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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I get the impression that this is how you get proper support from Facebook or Google. Make a Reddit or Hacker News post, get a few upvotes, and someone with influence inside the company files an "Oops Help My Friend" support ticket or contacts another person with the right authority to take a look.

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In the Catholic theology, there's a concept of Saints, who are basically humans that intercede with God on the behalf of ordinary mortals. People will sometimes address prayers to saints in the hope that the prayer will be more effective. Probably similar in other religions too but I'm pulling from memories of catholic school

This is ridiculously accurate and totally makes sense.

The 21st century is making me rethink how atheist I truely am. I think by following the moral code of face masks and social distancing, I will spare my family from plague and those who scoff at these codes will get smited. I put my faith and security into these big corps that don't even have an corporeal existance, and work with us through intermediaries like Amazon through ups and Microsoft through gamestop, Google doesnt even have a customer service branch and I had no way but to dig up my old school email in order to prove to them I am who I say I am. I tithe to the market, my funding of corps will pay back in future wealth. I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky.

God help us all .

> I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky.

Same but with our Jenkins builds, which appear to be entirely non-deterministic. "Perhaps the praying will help," I think to myself as I create my PR.

There are no atheists in ops roles?

"I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky." so accurate it hurts

Too close to home here.

buddhism has Bodhisattva that perform a similar purpose

They don't intercede for some authority, though. Bodhisattvas are more like the folks that hold the door open for people and don't leave until everyone else has.

Huh. I grew up Catholic and I never understood the point of praying to saints. I always chalked it up to superstition. Your explanation sort of makes sense,

> I always chalked it up to superstition.

I mean. It still is.

It is superstition, same here for my Muslim country, people pray at the tombs of dead Imams, though it is shunned by almost all scholars, but ignorance begets superstition.

This is a reason why better education for all is the way forward for humanity.

I wonder where angels would fit in?

Speaking of, https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/world/teenager-beatified-chur...

.. and prior to the reformation, people would pay priests to pray to the saints to intercede on their behalf.

People got so upset about the Catholic church selling the right to bend the divine rules that one guy wrote an extremely angry listicle, made a viral post on a church door, and the rest is history. And centuries of sectarian warfare.

(Seriously, most of the 95 theses are about indulgences: https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html )

I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"? Perhaps people who help others with these issues (which are public by nature of being discussed on reddit/twitter/etc) can put it as an item on their resume when looking to switch jobs - something like "I care about the community and people who use the products I help build. I advocated for [this person (with link to public forum)] which ultimately resulted in [this solution (with link to release note if possible)]."

Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).

It's incentivized like this:

[At a party] A: What do you do? B: I work for $BIGTECH. A: You suck dude. I bought one of their products and it never worked once.

Response: "Oh yeah I know, the team that made that really sucks. How about that local sports team?"

"The thing about Facebook is, they always try to walk it in."

Couple of pop psych thoughts:

People on HN are not really strangers, we are part of a community. By helping one of us, they help one of their in groups. Not helping might devalue their investment in this place.

HN users are the early adopters that small group of users who have much more influence early on in projects. Care of early adopters makes sense.

I assume that quite often those are marketing & PR people who use special tools to track every mention of a product / company name. Many companies (especially niche ones) buy those services that basically track the whole internet - so their representatives can comment on issues.

Bigger companies seem not to care that much, apart from maybe twitter? And those few thousand upvote posts on reddit.

There are groups inside Facebook to raise issues like this. I can guarantee this one has already been escalated.

They wouldn't allow just any employee to "fix" these issues. Too often there is a lot of context that is omitted from the shared story, so it's not just a matter of hitting a button to remove a block.

You don't want to incentivise this too much or people will start taking bribes.

Also, "I helped a member of the public defeat my organisation's policy" is a negative on the resume not a positive. Sadly.

The very fact that regular employees of these companies might have the clout to take bribes for simply giving their attention to something, speaks to the absurdity of how much power we've given the organizations. We're talking about Facebook programmers like they're state senators.

I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"?

When the coin in the coffer rings / An account from bannination springs!

Unfortunately for each of these cases going public there will be about a hundred poor souls being unnoticed.

This has happened with me re: Intuit, Microsoft and Adobe as well - all companies with proper support channels - issue resolution/escalation for people with the "right contacts" goes about 100x faster.

What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?

Anecdotal, but.. I got dicked around by Wayfair for almost two months (stalled order, various excuses, well meaning but essentially powerless customer support). In the end all it took to resolve was one tweet at their account. Next day the order cleared.

Followers are power

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