4 ms·

Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations. I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the

Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations. I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the hope that if I suddenly lose my XYZ account I will be able to get redress through the same avenue.

jareklupinski 4y ago
yup, if there was going to be one place to do this, HN would be a good one maybe a Help HN! subsection could be created? where people who work for the companies users need support from could gain +25 karma for helping out, or something
TylerLives 4y ago
I think the fear is that you'll see a lot more of them in the future if they're allowed.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  The hope (generally unjustified) is that corporations will feel shame about their practices, or perhaps more realistically that people will decide not to use their services or work for them.
roundandround 4y ago
Without these there's also not as much to counter survivor bias in the stories/recipes of successful use of rental economy, freemium services, etc.
ddtaylor 4y ago
> Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations. The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed. If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines. If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus. If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings. I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.
- prmph 4y ago
  But at least when posts about major tech companies' customer service fiascos show up here, there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better. If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not. Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
  - ddtaylor 4y ago
    > there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better. The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork. > If these kinds of posts are disallowed here I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out. > Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon. It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.

jareklupinski 4y ago

yup, if there was going to be one place to do this, HN would be a good one maybe a Help HN! subsection could be created? where people who work for the companies users need support from could gain +25 karma for helping out, or something

TylerLives 4y ago

I think the fear is that you'll see a lot more of them in the future if they're allowed.

dsr_ 4y ago
The hope (generally unjustified) is that corporations will feel shame about their practices, or perhaps more realistically that people will decide not to use their services or work for them.

roundandround 4y ago

Without these there's also not as much to counter survivor bias in the stories/recipes of successful use of rental economy, freemium services, etc.

ddtaylor 4y ago

> Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations. The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed. If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines. If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus. If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings. I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.

prmph 4y ago
But at least when posts about major tech companies' customer service fiascos show up here, there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better. If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not. Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  > there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better. The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork. > If these kinds of posts are disallowed here I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out. > Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon. It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.
MattGaiser 4y ago
I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.