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Comment by njs12345 | Hacker News Reader

> Immediately writing a public blog post is not negotiating in good faith.

Yet this seems to have been quite effective, given that the head of Developer Relations at Twitter is replying to this story on HN..

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I don't question that. Yet doing things based purely on their effectiveness for your goals without any regard to the consequences for other parties is semi-sociopathic behavior, which is why it's frowned upon. Whether something is effective or not should not be the only metric by which we decide whether it's the action we should take.

A small-time developer asking a big company to be reasonable practically never works. Likely first response is from a low-paid customer support person who has no idea what you're talking about, likely second response is from an aggressive business or law type in the company.

Public shaming on twitter+blog is 50/50. It often gets the attention of an engineer and sometimes even a founder, and when it does the response is often reasonable. Why would you ever try anything else?

I've had a crazy technical issue with AWS that our account representative proved useless for about but a tweet got it fixed. Also see news articles about people suffering the most ridiculous treatment from comcast/timewarner/verizon/at&t until they get in the news and everything is finally sorted out. This is a totally standard thing you should already be familiar with. The problem is that these big companies get too many queries from crazies and people who have no idea what they're doing, they're inundated with stupid support requests. So a legitimate support request will never be noticed by anyone who knows anything. So you need a sort of public vetting process. You need the "shaming" part to express the priority in large companies where business people have all the power.

I'm not sure there's a better way, that's just how it is.

Going public is incredibly short sighted and almost never effective. People are people and turning a potentially innocuous situation into "us versus them" just makes them less likely to want to help you.

I got a problem with logging into a service a couple of weeks ago. I sent them mail, no answers. I wrote on their Facebook page a few days later (no harsh words). They called me home in a couple of hours and we fixed the problem on the spot. I wrote again on fb to thank them.

Going public means getting in front of people that care more about customers or has more time to do so. It feels a little like skipping the line though.

The difference here is that you attempted normal contact first, and waited for a reply. If everyone immediately defaulted to publicizing their problems with their relationships with companies, it would be both more annoying for everyone and less effective. The importance they place on your publicly aired problems is relative to how many of those problems they see and the expected negative impact. A thousand people complaining about your service daily will not receive the same attention and treatment as when there's a single person complaining.

It's just getting to the point where emailing a company through the normal support channels is just a joke. Their email queue is days long, while their Twitter queue is minutes.

What needs to happen, and probably has little chance of happening, is for people to always mention how understaffed the support at the company in question must be. These companies are under-staffing their support and it's contributing to the situation where things often need to be publicly escalated before they get the attention they need. Making support and customer service part of their reputation will go a long way towards solving that. There's really no excuse for support as atrocious as some companies have become known for. Sure, some of the products are free, but at the same time they are able to monetize the aggregate of all that free use, so there's really no excuse, since the free use and their revenues are intrinsically linked.

It makes them more likely to help you and less likely to do it happily. Depends on circumstances whether that is better for you.

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