Comment by lunaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lunaru | Hacker News Reader

Before rolling out this exact feature in our own chat product we resisted doing so because of the concerns being echoed here. However, it was becoming obvious from the demands from our users that this was make-or-break feature in a modern chat system.

After rolling it out and enjoying this for ourselves as we handle our own customer support using our own software, it's become a "why didn't we do this earlier?" type of thing.

Overall, there's already a ton of asymmetry of information when a customer contacts a support team (e.g. our product pulls in order history, subscription details, stripe transactions, etc) that streaming a text preview is really just a drop in the bucket, and it's actually a win-win for both sides since it leads to faster answers.

Also keep in mind that any questions you ask may be used to feed machine-learning systems, like chatbots, which is true for our product as well. Just something to be aware of, that I think is a fair tradeoff for better customer experiences long-term.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://reamaze.com

> "why didn't we do this earlier?"

Because it's invasive.

The user consents to sending you information when they hit Send(explicit). They can remove any incorrect or unrelated information from the text box before they do so.

Especially if they paste in to the text box and inadvertently paste the wrong thing(be that sensitive info or similar).

I use a chat service that has this feature on by default (for real-time chat customer support, not for general messaging), and never in the history of its usage has a person complained about it. For every 10,000 people that may not have an issue with it, 1 may have an issue about it, and with these numbers it's really up to that 1 person to guard their privacy better (disable JS, never step outside their house, etc) than to inconvenience 9,999 other people from the benefits.

The experience is all in the context, and since this is only general behavior for customer service chats (where you're expected to send everything you type and the other end is simply trying to help resolve an issue), it's not really a realistic issue in terms of privacy. I agree that if facebook messenger started doing this and showed the other person what you are typing, this would be unexpected and potentially unwanted behavior, but the likelihood of unwanted behavior in a customer support context is extremely rare.

> I use a chat service that has this feature on by default (for real-time chat customer support, not for general messaging), and never in the history of its usage has a person complained about it.

How would most people know to complain about something they don't know is happening?

> For every 10,000 people that may not have an issue with it, 1 may have an issue about it,

How many of those 10k people even know this is happening? I suspect, given the other comments here and the fact that this article exists, that it's a very small number. Try informing all 10k people first, then count how many 'may not have an issue' with it.

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