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Comment by BbzzbB | Hacker News Reader

This is off topic but it reminds me, every time I look for some Windows 10 problem, it mostly leads to some Microsoft forum (answers.microsoft.com). In there however, the questions systematically get answered by a billion "MSFT specialist consultants #not working for MSFT", and it always weirds me out. Are these people there for self promotion, for the thrill of it or is it MSFT that has some reward system for third parties to participate? I know helpful strangers is nothing new to the internet, I guess I'm just weirded out because there's never an official answer on MSFT's official forum and these sorts of questions are not really the sort of "playful" puzzles one might encounter helping strangers on SO/Reddit/Discord.

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They also seem to just skim read questions for keywords and give you canned solutions for problems they already know how to fix. If your problem is either new or something that's not actually fixable the thread turns in to a back and forth of them clearly not actually comprehending that and you restating your issue in different ways in futility.

It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.

Or they'll ask for rafts of info that anyone paying attention can see is unrelated. Those posts, I always imagine them ending with "heh heh, THAT should keep Batman & Robin busy for a while! mwa ha ha, ha HA HA HA HA HAAA!"

It's the same on the Apple discussion boards. You won't ever get an official answer, only a guess of an answer from somebody with no more knowledge than yourself.

HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.

My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.

And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.

And the guess of an answer they give is always the same:

1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)

2. Have you reset your PRAM?

3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.

And don't forget the mandatory "reset your SMC"

Real answer they don’t want to give.

   “Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”

Apple's discussion boards are useless, but at least they have actual phone and email channels to get an answer from an employee (usually). And Apple doesn't generally charge for the phone call itself (they will charge for out-of-warranty hardware work, but generally don't for software support even out of warranty).

With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.

Maybe Apple consumer forums, but I’ve had amazing support from the developer forums. Especially Quinn “the Eskimo” ... saves my butt every 6 months it seems, and isn’t the least bit offended when my questions relate to an opaque electron code signing issue. Seriously, bless this person for doing the “lord’s work.”

Ditto for the same person and similar reasons (code signing and notarization).

He's been doing it since the late 90s too... I still remember getting an answer from him regarding a dusty corner of the Mac OS 8 internet config API when I was trying to bulk provision Macs for campus internet access in 1998. It was all mailing lists then.

The Apple communities are next to useless, especially when it's a design flaw; butterfly keyboard. You practically have to sue companies like Apple to get them to take notice.

Big-vendor hardware: Sure it costs 1.5-2.0x as much as white-box equipment, but you're paying for the support!

... later...

"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"

"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"

Honestly, that last line reads exactly like something from BOFH[0], right before he gets the PFY to commit some heinous act of domestic terrorism on the unsuspecting enterprise support salesman. Some things apparently never change.

[0]https://www.theregister.com/data_centre/bofh/

Google support forums are the same, the "product experts" who write most of the answers don't work for Google and are limited in their ability to escalate things.

In the '90's I had a mission that I carried out by offering answers to questions on CompuServe fora pertaining to Windows. In 1996 Microsoft decided to embrace and extend this by offering perks to the people who were most active. That program has been revised and renamed over the years. I wouldn't say that I succeeded in my mission, but I would say I don't feel I need to do such things personally. The people you are pointing out seem to need to offer you a solution, however off-point, and need you to accept it formally if you indeed find it to be a solution, and I speculate, seem to be paid and possibly try to make a living doing it now. A possible explanation is that Microsoft doesn't want to be obligated to provide online support any more than Google does. But they want to indeed offer online support for the time being, as casually as possible, and they are regulating some people by measuring some aspects of the support activities of some people.

Getting Microsoft MVP is based, in part, on community involvement. This is one way to show community engagement.

Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.

And maybe this has changed, but I think the Microsoft support forum used to show the "accepted" answer twice, once in the thread and once in the accepted answer section. Or something similar; whatever it was I felt like I was reading the same thing twice.

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