Google with its economies of scale.

The underlying assumption with all these criticisms is that human contact would be better. But is this really true?

Humans can be bribed, manipulated, or lied to. This introduces a whole set of new problems. It just turns "YouTube algo removed my channel because I got report bombed" to "A YouTube employees removed my channel after they were social engineered".

Contact with a knowledgeable human is better than no contact is I think what people are arguing, yes.

It shouldn't be an excuse. The system is not fit for purpose.

Google makes billions of dollars. They can easily afford to hire tens of thousands of call center employees.

They all have the ability to control that funnel though. In this case, they could allow channel owners that have been demonetized to open a ticket. Or allow artist representatives that already have "special" YouTube accounts to complain, etc.

> I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.

I think I lean in this direction, too. Customer service should go hand-in-hand with having customers in the first place. If you have grown so outrageously large that you have no feasible way to plumbing some of your astronomical profits to servicing those who facilitate your profits, then maybe you have grown too big.

At scale you have more options. You can subcontract out your call center like all the big companies. These companies use these subcontracted callcenters like https://www.helpware.com/. They don't want to spend the money.

"Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook."

So they have an unfair advantage over competition by avoiding the cost of customer support? Am I meant to feel sorry for them?

They can always contract it out, and in some cases they do. For example Meta has (used to have?) large deals with Accenture to handle a lot of the interaction internationally.

They could absolutely do it and they have more than enough money to do it. They just don't want to because it'd cut into profits.

I think an ISP is a bad example. The relationship between the user (content creators) and Youtube very different than that of a consumer.