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trainingonmetoday at 12:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

Question here then, is when will we see a competitor enter the market who both cares about getting it right and is actually able to compete with google maps


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kevindammtoday at 1:35 PM

Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.

Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.

I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.

Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).

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0xbrayotoday at 12:57 PM

Apple Maps maybe?

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