Stop "NOT APPLIED"

[#1]

Mods, please read this carefully. I'm pretty sure this is a totally new idea that should NOT be merged.

From what I can tell, as soon as a submission is “NOT APPLIED,"  then Google doesn't use this info any more. For example, I've never had a submission get promoted from "NOT APPLIED" to "APPLIED."

I think it's ridiculous, with how much obviously good data that google has is its probably millions of "NOT APPLIED" rejections...maybe billions...that it hasn't mined these for info yet. I'm actually hoping that Google does already, but I've seen 0 evidence of it. From what I can tell, "NOT APPLIED" is the equivalent of being on a 5.25" floppy drive labelled "Rejected," and being in your grandpa's second filing cabinet drawer...meaning it's stored somewhere, and in theory could be used, but it's probably going to the landfill before it ever actually gets used.

I've made thousands of edits...maybe tens of thousands, and I estimate that 5 were actually wrong. Soon after I made those wrong edits, I fixed 3-4 of these. If I could remember where they are, I'd fix them all. However, I've had hundreds of very valid edits that got "NOT APPLIED," that are in a virtual dumpster, somewhere. And I believe that they're never going to get used. Ever.

Google Maps is very integrated with machine learning, and AI, and so “NOT APPLIED” kind of makes sense...a little...in that context. With machine learning, it basically rejects everything under a certain confidence level. And then the human operators feed it a ton more data until the AI gets confident over whatever the confidence level is that they set. The thing that the folks at Google aren’t getting...aren’t understanding...is that Local Guides aren’t Operators that just need to feed the next 10,000 pictures into the AI when the AI isn’t confident. We’re real people, that are giving our best efforts and our best data and best information to Google Maps. Google really needs a better strategy than, “um...our AI can’t tell for sure...we’ll just reject everything, and then hope these humans just keep giving us data.”

I’m sure that eventually that strategy will kind of work...in the long, long term. But Google has a lot of really, really smart people working there, that should be able to come up with a much better strategy that alienates much fewer humans along the way...than the current one, that keeps rejecting good edits, with the only reason being, “um, our AI isn’t sure yet.”

Oh, and also, if you add a business, with photos, that gets "NOT APPLIED," and then later that business actually gets added to Google Maps, then you NEVER get your original photos added to the new business listing.

[JanVanHaver]

I'm not sure if something was already changed in the AI, compared to the situation we had before, or if it is due to the fact that my trust score has improved, @JosephDewey, but quite recent I have had a couple of times a PENDING changed to NOT APPLIED where, upon opening the POI, it turned out that my suggested edit was applied after all. My interpretation would be that this is due to a PENDING edit from another local guide which was approved with my suggested edit getting a NOT APPLIED at that same moment - whereas 'traditional' LG knowledge had it that you would get an immediate NOT APPLIED whenever there already was a PENDING from another LG.

But, as usual: this is 100% speculation.

And by the way: I really loved the bit about the 5.25 floppy disc (although it would not affect me: I switche to 3.5 quite a while ago) 

[TsekoV]

Hello @JosephDewey,

We would like to thank you for your ideas, but we did not manage to implement it in time and according to our Idea Exchange policies we are going to need to close your idea.