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If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your i

If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent. This article presents a distasteful world-view that "Good manners are a display of weakness" and the best strategy if you're a no-good company is "Sweep it under the rug where the neighbours can't see". How tediously reminiscent of quiet domestic abuse. Here's another take; Most public responses to complainant's are insincere displays. Tepid litanies of excuses, virtue signalling, soft deflections, sugar coated restatements of unconscionable policy - these just show intransigent contempt for the complainant. People aren't stupid. They see right through public "perception management". That's why the share price drops. These companies do it to themselves. When in a hole it's best to stop digging. Don't try turning complaints about a broken company into an "opportunity" to self stroke and posture. People are more sophisticated than company PR goons imagine.

gxs 5y ago
Intuitively, I disagree with the article, but for some reason I'm having a hard time articulating my concerns. You've definitely helped here (helped me) and my biggest problem is that analysis wasn't done on the type of replies. As you mentioned, the quality of the reply might be even more indicative of stock price fluctuations. In general, without seeing additional numbers and some data to see if there is a trend in the sentiment of responses, I find it hard to adopt any hard and fast rule based on the article.
kodah 5y ago
> If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent. When people speak to individuals they speak differently than when they speak to a crowd. Callout culture is the manipulation of a direct conversation into a crowd conversation. In some ways that could work in a users favor but in other ways it could also work against them in that it makes the company drop any (if it existed) personal speech in favor of guarded corporate speak. While I think that users engaging in callout culture is fairly toxic, I think that what it really highlights is our need for a better system for arbitration. With most tech products there is no system for arbitration and the human-based support systems are scarce. All that to say, I don't really think either party here is engaging in "good behavior", if we're going to be playing behavior police. It's also somewhat likely that some of these bad outcomes are egged on simply by reverting to callout culture. The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  You're right Kodah, "call-out culture" is toxic. Bad choice of words on my part. And yes, some people delight in turning a genuine error or manufacturing fault into a public flogging spectacle of a company that can do nothing right no matter how sincerely it tries. What I think I object to is the calculating tone of the article, and the attempt to paint it as quantitative (and so implicitly rational) "research". Of course there are many interpretations of how brand value varies with visibility of arbitration, so I just proffered one (that maybe the PR people dig their own graves). > The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter. Because of the power asymmetry I feel there is something sinister about a large company able to use "no-reply emails", stonewalling, or employ an entire legal team against an individual that makes it not okay to try taking a conversation initiated visibly to a place with less public legibility. I'm not a Twitter user or reader, so quite naive as to how bad things get there. Reliable friends tell me "it's a sewer". I do understand that mobs can be nobs. I have had to firefight product mistakes with large numbers of unhappy users, and yes transparency is powerful. We published the Slack and ticket stream on website, and that cooled hot tempers and even had some of the users advocating for the devs in comments.
  - kodah 5y ago
    I do think you're right that at a certain size a company should be able to efficiently employ humans to solve human problems within a system. In practice, this turns out nightmarish. I think that's where governmental institutions can play a role in setting expectations for people interacting with large companies, especially ones that provide critical infrastructure (which admittedly, is a growing amount). We can't just declare them all public utilities, so in a way I think this sort of problem demonstrates a need for evolution in the way we govern people and corporations.
dfxm12 5y ago
to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent. On the other hand, it can be hard to suss out details of an issue without exposing some sort of personal info, sometime unintentionally. I don't think it's fair to wholly categorize that as a negative. Plus, if you have a problem at a McDonald's, are you going to shout it out loud in front of everyone in the store (who has bad intent there?), or talk to individually to someone who can fix it? It depends on the problem at hand, sure, but I also think people get that companies focus on just one avenue of support and funnel everyone there.

gxs 5y ago

Intuitively, I disagree with the article, but for some reason I'm having a hard time articulating my concerns. You've definitely helped here (helped me) and my biggest problem is that analysis wasn't done on the type of replies. As you mentioned, the quality of the reply might be even more indicative of stock price fluctuations. In general, without seeing additional numbers and some data to see if there is a trend in the sentiment of responses, I find it hard to adopt any hard and fast rule based on the article.

kodah 5y ago

> If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent. When people speak to individuals they speak differently than when they speak to a crowd. Callout culture is the manipulation of a direct conversation into a crowd conversation. In some ways that could work in a users favor but in other ways it could also work against them in that it makes the company drop any (if it existed) personal speech in favor of guarded corporate speak. While I think that users engaging in callout culture is fairly toxic, I think that what it really highlights is our need for a better system for arbitration. With most tech products there is no system for arbitration and the human-based support systems are scarce. All that to say, I don't really think either party here is engaging in "good behavior", if we're going to be playing behavior police. It's also somewhat likely that some of these bad outcomes are egged on simply by reverting to callout culture. The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
You're right Kodah, "call-out culture" is toxic. Bad choice of words on my part. And yes, some people delight in turning a genuine error or manufacturing fault into a public flogging spectacle of a company that can do nothing right no matter how sincerely it tries. What I think I object to is the calculating tone of the article, and the attempt to paint it as quantitative (and so implicitly rational) "research". Of course there are many interpretations of how brand value varies with visibility of arbitration, so I just proffered one (that maybe the PR people dig their own graves). > The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter. Because of the power asymmetry I feel there is something sinister about a large company able to use "no-reply emails", stonewalling, or employ an entire legal team against an individual that makes it not okay to try taking a conversation initiated visibly to a place with less public legibility. I'm not a Twitter user or reader, so quite naive as to how bad things get there. Reliable friends tell me "it's a sewer". I do understand that mobs can be nobs. I have had to firefight product mistakes with large numbers of unhappy users, and yes transparency is powerful. We published the Slack and ticket stream on website, and that cooled hot tempers and even had some of the users advocating for the devs in comments.
- kodah 5y ago
  I do think you're right that at a certain size a company should be able to efficiently employ humans to solve human problems within a system. In practice, this turns out nightmarish. I think that's where governmental institutions can play a role in setting expectations for people interacting with large companies, especially ones that provide critical infrastructure (which admittedly, is a growing amount). We can't just declare them all public utilities, so in a way I think this sort of problem demonstrates a need for evolution in the way we govern people and corporations.

dfxm12 5y ago

to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent. On the other hand, it can be hard to suss out details of an issue without exposing some sort of personal info, sometime unintentionally. I don't think it's fair to wholly categorize that as a negative. Plus, if you have a problem at a McDonald's, are you going to shout it out loud in front of everyone in the store (who has bad intent there?), or talk to individually to someone who can fix it? It depends on the problem at hand, sure, but I also think people get that companies focus on just one avenue of support and funnel everyone there.