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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

The most shocking of this all is that these big tech companies are communicating in a way you see in dictorial countries. There is hardly any dialog possible. Disputes are ignored. the right to a fair dialog and the principle of an adversarial process is completely ignored by these giants. And that is quite a bad thing. We see it now happening quite often with smaller but also bigger companies. Sooner or later even individuals will get to face the strong negative influence these companies can give. For many centuries we killed each other to fight for proper humane rights. Individuals but also companies. And now some kind of new virtual world is created where local laws are completely ignored. Not good!!!

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Yeah - I'm with you. This is alarming. I've been reading and thinking about it for months. Some of the books and thinkers mentioned (especially Nicholas Carr) have really changed the way I see our current situation. It's quite dire, I'm afraid!!

I really appreciate my medium sized ISP, which actually answers support emails in a timely, competent and helpful manner.

I don't even bother with bigger tech companies, including Valve. Getting completely senseless automated and canned responses just makes my blood boil and certainly doesn't resolve anything.

Another pet peevee are automated A (not very) I chat bots.

If you want to have a truly horrendous experience try Air Asia's automated customer "support".

All corporations in the US act like mini-dictatorships/oligarchies.

Comcast was always terrible, but at least I could call up their support desk and make someone answer for their bad service. Sometimes they even fix the problem!

You can't call anyone at these new companies.

Not true, I've dealt with Amazon support and I thought it was better than dealing with my bank or cable company.

Someone once tried to steal my account and they would not help me unless I gave them the attackers email (they changed it on the account). This despite using the same email for 10 years with them. Luckily amazon auto-filled it on one of their sign in forms so I was able to repeat it back to the customer service agent.

Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.

As a product buyer? AWS customer? Or vendor?

As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!

As a product buyer. I complained and they gave me a refund without any hassle.

It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.

I suspect that on Amazon's scale, it's probably cheaper for them to toss refunds at customers than to actually fix problems.

Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.

Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.

Oh, I’m sure. It worked out great for me, but it probably affected all S3 public web hosting users.

Though i’d Estimate a fix costs at least 10x $300, if not 100-1000x.

They are making it harder and harder to find their support page though, and as stellar as customer support is once I get hold of them... everything else about Amazon is going customer-hostile.

Google’s Fiber support line is great! Knowledgeable technical reps and I’ve never had a hold time. Unfortunately it’s only in a few cities and they’ve largely abandoned the effort.

With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.

that's by definition, worldwide. other forms of business are co-operatives, or collectively owned companies in communist countries.

A corporation is just a group that's recognized as a separate entity by the government. There's nothing that says the governance of a corporation has to be dictatorial. Many cooperatives are corporations.

You could have a closely or publicly held company with democratic governance. It's rare and I don't know of any examples, but it could happen.

Companies don't have to be feudalism in microcosm by definition, it just so happens that aristocratic ownership tends towards oligarchic governance.

or just tightly controlled companies fail less often than cooperatives

Or it could be that private companies are more likely to care more about profit for shareholders than the health of the market and their own workers, so they deploy unfair employment practices and anticompetitive market behavior to cut corners, destroy the competition, and monopolize for even more profit.

What a nonsense blanket statement.

> a way you see in dictorial countries.

It's not easy to relocate to another country. It's trivial to switch to using some other tech product.

and corporations don't pretend or even have to pretend they are some sort of republics.

Nonsense. In many cases, vendor lock-in and the network effect present a substantial hurtle to living free of these companies. Sure you can quit Facebook, but they'll still build an internal profile about you. You can also tell your mobile carrier to go f* themselves and get a ham radio - but unless all of your friends and colleagues do the same thing you'll just be talking to Major Tom up in his tin can.

Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.

If you quit using Facebook, what does it matter if they have some bits about you?

They’re my goddamn bits, that’s what’s the matter.

They’re bits about you, but what makes you think you own them?

I suppose the general fear is that we are the product and we don’t know what we are being sold for or to whom. If they are so sophisticated they can infer behavioral patterns after you quit by using your still existing network of friends who didn’t quit then it’s a pretty useful bit of profiling technology with buyers. The only part that ever really mattered is how they monetize the product, us. It’s an unspoken agreement for using a service which has no transparent monetary cost.

So it’s fear of the unknown? I’m genuinely curious why people are so bothered by this. I don’t use Facebook, and use privacy extensions to prevent my agents from using Facebook. It’s like they’re a non existent entity in my world.

I simply can’t prioritize caring about something that doesn’t appear to impact my life in any way. But I’m admittedly not much of a principalled-living person. Too much internal hypocrisy for me to pretend to be principled.

That's it none of their fucking business and that it's quite likely a violation of the GDPR.

Nevertheless there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Your question reminds me of the "If you have nothing to hide " fallacy

I don't use Facebook, I'm not on Instagram and scoff on Whatsapp.

They nevertheless maintain a shadow profile of mine.

Would you care to elaborate how I can "trivially switch off" that they abuse my data?

There's not even a need for me to switch to another provider.

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