... why?

Google has a zillion employees and the story didn't even end altruistically on their side, what the fuck would the point of fictionalizing this encounter be? typing practice?

I get that it's kind of supposed to be an advanced jab at google "The world will end before you speak to a human", but cast the shade on the perpetrators rather than saying that the victimized side is lying.

Otherwise consider that you're fucking wrong and have little understanding of how communication with Google works?

Also go through my history and find the other times I have sharesd this same story. Do I get paid for each time?

Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".

Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.

We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.

So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.

You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.

That's the present. The future will be trying to cajole an LLM into interpretation of bogus rules. Not sure if that's better or worse.

I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.

All you can do it post a thread on the support forums, and nothing happen anymore;

I think for ordinary users (rather than developers or merchants), this is even worse.

It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).

I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.

   SELECT
      id,
      full_name,
      IFNULL(age_verified, acc_created < DATETIME_SUB(CURRENT_DATETIME(), INTERVAL 18 YEAR) AS age_verified,
   FROM 
      google_accounts