It's frankly infuriating when you get generic responses from someone who has no internal systems access, means to address the problem, or ability to escalate to an engineer.
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.
I think that's because Google teams are failing to engage properly with the community volunteers. When I was at Cloudflare I engaged directly with the external community moderators on Discord and made sure they felt comfortable DM'ing me or mentioning me if they wanted to escalate a thread to my attention (this is separate from them having formal community manager contact points which I'm sure Google does). Google engineers just don't care & there's no incentive structure at Google to improve things + Google management probably views this as "these people aren't paying us enough & engineering time is expensive". My counter here is that I viewed the entire class of non enterprise customers (free tier or tiny customers not paying for support) as a whole class that's 1 enterprise customer in aggregate. Yes it costs some money, but in practice not that much & there's non-monetary value you can extract doing that that offsets that cost.
That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened.
It’s so frustrating when you Google your problem and you read some Google or Apple or Microsoft product support page and see people like this responding. They absolutely never have the solution and it will still be marked as problem solved.
The worst are the Apple forums where some ding a ling will chastise the person with the question for some supposed failure to follow whatever Apple wants you to do.
I didn’t want to say it…but yes. Every time I google something like that I end up on some Apple page with the borg asking “Well why would you want to do that?” to something completely obvious that people should be able to do.
Gathering data so when some PM wants to empire build and justify a project, or when a UX researcher person needs evidence to support their initiatives. All of this is self-serving towards their careers.
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.