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Comment by nadams | Hacker News Reader

> I'm going to guess this is either totally false

I tried to contact Reddit administration once - no response. They probably either ignore uninteresting emails (read: any email except where people want to give them money) - or it was labeled as spam and went into the bitbucket.

After the latest reddit drama - this isn't surprising. When you fire someone who handles major publicity without telling anyone (I'm sure people knew and knew why - but didn't want to say anything) - there is definitely a communication problem in your company. And this is not a "sorry we will work for better communication in the future" issue - it's a problem where they need to identify the problem and fix it immediately.

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A lot of very large, very public websites have very poor procedures for handling being contacted from the public.

Some times there may be a contact e-mail, but you have to stumble onto it, like after hitting a 500 error page (though often error message contact info is hidden, too).

Other times the e-mail is some internal address that's used for testing, or is non-routable, and the mail goes nowhere. What server is it forwarded to from the public-facing MDA? What mailbox? Is it an alias? A group list? An individual?

Other times, maybe somebody gets the mail, but nobody knows what to do with it. Who checks it? Who figures out where it needs to go? Who replies to it? How do you know if somebody never follows up on it, so that you can re-try to get a reply from someone internal? Does the e-mail seem important enough to even warrant a reply (does anyone care)?

And a lot of the time, even if there's a contact page for the whole site/company, there's no e-mail address, because nobody ever planned for there to be a generic contact e-mail for the whole site or company. How do you reply on behalf of all of Microsoft? Of General Electric? Of Kraft?

Almost always, if a reply does come, it's because someone went above and beyond their normal job duties just to make sure you, the inquiring party, get your question answered.

> How do you reply on behalf of all of Microsoft? Of General Electric? Of Kraft?

All these companies have 800 numbers that I can call to get an official-ish reply to my question or concern. It should be just as easy to setup a shared email account for people to respond to.

That 800 number leads to a contracted call center in India. The most official thing they can say is written down for them as a catch-all response.

I listed the problems of shared e-mail accounts above.... My main point is this: it's not about being easy. It's about someone caring enough to go through all the work themselves of getting it set up, because nobody ever requests it get set up. Somebody has to do it all of their own initiative. And often, that initiative gets halted by the chain of command, usually because not answering questions is easier and safer overall.

Publicly accessible email addresses are nearly impossible to manage. Reddit has 20 million unique visitors per month. If in a given month 1% of users send an email in a month, they are receiving an email an average of once every 13 seconds. Assuming you can read an email every second that is still three full time employees just reading email to keep up.

This makes the point that reddit is either willful or negligent quite forcefully. Under broad legal doctrine, "ignorance is no excuse" for non-compliance with lawful regulation. So its probably too strong an anology to be relevant. Its pointless to assume innocence or exoneration without more substantial information. Reality is most likely somewhere in the middle.

> Publicly accessible email addresses are nearly impossible to manage.

That's hard to believe when many companies offer a support@company.com, twitter, facebook, phone or other means of public contact.

And why would every visitor contact the owner of the website? Have you ever sent email or wanted to send email to Comcast, Microsoft or any other interesting company? I would imagine only a small number of people would ever contact or even want to contact reddit administration (simply because the subreddits are managed by other people). And I'm sure 90% of those who contact reddit could be replied with pre-typed message of "We have no control of the subreddits - please contact the subreddit moderators".

> That's hard to believe when many companies offer a support@company.com, twitter, facebook, phone or other means of public contact

Personally I couldn't find Twitter's support email. Tried out this page, but all I'm getting is a bunch of contact forms: https://support.twitter.com/forms ; Facebook does this too and here's the thing - they've got an automated system that aggregate issues and bubble up popular ones to their support crew. The long tail of that support queue is most probably completely ignored.

There are ~ three employees (ok sometimes 1 or 2) managing complaints in every average size home appliance store throughout the world, so why not for a successful internet company?

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