4 ms·

So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes

by jsnell 2y ago

So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes. They're just gullible enough to believe what they read on the internet, and take action on it. The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job, and the expertise to predict what the implications of doing the policy changes asked by the complainers would be. Not just how much it'd cost directly, but the second order effects on abuse from making different tradeoffs. So let's say that you want to give high-touch customer support to billions of free accounts? Not only is it going to be fabulously expensive, but it's going to be abusable as hell. The abusers will quickly learn just what kind of sob story will have the best chance of fooling the humans, and get their accounts falsely unbanned or even use it to hijack the accounts of others. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the customer service reps have no agency. But then you're paying tens or hundreds of millions / year just to have humans execute a script. And these predictions will be a lot more credible than those from random employees parrotting social media posts and making vague claims about potential brand damage or loss of trust. Ignoring the complaints is going to be a pretty easy choice for an exec.

pompino 2y ago
Raising complaints internally always has value in any organization. At a minimum, it highlights the fact that people outside the organization think your colleagues are doing a shit job. The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common.
- jsnell 2y ago
  I'm not saying there's no value in raising complaints internally. I'm saying that the proposed method of having somebody uninformed do it in an all hands meeting based on internet anecdotes has no value. It has no chance of affecting change.
- grayhatter 2y ago
  >The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common. Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people. Now I still question every decision, but I have experts that I believe will have answers worth listening to. The answers these days are rarely, we know what we're doing, and much more common to be; we tried that but it didn't work because [reason]. Complaints without suggestions or requests are normally ignored.
  - pompino 2y ago
    >Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people. Thanks for the free advice, I guess. >we tried that but it didn't work because [reason]. If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life.
    - grayhatter 2y ago
      > If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life. ahh, line on graph must go up, huh? this isn't a critique of the suggestion you didn't make which I assume you meant to of: everyone should always be seeking out new ideas to improve the status quo. But the meme that if you're not improving what you're doing has no value is a trash take. CPR hasn't changed dramatically in decades. Good chest compression is still the single most important thing if you want to survive to hospital discharge. But you're right, the paramedic's skills who isn't inventing a new method has no value. sigh
kelnos 2y ago
> The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job I think it should be evident by the number of cases we see posted about on HN alone that they are not doing a good job. Or, I guess maybe they're doing a good job based on the metrics they were given, but I wouldn't consider it a good job in the sense of living in a fair society where negative actions taken against people (by governments or by private entities) should have a reasonable appeal process involving real humans. My view is that if even one person loses an account who shouldn't have, and there is either no process to appeal and fix it, or the process ends up not giving that person their account back, they're not doing a good job, full stop. I know that's an incredibly high bar, but I don't care. The loss of many of these types of accounts can cause real financial and emotional harm to people, and that's just not ok.
- jsnell 2y ago
  It should be even more evident that you can't judge whether they're doing a good job by looking at just the numerator. You need to know the denominator as well. Or rather, the denominators. In a simplified model there are two groups of users {good,bad} and two outcomes {suspended,not suspended}. You're saying that success can be judged by whether there are any people claiming to be good (though you have no idea of whether that's true, they're just claiming that on the internet) ending in the {claims-to-be-good, suspended} bucket. But actually to judge whether they're doing a good job, you'd need to look at the {good, not suspended}, {bad, suspended} and {bad, not suspended} buckets too. The first one is a baseline. Obviously if you've got a billion users, all your numbers are going to be 1000x higher than a somebody with a million users just due to the higher number of users. The number of internet complaints will be 1000x higher too. But the actual harm to the average user from the mistakes is the same. The second bucket are the successes, and they are going to be totally invisible to everyone not working on the problem. Not only to the random HN commenters, but to the random bigco employee too. They literally can't judge the success. The only visibility will be if that number is too low, since it obviously means the third bucket is too high. And that will be visible as the platform being overrun by spam and scams. Now, I understand that your view is that it must be completely impossible for a possibly good user to lose an account. That's just the kind of thing that people who don't understand the problem space would say at an all hands open mike, and then get ignored because their view is just so detached from reality. It's not even a matter of resources; even if you threw infinite resources at the problem, what you'd end up with is a worse experience in the aggregate. You'd have scammers reinstated, and continue scamming more people. You'd have accounts be hijacked because the scammers are going to be better at social engineering their way into accounts than the real users will be at social engineering their way to account recovery. It's all tradeoffs, and absolutist statements about how it's unacceptable for even a single good user to suffer any harm are just as unrealistic as absolutist statements about how even a single piece of spam can't make it through. The best you can do is try to find the best place in the tradeoff space.

by jsnell 2y ago

pompino 2y ago

Raising complaints internally always has value in any organization. At a minimum, it highlights the fact that people outside the organization think your colleagues are doing a shit job. The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common.

jsnell 2y ago
I'm not saying there's no value in raising complaints internally. I'm saying that the proposed method of having somebody uninformed do it in an all hands meeting based on internet anecdotes has no value. It has no chance of affecting change.
grayhatter 2y ago
>The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common. Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people. Now I still question every decision, but I have experts that I believe will have answers worth listening to. The answers these days are rarely, we know what we're doing, and much more common to be; we tried that but it didn't work because [reason]. Complaints without suggestions or requests are normally ignored.
- pompino 2y ago
  >Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people. Thanks for the free advice, I guess. >we tried that but it didn't work because [reason]. If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life.
  - grayhatter 2y ago
    > If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life. ahh, line on graph must go up, huh? this isn't a critique of the suggestion you didn't make which I assume you meant to of: everyone should always be seeking out new ideas to improve the status quo. But the meme that if you're not improving what you're doing has no value is a trash take. CPR hasn't changed dramatically in decades. Good chest compression is still the single most important thing if you want to survive to hospital discharge. But you're right, the paramedic's skills who isn't inventing a new method has no value. sigh

kelnos 2y ago

> The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job I think it should be evident by the number of cases we see posted about on HN alone that they are not doing a good job. Or, I guess maybe they're doing a good job based on the metrics they were given, but I wouldn't consider it a good job in the sense of living in a fair society where negative actions taken against people (by governments or by private entities) should have a reasonable appeal process involving real humans. My view is that if even one person loses an account who shouldn't have, and there is either no process to appeal and fix it, or the process ends up not giving that person their account back, they're not doing a good job, full stop. I know that's an incredibly high bar, but I don't care. The loss of many of these types of accounts can cause real financial and emotional harm to people, and that's just not ok.

jsnell 2y ago
It should be even more evident that you can't judge whether they're doing a good job by looking at just the numerator. You need to know the denominator as well. Or rather, the denominators. In a simplified model there are two groups of users {good,bad} and two outcomes {suspended,not suspended}. You're saying that success can be judged by whether there are any people claiming to be good (though you have no idea of whether that's true, they're just claiming that on the internet) ending in the {claims-to-be-good, suspended} bucket. But actually to judge whether they're doing a good job, you'd need to look at the {good, not suspended}, {bad, suspended} and {bad, not suspended} buckets too. The first one is a baseline. Obviously if you've got a billion users, all your numbers are going to be 1000x higher than a somebody with a million users just due to the higher number of users. The number of internet complaints will be 1000x higher too. But the actual harm to the average user from the mistakes is the same. The second bucket are the successes, and they are going to be totally invisible to everyone not working on the problem. Not only to the random HN commenters, but to the random bigco employee too. They literally can't judge the success. The only visibility will be if that number is too low, since it obviously means the third bucket is too high. And that will be visible as the platform being overrun by spam and scams. Now, I understand that your view is that it must be completely impossible for a possibly good user to lose an account. That's just the kind of thing that people who don't understand the problem space would say at an all hands open mike, and then get ignored because their view is just so detached from reality. It's not even a matter of resources; even if you threw infinite resources at the problem, what you'd end up with is a worse experience in the aggregate. You'd have scammers reinstated, and continue scamming more people. You'd have accounts be hijacked because the scammers are going to be better at social engineering their way into accounts than the real users will be at social engineering their way to account recovery. It's all tradeoffs, and absolutist statements about how it's unacceptable for even a single good user to suffer any harm are just as unrealistic as absolutist statements about how even a single piece of spam can't make it through. The best you can do is try to find the best place in the tradeoff space.