5 ms·

Just as worrisome as the content of the review is the fact that the company tried multiple avenues to make him remove it: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/7476

• krmmalik 10y ago
  About two months ago i tried out some ads automation software. The concept was good, the product was ok, but support was awful and things were buggy. So i waited patiently until one day i got fed up and made my thoughts public in a tweet. I was civil about it. Anyway within a couple of hours the CEO contacts me telling me how he's been ill in hospital and that half his tech team have left and how he might be shutting the company down, but i could a "please remove the tweet of you blasting us". I felt sorry for him so obliged. 2 months later, they've continued to market the product heavily so he was obviously lying just to get me to remove the tweet. After that experience, im never going back on what I say ever again.
• CWuestefeld 10y ago
  At the first link, I'm immediately turned off by his follow-up: Capitalism is fucking bullshit What's really ironic is that this experience shows how well capitalism does work, more effectively than other systems can: The reviewer found a bad product, reviewed it honestly, and is now helping other people stay away from it. Let's see you try to make that happen when you're faced with poor and disinterested government-provided services.
  • themgt 10y ago
    He doesn't actually clarify his line of thinking. As someone who is also not much a fan of capitalism, my thought at getting those emails might be "this company cut corners trying to turn a quick profit making a crap product, and now some poor shmucks at the bottom are getting fired. capitalism sucks" Soviet-style five year plans are also not the only alternative to hobbesian capitalism, that is a false dichotomy.
    • CWuestefeld 10y ago
      Soviet-style five year plans are also not the only alternative Actually, what I had in my mind when I was typing that was an experience of my wife, very recently, right here in America. Her job is researching regulations for Medicaid across the country. Her boss came across documentation from State of Illinois that were contradictory, so he tried to call their offices. He logged 11 calls to them two weeks ago today, with no one taking his call, and then had to hand the question off to my wife. Last Monday she attempted to call, only to get a message saying that: (a) they were replacing their phone system for the entire week so they can't receive any calls; and (b) they normally don't take any calls during the last week of the month (!) but because of the phone system problems, they'd make an exception and open their phone lines for the last week of June. So she started trying again this past Monday, and it still took several days for her to get someone to pick up the phone. That can happen in any system where there's no market allowing people to reject bad alternatives, and to signal the importance of a product through the price system. But any time you remove the market forces (e.g., any socialist-type system where the government is making the calls), the system quickly stops responding to the needs of its customers. Can you imagine any capitalist company that would simply take down phone communications for a weeks while replacing the system? Years back, my employer put in a new phone switch, and the outage amounted to hours over a weekend. Even worse, can you imagine any company that would just say "we never take customer calls during the last week of any month"?
      • davidgerard 10y ago
        It's entirely unclear that the US health insurance market is evidence that capitalism is a good thing, compared to literally the entirety of the rest of the first world, e.g. the UK, where Garrett is from.
        • CWuestefeld 10y ago
          Yes, my point was that this is an example of a NON-market-driven system, i.e., not an example of capitalism at work.
      • acdha 10y ago
  • davidgerard 10y ago
    Matthew Garrett's track record versus yours: which wins?
    • CWuestefeld 10y ago
      Appeal to authority fallacy.
  • vtlynch 10y ago
    Yes, I forgot about Adam Smith's treatise about online review systems.