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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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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