8 ms·
I always wondered why tech companies had such an impenetrable inward communication until I came across the following insight: "If you have a billion users, and
by spondyl 9y ago
I always wondered why tech companies had such an impenetrable inward communication until I came across the following insight:
"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.
If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]
It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
[0]: https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz
- pavlov 9y agoIt's a misleading estimate because it doesn't define "user". In the case of YouTube, there are a billion users but only creators would require support. Maybe there are 100,000 YouTube creators who get paid anything meaningful? (I have no idea, just guessing.) If 0.1% of them require support, that's 100 requests per day. Any moderately successful mom-and-pop SaaS gets that much. There's no financial reason for Alphabet not to provide personal support to YouTube creators. They just don't want to.
- polishTar 9y agoWhat you're suggesting is how it already works. Partnered creators all have access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO). Top partnered creators (aka the "creators who get paid anything meaningful") will also have a partner manager they can contact for 1-1 advice/support/etc.
- pavlov 9y agoGreat. So maybe the bar for support is set too high? Someone making $50 / month on YouTube is meaningless to Google but may spend an enormous amount of time on that content in the hope of a breakout. Those are probably the people whose mental health is most at risk. It’s Alphabet’s community, they own it. Extending more support to dedicated members may not make direct business sense but it could be the right thing for long-term community health.
- ci5er 9y ago> ... for long-term community health I understand words like books and bricks and apples, because these words have physical referents. I have no idea what "long-term community health" means. What does that mean? And why would anyone invest more in it than in barricades and highly weaponized security guards? (I'm not actually promoting an armed response to whatever a 'community' is, I'm just using it as a rhetorical foil to try to understand the pros and cons of investing in whatever a 'community' is)
- freehunter 9y agoA community is a group of people you interact with (and who interact with each other) regularly. Community health means the people are kind to each other, help each other, communicate with each other. If a community is not healthy, they don't talk to each other and view each other as enemies. If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war.
- ci5er 9y ago> If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war. Or a highly pacified citizenry? ("Move on citizen. It's after dark. go home.") What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?
- freehunter 9y ago>Or a highly pacified citizenry? That's still a war, just a very one-sided war. >What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience? I'm assuming the question is "what reason does Youtube have", since their role is pretty clear: they control the platform. If they want people to keep using it, they have to keep those people happy. If they want to prevent a revolt, they have to keep people happy. Because unhappy, unstable people can turn violent. Keeping them happy won't necessarily stop all unstable people from turning violent, but you certainly do maximize that risk when you have some unstable people in your community and your community is already on the brink of a user revolt.
- kalleboo 9y agoCreators have these questions - "why is this seemingly harmless video demonetized?", "why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me?" and support won't answer those. They blame the algos and point to you a vague list of guidelines.
- freehunter 9y ago>why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me? Ugh Facebook. I have a community page for my town with thousands of likes, and most posts only reach 10% of the people who explicitly followed my page. Even if I pay to boost a post, I'm lucky to hit 20%. I get a lot of complaints from people who missed an event because they never saw the (sometimes multiple) Facebook posts announcing it. I mean, they could have visited the website or subscribed to the newsletter, but still... they asked Facebook to kindly show them the posts from this page, and Facebook told them "no", because "algorithm".
- blarg1 9y agocomputer says no.
- taneq 9y ago> Partnered creators all have access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO) Does that still apply if they get summarily "de-partnered"?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mschuster91 9y ago> Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable. The problem is that now society has to shoulder the costs. For example, when a mentally not-so-stable person goes to YouTube HQ and starts shooting everyone in sight. Or, more common, people falling in depressions, losing their homes, ...
- kryptiskt 9y agoWhat's so outlandish about that support organization? Presumably you have the revenue to match when you have a billion users. Walmart has 2.3 million employees.
- mikeash 9y agoIt’s fascinating how the tech community is so obsessed with scaling and automation that the idea of having a five-digit support staff for a billion users is seen as absurd. Companies like Google have taken this attitude to heart and seem to be absolutely determined to avoid anything that might require a linear relationship between userbase and staff numbers.
- musage 9y agoDo the right thing right away, and you can't grow to a size where you can't provide customer support anymore.
- talmand 9y agoIf a company can't support the number of customers/clients it eagerly takes in, it's time to either scale up support or scale down customers/clients.
- Klathmon 9y agoWhich they are doing in a way, by demonetising them.
- talmand 9y agoPlus by screwing their current clients, they are in effect working towards not getting new ones. It's a win/win scenario I suppose.
- Klathmon 9y agoIt's not "screwing" them, you said it yourself. They can't provide adequate support to all of their customers (in this situation, customer is defined as a content creator), so they are reducing the number of customers that they take on (by making it so you need a specific number of views-per-month or subscribers before you are eligible for monetization), and are reducing the number of current customers they have (by demonetizing the videos and categories that advertisers like the least)
- DataWorker 9y agoGreat solution give or take the occasional shooting. The shootings don’t cost much and most shooters can’t scale their killing so I guess it’s all good.
- Klathmon 9y agoI don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to this, but what is your proposed solution that keeps the company in-business and ensures no mentally-ill people decide to shoot up the company?
- Retric 9y ago20,000 people doing support at a generous 10$ an hour is ~400 million a year. Which sounds bad but is only ~40cents per user. However, 0.1% per day and 10 minutes per call is a very high estimate.
- SmallDeadGuy 9y agoAlso 1 billion users may be true for viewers, but the real support is only needed for content creators. That number is _significantly_ lower than 1 billion.
- dredmorbius 9y agoGoogle and Facebook have an employee:user ratio of roughly 1,000,000:1. This makes any hands-on intervention exceptionally expensive. (Not impossibly, given high-enough levels of interest, but high.) Google, and technology's, most powerful tool is its ability to amplify reach, capability, and efficiency. This works very well in a broadcast-style transmission. Where that transmission is reversed, and the many nodes start trying to feed back to the single hub, there's a problem. It's interesting to note that much of the history of the formation of the modern corporate entity has been one of changing modes of communication (and the parallel development of management structures). Two authors who explore this in (well, for me) fascinating detail are JoAnne Yates and James R. Beniger Yates: "The Memorandum as a Management Genre" http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.pdf http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.... Yates: Control Through Communication: The rise of system in American management https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-through-communication-the-rise-of-system-in-american-management/oclc/882059216 https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-through-communication... Beniger, The Control Revolution http://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technological-and-economic-origins-of-the-information-society/oclc/895626594 http://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technologic... In particular, broadcast technologies give leverage, but work best, as with the agricultural model, where seed can be scattered at will, and harvesting is simple, bulk, and commodity. When your plants talk back to you and have concerns about their growing conditions and/or opportunities, you're going to need a more complex feedback system. And it will have to be effective. This has long been an Achilles' heel of Google (and, to be fair, many other large corporations). On which, see A.O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. https://www.worldcat.org/title/exit-voice-and-loyalty-responses-to-decline-in-firms-organizations-and-states/oclc/964628199 https://www.worldcat.org/title/exit-voice-and-loyalty-respon... The fact that the modern corporation is, by its very intent and design, a risk-externalising machine, one that shifts danger to customers, users, vendors, and employees, rather than either the investor-principles or their manager-agents (and yes: principle-agent problem is another dynamic) is itself part of this very toxic mix.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Raphmedia 9y agoOne good chatbot could probably solve more than half of those issues.
- mschuster91 9y agoAnd drive the other half of people to insanity. There is, in support terms, not much worse than an obvious chatbot or support personnel that only has canned responses available. You explain your problem, they come with a canned response that suggests doing what you already did AND WROTE THEM, you reply back "I already, as you advised, did XYZ and wrote you, this does not help" and get the SAME canned response bullshit back. For what the fuck did I just invest half an hour in a detailed bug report when you're not even bothering to literally read it?!
- makecheck 9y agoEven if those statistics are accurate, my response to such companies would still be “boo hoo”. If your company wants to rake in the billions of dollars in benefits, you need to spend some money too. If your company can’t handle the time/effort then you shouldn’t aim for a billion users.