Google's fetish for not providing human support is so counter-productive it makes me think there must be a single powerful individual executive maintaining the policy. It's too stupid to have widespread support among Googlers.
An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR.
Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.
I'll get comfortable.
Except I believe that there’s a deeper cause here, the misalignment between the interests of the actual users and the company to whom the users aren’t actually a source of revenue except by numbers that can be shown to advertisers and investors. (Further down this goes to our expectation of free service; it was all fun and beta at first but it turned out to be a trap.)
Importantly, providing human service will address a symptom but not eliminate said misalignment—it’ll keep manifesting itself.
That kind of stuff needs to end. Email's are required to conduct business and interact with the govenrment nowadays. A private company should not be allowed to just remove your ability to interface with businesses online. My bank can't effectively steal all my money and close my accounts just because I have a personal viewpoint or hell, even committed a felony! But for some reason (especially redditors) people think it's okay for a private company to shut someone down entirely just because of some form of speech or whatever reason simply because it's a private entity.
The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.
People who comment on Google's lack of human support ignore the fact that it's a virus that's engulfed the whole online world. Almost every large company has automated chatbots, voice response systems, FAQs, and every imaginable way to avoid paying human beings who know things. And let's not even talk about whether they're empowered to actually do things for you.
Google could certainly lead and maybe the rest of the world would have to follow. Maybe.
People using search, gmail, drive etc aren’t the customers.
(Fortunately I haven’t been called a wog to my face in decades)