> Imagine a system like this for any other service. A self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of allegiance.

You're being flip, but there are actually plenty of things like this.

For example — you know those arcades full of UFO-catcher machines, where the games are rigged so that it only allows you to grab the thing after N tries?

You can pump 10 dollars into the machine, and maybe still not get it... or you can just politely ask the attendant to get you the thing out of the machine after trying and failing once. And they will, because — unlike a carnival side-show operator who owns their booth+merchandise — for a gacha-store employee, it's no skin off their back if everyone gets a bear. Unacknowledged public side channels!

For another — it's a common belief that Adobe is perfectly fine with individuals pirating Photoshop, and really only go after companies who pirate. They think of individuals using the pirated version of their software, as future professional users in training; where the company those professional users work at, will inevitably buy them a Photoshop license. Adobe won't give you a Photoshop educational license (or at least, they didn't used to have such a thing) — but by pirating it, you're essentially taking advantage of an unacknowledged public side-channel left there by Adobe.

But really, in the Google case, it's not just about it being an unpublished side-channel; it's also specifically about engineers being okay with being reached out to by other engineers, who are signalling by their method of outreach that they understand engineering culture, and so, implicitly, that they understand the engineering problem implied by their request; have already tried to solve the problem themselves; etc.

It's the same reason that people in NOCs have unpublished numbers to get people in their peer NOCs on the line in case of a network outage. They're fine with people reaching out with a problem, if those people are going to tell them something useful that they don't already know.

The Google engineer is fine being told that their code breaks in edge-case XYZ. But they don't want to be asked how to empty your trash in Gmail. And they especially don't want to deal with demands and threats from people who have been scammed out of money over email, who want their money back, and think it's Google's legal responsibility to do that for them.

> I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault.

It's "our" fault in the sense of Google being an American corporation incentivized to maximize profit; and profit maximization implying maximization of margin by cutting / avoiding cost-centres (e.g. support costs); and consumers enabling that by preferring services that have those lower-margins over services that have higher margins. Your ability to use email, today, for free, has higher Net Present Value than your future unanswered support questions.

Or, to put that another way: it's capitalism's fault. But not capitalists' fault, per se. It's the fault of people doing what's economically rational. It's economically rational to use Gmail instead of a paid email service. It's economically rational to build your following on YouTube instead of Dailymotion/Vimeo/etc.

People can complain all they like, but they still do it, rather than doing something else, because a free product with no support still optimizes better for their preferences than spending a single dollar on an alternative does.