Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Here's what Notion.so says about this on their website.

https://www.notion.so/Back-up-your-data-1a8eb5bdfce34d19a636...

- *I tried clicking the `Export all workspace content` button but received an error message.*

    Oof, so sorry about this  For particularly large workspaces, the `Export all workspace content` function may have some trouble completing the export. We're investigating this issue and hope to have a resolution soon.

    As a temporary workaround for this issue, you can export in smaller batches:

    1. Navigate to a top-level page in your workspace
    2. Click the `•••` button at the top right of the page, then click `Export` (you may not see this option if you're not an admin in the workspace)
    3. Choose `Markdown & CSV` or `HTML` as the export format, and turn on the `Include subpages` toggle
    4. Repeat for any other important top-level pages in the workspace that you'd like to have a backup of

    Please note that we keep per-minute backups on our servers, and can help with data recovery at any time at team@makenotion.com. Thanks for your patience while we work on fixing this issue!

God, if there’s one thing I hate it’s that condescending millennial speak to cover up a serious issue.

> Oof, so sorry about this...

What??? If your company is broken don’t make it seem like a funny “aw shucks” blunder.

This reminds me of Discord

Discord, at least, has a vastly different audience than a B2B enterprise product. A different tone is more acceptable for something like that, IMO.

Yeah I love Discord's update messages. But I mostly use it for managing Overwatch play session, chatting while gaming, and sharing dumb or mildly interesting YouTube videos.(Edited for spelling)

I'm glad they got rid of most of them - the description text on startup settings such as "Start minimized" or "Start on bootup" were sentences such as "Have Discord greet you like a good boy", "Have Discord stay in the tray like a good boy"

While it's not trying to downplay anything like OP, it was certainly strange and creepy seeing software adopt Reddit English.

Interesting, I've written stuff very much like that before for customers that were hitting bugs. I wasn't trying to be "aw shucks" funny. I legitimately feel sorry that my shitty software was breaking on them. That they provided a workaround seemed like a nice thing to me. In fact that whole message seemed pretty good to me. It's probably not entirely that employee's fault but they're still trying to empathize and help.

I wonder how many people have felt the same way about me.

it's disrespectful to respond like that, to me. infantilizing; like I'm incapable of processing a response that is genuine.

"uwu we'we sowwy dis isn't wewking anymowe.. pwease don't be angwy wiff us"

Interesting. To me, its a strong signal that the person on the other end is not an offshored, overworked drone but someone who is treated well by the company and cares enough to express empathy.

it's not empathetic, it's an attempt to disarm and minimize, and it's insulting.

Consider the platform demographic before responding this way. It can be an advantage and a disadvantage.

There is no person on the other end. There is a program, so definitely a drone, maybe wrote by offshored developers maybe not, definitely overworked or they'll have the time to fix the bug or implement the feature instead of replacing it with a message.

A person doing the export manually would be OK as a workaround and instead all they have is that message. That's not OK.

Don't try to be funny in your docs. If you want to convey information, make it clean, precise, and to the point. Do not assume and do not distract.

Please.

P.S. Jokes are not totally forbidden, but they should be more subtle and not so intrusive as "You are asking me a question, but here I'll give you a performance instead of an answer".

Yes, the word ‘oof’ denotes a performance. The etymology dates back to early vaudeville days when Barker Malarkey used it to start the Famous Malarkey Family’s drag show…

Except that’s not true. That whole paragraph is a load of malarkey.

It’s a word. You don’t know the person involved and you’re making more awful assumptions based upon three letters.

Now, reverse it backward. Not only I don't know them, but neither they know me. Can you see the issue now?

There is such a thing as technical writing style and it is about the relevance of information pieces and the relations between them.

gee wiz

I laughed. thank you.

How the hell is "Oof, we're so sorry about this." remotely similar to "uwu we'we sowwy dis isn't wewking anymowe.. pwease don't be angwy wiff us"

I get it, some forms of communication aren't your bag. But I think it's at least reasonable to focus on a company's intent even if the verbiage isn't what you'd prefer. FWIW I'm quite older than a millennial, but I didn't find anything infantilizing about Notion's response - I'd much prefer a genuine expression of regret, which is what this FAQ appeared to be, than some nonsense corporate-speak.

it's insulting because it is attempting to minimize the customer's stake in the problem by appearing to be concerned and empathetic.

if they were concerned or empathetic, the issue would not have lasted as long as it has.

in short, it's disingenuous and it's an attempt to minimize the customer's concerns.

Do you have special crystal ball that lets you peer into another company’s dev processes? If not, who are you to claim people have no empathy? That’s not only a really dark view of humans but it ignores the possibility that they cannot fix it right now.

God people, have a touch of respect for our colleagues.

Probably Notion should not have put them into this situation in the first place? Maybe they should have been more clear on the issue they’re having so nobody has to make a guess? Shortly explain the details of the issue they’re having and give some timelines? Like mature companies do? It would be good enough for me if I were their customer but oof, who am I to suggest.

I have respect for my colleagues at other companies.

They lose it when they talk down to me. "oof, sorry about that, but this is not important enough for us to fix right now" is not how you keep my respect, when the functionality has been broken for months.

The word "oof" affects a casual, breezy tone that is inappropriate in a professional response to a customer concern.

Yes that's casual. But how it that inappropriate? It's not a legal document.

Or it’s a genuine expression of embarrassment and anyone who would be bothered by that is an asshole. It’s three letters. Who cares?

In my experience, it's mostly the Millienial developer who writes error messages like these and the Gen X that takes offence (probably because this reminds them of their condescending Boomer parents ;))

I used to do this too but stopped after getting negative feedback. It can come across as insincere or unserious at a time when the user is already not happy with you.

P.s. the person who first brought it to my attention was a UX designer. Good UX people add so much value. This kind of stuff can be really hard to see on your own.

It is unprofessional. Plain and simple.

Thank you! Written communication with complete strangers is incredibly hard, so it's always good to know how you're being perceived.

For what its worth, I second the parent's sentiment. It comes off as really patronizing to me to make responses like this to serious issues.

At a minimum, if you take a friendly personal tone in important communications, but there isn't a real person waiting behind it in an easily accessible manner at customer support with the same tone, I get extremely annoyed. There is something infuriating about the cheapness of projecting friendliness in a UI but then directing me to some robot phone line or an auto generated email where it really matters.

Oh interesting, I assumed this was a response to a support case or something, not the text on their website. In that case I agree with you.

In my case I was a real person writing and waiting behind it. I was emailing a response directly to a support case I was handling.

Does that change anything in your opinion or would you still feel the same way? (Please don't spare my feelings. I'm really asking as I need to know the hard truth in order to improve)

For me that’s a much more acceptable setting to have a more “human” interaction (provided that is actually how you normally interact).

I generally dislike this tone too.

If they really felt sorry for this particular customer, they would be actually solving their issues, not answering with automatic messages.

When your product is broken informality and conversational prose comes across as sloppy and unprofessional. It sends a bad message and it’s counter productive in this context.

I’m obviously in the minority here but I appreciate that kind of tone. Yeah, it sucks that I’ve found a bug but the vast majority of the time, the devs involved hate the bug more than I do.

I think the best way to handle support is to be yourself.

Unless you have a personal relationship with the person on the other end (like a customer you have been helping for years and are on a first name basis with), the best way to handle support is to be overly professional.

Casual is almost always a recipe for disaster if the person on the other end doesn't know you. It makes it sound like you aren't taking their issue seriously.

How does a support rep being friendly and casual lead to a disaster? Or are the disasters you are referring to purely caused by the customer acting entitled and screaming because they got offended that someone was trying to be nice to them?

It's more than likely some dude that is just starting their career that has almost no training that is trying to the best of their ability to express empathy, provide a workaround, and make the customer happy. He doesn't control what gets fixed. Why do business interactions need to be devoid of social niceties? It's some software company, not a morgue.

Right. There's definitely a time and place to be casual. As a support person, you're your customer's 911 dispatcher.

Please don't make light of their issues. People want to be treated seriously when they're having a problem.

You can't tell people they're entitled for disliking how you're treating them in a serious situation, and call it empathy in the next breath.

Right, but again, it's not 911, it's a software company. The user's company is not gonna go bankrupt, they can still use the application.

It is a front line support rep, it is the same as some guy at McDonald's. Yes, I think people are entitled when they feel they have a right to be mean or difficult to some person who is just trying to do their job and is making a plausible attempt to be nice to you. You can't read that workers mind, they said one word that can be plausibly used in either circumstance. That word expresses anguish that their customer is having trouble. That is empathy if it was used sincerely. It is not the south park episode with the cable company workers.

This thread has really messed with my feelings on the tech industry. When did we all become unfeeling automatons? Did I miss that memo??

There’s nothing wrong with expressing anguish. And I happily fire customers who have a problem with that. Life is too short to deal with that level of entitlement.

I've learned that good intentions are filtered differently when the other party is already angry.

If my customer is having a problem, I can try being friendly after the communication is already ongoing, problem has been aknowledged, and it is on his way to be fixed. Ending in a friendly tone is a big plus. Starting with it, not at all.

On the other hand, as a customer, having to deal with you at all is already stressful enough, i'm paying you and still losing time over your screw-ups, and still you start with an "ooof". It would give me a feeling of "not only i'm losing time, i'm also being joked on".

Being professional and gradually friendly is simply the most secure way to operate, because every person that contacts you for a problem, big or small, doesn't want to contact you to begin with. Don't "ooof" me please.

It seems like the disconnect here is that the angry people are viewing this one person's response as representative of the entire company and as though it was filtered through a PR rep, while the more understanding people are viewing this person a person speaking for themselves, not necessarily the whole company.

The person could have just copy pasted the canned response with no help and it sounds like a lot of people would have been happier with that. At a minimum, they wouldn't be hating on the customer support rep personally.

Yea, that sounds about right. I think I recall being a support rep for trading software in college and I've interacted with those front line workers for a long time now so I have a lot of empathy for them.

They are just people trying to do their job and I don't recall a single support rep that wasn't just trying to do their job well. People are complicated and socializing is hard, especially when it's not in person. What we do is almost always not life and death. We shuffle bits around between computers, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously. There is no reason people can't be nice to each other in these interactions.

This industry mostly provides very ephemeral services, so it's almost never a matter of life and death (the entire multi-million email marketing sector could implode overnight and life would go on just fine), but you still charge money for those ephemeral services, and the least you could do would be to take your screw-ups a bit seriously.

I repeat, there's a big, big value in being friendly and basically "a human", but the very first starting interaction must be serious, not a joke.

Yes and no.

People realize the guy there is not the whole company, but they also realize they are the only way to get communication going, and losing time only to be greeted with an "ooof" can be annoying.

Of course it also depends on the specific case (how big the problem, how angry the customer, how long the "ooof"), but I've been on both sides for a couple of years now and starting in an over-frienly manner sets the mood for an "un-important" context.

And, in particularly bad cases, that could sour the entire conversation.

Why are you twisting my words to this extent? My advice was simply ‘be yourself’ and you’ve bastardized that into making light of their issues. I don’t make light of people’s issues - that’s crap. But I’m going to be kind because that’s who I am.

I guess I completely disagree with your sentiment that somehow being casual means you're being friendly. Those are two completely unrelated actions.

You can be casual and a jerk. You can be friendly and professional. Someone telling me "oof" when my business is offline and losing money (or insert major issue you've caused me) isn't a social nicety, it's something I would expect a buddy to say if I told him I lost money playing poker.

I disagree. People can be themselves and still be professional. If your experience doesn’t match this, maybe you’re just bad at hiring people.

It's too lighthearted when you're dealing with a pissed customer and is only going to escalate the situation. If you truly want to show empathy and provide good service, I really hope you rethink the approach you take moving forward. In this case "oof" reads like "sux to be u, bye!" and you have several other people confirming that here. Now you can't say you don't know.

Yes I have re-thought my approach. I'm not sure how I'll handle it quite yet though. I'm now terrified of trying to be nice and personal to customers, and will likely just copy/paste traditional BS unless I know them.

I thought things had being going well, as I've gotten lots of messages from people that appreciate it, and never ones expressing unhappiness about it. However it's not worth it to roll the dice and be myself if people might actually be offended and mad about it. I got this response from someone (who had previously identified as a 75 year old man who struggles with technology) not that long ago:

> Thanks for acknowledging the issue and for not being a robot. The personal touch was nice, and your comment about blood pressure brought a smile to my face in a time of deep frustration. In the mean time I'll try the work around from your PDF, but hopefully this is fixed by time renewal comes around.

This is also more or less how I talk to other engineers when they find bugs I’ve written :)

As a millennial myself I appreciate this type of lingo. I think it’s a generational or cultural shift if some sort

I’m in my mid-forties. The tech industry wasn’t at all like this when I was young. Somewhere along the lines, people stopped being nice and having a personality apparently became a personality flaw.

I’m taking a break from this fucking site. I can’t believe the extent to which my colleagues are roasting someone over three letters. Bunch of fucking bullies if you ask me.

I could be mistaken, but it feels like your colleagues are not roasting someone but are taking offence at the tone of a message that whilst obviously written by someone, isn't actually from someone but is (or appears to be) an automated response.

Personally, if it was a human at the other end of a chat who started off with "Oof" I'd be fine with that as we're having dialogue, but when used as a generic automated message it would feel a little unprofessional. Not enough to complain about, but it would be noticed.

Nothing to do with bullies, personalities, or roasting someone. Quite the opposite in fact in that it is totally fine from humans - just not ideal from an automated system.

Yeah I'm a millenial and I can't stand it either. Doggo, pupper, adulting, ninja/rockstar/awesome, oof, yikes, "my dude"... and don't even get me started about dressing like you're still in high school (pro-tip - unless you're are in great shape no one wants to see you in a tight fitting t-shirt).

Big reason why I'm now a "programmer in the X industry" as opposed to an "X programmer". I guess I just wasn't a "cultural fit" - yikes.

> pro-tip - unless you're are in great shape no one wants to see you in a tight fitting t-shirt

There's a decent chance that these people don't seek your approval. Also, how has "pro-tip" not made your list?

Personal appearance and hygiene isn't something insecure people do to seek approval.

They used ‘oof’, apologized and explained a workaround. This is a rather extreme amount of anger over one word.

I mean, the sentence itself doesn't seem all that bad IMHO, it's the context that makes the difference. If I'm in a real time conversation actively trying to fix the issue, saying "oof, so sorry about this" seems like a perfectly genuine way of expressing the mutual feeling of frustration.

Writing this same sentence with an emoji beside it on a customer support documentation page, however, looks quite unprofessional. In these types of contexts, the general writing etiquette is that one is expected to write using a less casual tone.

I take it you haven't worked in support before. It's just a support rep trying to defuse some tension, there is basically nothing they can do except escalate and provide work arounds. Management should be the ones that you get angry at. Getting angry at the front line reps does nothing except to make some poor guy or girl more stressed.

> condescending millennial speak

Excuse me? "millennial speak?"

Reminds me of this tweet recently posted here :)

https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594

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