4 ms·

> Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corp

by _gabe_ 4y ago

> Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corporations. At sufficiently large scale there will be employees that just don't care about their users. It doesn't mean every individual at Facebook is like this, but Facebook as a corporation, and a certain percentage of employees, do not care about the users. That's not to cast judgment on you or your team, I believe there are people who genuinely try to help at all corps :) Unfortunately, like you said, the reality is that as the scale of a product increases the quality will decrease on both sides of the transaction for some people.

tehlike 4y ago
Of course, there will always be someone who won't care about their users, it's inevitable. But knowing how sausage is made, there are different trade offs when it comes to authentication... I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs. I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  There seems to be a loose consensus (which I agree with) that takes a bit of a dim view toward patronizing a company (any company) where the scale is such that there’s no effective relationship between the company and non-paying users. I think that’s probably a better way to capture and elucidate the sentiment than “scale goes up, quality goes down.” There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably. It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.
  - tehlike 4y ago
    I think this is fair. Part of the issue is as the number of users increase, the support staff has to increase, which in turn would increase the "attack surface" where a support staff might go rouge etc, and cost also increases probably super-linearly. Google took the opposite approach and delegated everything to automation, which had other problems. Being a paid user also probably helps with contractual side of things, but ianal. Everything here is my personal opinion if it weren't clear.
    - orbit7 4y ago
      I think future tech like Kilt protocol would go a long way to helping solving this problem. But I think generally there is a lot of solution options such as KYC processes that could take steps to solve it, some countries would perhaps be easier than others to solve initially. Is there not a team/ think tank working purely to solve these types of problem? Solving this type issue should matter most above all, its the grass roots of users that's made FB what it is.
      - tehlike 4y ago
        Try doing KYC and people will go bonkers(americans in particular). I personally don't give out my passport info unless i absolutely have to. IRS recently implemented this id.me id verification thing and I only went through it because i had to. Also people use Fake Ids all the time. Even when you present an ID in person, it would be somewhat fakeable. Imagine now doing it over laptop camera, with tech like deep fake it will get even easier eventually. In my IRS case, automated system couldn't get me verified, so i had to wait i forgot how long to get to a person who just said "yup, you are you" and had other limitations and probaly would quickly run into scale problem if it were peak times or peak use cases.

by _gabe_ 4y ago

tehlike 4y ago

Of course, there will always be someone who won't care about their users, it's inevitable. But knowing how sausage is made, there are different trade offs when it comes to authentication... I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs. I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
There seems to be a loose consensus (which I agree with) that takes a bit of a dim view toward patronizing a company (any company) where the scale is such that there’s no effective relationship between the company and non-paying users. I think that’s probably a better way to capture and elucidate the sentiment than “scale goes up, quality goes down.” There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably. It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.
- tehlike 4y ago
  I think this is fair. Part of the issue is as the number of users increase, the support staff has to increase, which in turn would increase the "attack surface" where a support staff might go rouge etc, and cost also increases probably super-linearly. Google took the opposite approach and delegated everything to automation, which had other problems. Being a paid user also probably helps with contractual side of things, but ianal. Everything here is my personal opinion if it weren't clear.
  - orbit7 4y ago
    I think future tech like Kilt protocol would go a long way to helping solving this problem. But I think generally there is a lot of solution options such as KYC processes that could take steps to solve it, some countries would perhaps be easier than others to solve initially. Is there not a team/ think tank working purely to solve these types of problem? Solving this type issue should matter most above all, its the grass roots of users that's made FB what it is.
    - tehlike 4y ago
      Try doing KYC and people will go bonkers(americans in particular). I personally don't give out my passport info unless i absolutely have to. IRS recently implemented this id.me id verification thing and I only went through it because i had to. Also people use Fake Ids all the time. Even when you present an ID in person, it would be somewhat fakeable. Imagine now doing it over laptop camera, with tech like deep fake it will get even easier eventually. In my IRS case, automated system couldn't get me verified, so i had to wait i forgot how long to get to a person who just said "yup, you are you" and had other limitations and probaly would quickly run into scale problem if it were peak times or peak use cases.