Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Wesley made some great points on the show.
The Play Store banhammer issue needs to be fixed. Google built Android on the openness and creativity of their developers who gave us so many great apps that unleashed the power of our phones only limited by our creativity. Now because of the bad actors abusing the openness, they are going overboard in limiting the abilities of some apps outright through reduced API access and then using crude AI algorithms to deliver harsh penalties to developers regardless of their intent. And I believe if they invested more into actual human oversight and communication with the flagged developers it would be very easy to determine who indeed was a bad actor. coughCheetah Mobilecough
I loved Wesley’s point about giving the developers more information at points in the process when it could be of more use. Google owns the dev tools now for the most part, and if they’re going to be relying on bots to do the determination of apps that offend, why not do that before the app gets uploaded, or why just ban the app then have a human come in and determine bad intentions?
It’s almost as if they don’t care about the developers unless they’re a big company bringing lots of revenue that Google can get it’s 30% cut from.
I also liked Wesley’s point about Google needing to address the diversity issues especially surrounding the AI ethics researcher(s) that they attempted to silence when they heard an opinion that cut too deep. It seems like these kind of stories are coming from Big Tech almost every week. And the attitude that permeates always always comes from the top.
So one wonders, if the message coming from the top is to silence criticism, to lock consumers more into products, to punish innocent developers with broad strokes, to have no coherent strategy for integration points between apps/services/products that get killed/crippled/transformed, and to expect your customers to not care about any of this because they get it for free/cheap … then maybe a new person is needed at the top.
Just saying.
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