Hacker News Reader

Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

The signal to noise ratio tends to be poor though. So many will insist and swear and beg and threaten about what they think they need, or what they used to do, or what they won't pay for but would like to have if it's free and maintained indefinitely. There's often a background noise of "all change is bad" and some improvements are not as clear as helicopter vs rush hour traffic, so the benefit will take time to appreciate.

The trick, of course - and rather old news - is reading between the lines and not becoming arrogant in response to the lower quality feedback. You probably don't know better than them AND they probably don't know what they want.

View on HN

This is true. And the bigger a company is the more there is to trawl through.

Still, you get stuff like this 14 page thread dating back two years asking Dropbox to stop forcing new folders to automatically sync[1], or this 10 page thread spanning 3½ years where adding an external email to hotmail/outlook.com was broken[2]. Never any official response, just moderators posting form responses like robots. Those are where I feel things have gotten a bit ridiculous, when the company stops ever interacting with the customers at all.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...

Oh my god I can't stand moderator responses. Worse when they're just copy+paste and they didn't even read your request/question. Been happening on Github more and more too with issues.

Sounds like you're having some trouble with forum moderators.

To allow me to fully assist with your issue, can you please make sure you've completed the following steps:

- Restart your PC.

- Copy down any annoying messages from moderators that you see.

- Try reading the messages again to see if you feel better about them now.

If this message was helpful, please remember to upvote and mark as SOLVED.

Very true. The helicopter vs. rush hour example is kind of like finding the holy grail, and that's what you strive for. In practice, the majority the improvements you can extract from these conversations end up being much smaller. But many small improvements compound and also help create the invaluable customer feeling of "Hey, I feel like the team behind this product really gets me!"

Also, well put: "You probably don't know better than them AND they probably don't know what they want."

Great point about the signal to noise ratio. One interesting thing there is how the ratios differ between a mostly emotional experience (a new social platform for example) vs.. say.. a product that helps the user make more money (most B2B). You'll often have much less noise when all of your users want roughly the same specific thing. But, like you said, there's definitely still a bunch of noise.

For sure it gets a lot worse if you have multiple different groups saying different things and you don't know which are the most important or profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com