Ghost CEO lectures locked out customer about empathy
twitter.com
twitter.com
From a customer's perspective this is the same thing. This shows a complete lack of empathy with what customers feel when they use your platform.
Stories like these stick with me. When I evaluate using a product, hearing about customer pain like this makes it a no go. Similarly I've told friends that I wouldn't work for a company they've applied to based on bad c-level engagement with customers.
Stuff like this spreads. If you won't fix it for your customers sake, fix it out of self interest.
1. The CEO randomly picks on women on twitter he thinks subtweeted him and writes their bosses
2. The same lock-out mechanism — plus the queue for deletion — happens if eg your credit card expires or has an issue or sometimes randomly
It is amazing how recording a video going through the product does: the video is full of swear words and cursing. All the things that were invisible suddenly become glaring. All the un-necessary clicking and convoluted flows become torture with cognitive dissonance: "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and it hits you. Hard.
Hence, some things trigger that agression, especially in a more mature product. For example, I only used YouTube as a consumer of videos, but recently I was putting a lot of videos there in my personal account.
I then created another account and wanted to transfer the videos. Easy, right? No. I looked and looked, and read documentation, and searched on the web, and people said you need to download the videos from one account, then upload them back again to the second account. That can't be, right? I mean I clearly am not the first one to want to do that, and YouTube has existed for ages. There has to be a way I'm stupid enough to have overlooked. I contact them on Twitter, and they link to the documentation that tells you to download videos somewhere, then upload them back again. This is insanity. They're already on YouTube's infra, why do the round trip. Just move the darn thing? I'm not privy to how their infrastructure works, but I have a feeling that this is not the flow I want.
One other example... I have one Android phone that was not physically in the same place as me. I wanted to get the call history (which is backed up in Drive) to urgently call the last number that called me. I could clearly see that the call history was backed up in Drive, and it shows you a "Preview" button that, when you click on, shows a modal that tells you the call history is backed up, and has a button that says "Delete".
I can use Find my Phone and pin-point the location, I can erase it, I can make it ring, I can download all my data and Drive. I can download the device settings. I can Delete a backup, but not download it.
Now I need to wait for tomorrow to be able to get that phone for that call log.
Here's what is interesting: it's almost impossible that I be the first one that hits something like this (either for YouTube or Drive) for products with this many users existing for this long. Moving a video around is practically so obvious, you don't think there would be a documentation for it, let alone a documentation that tells you you can't do it. Heck I'll run my mouth and say it's harder to write and maintain the docs that tell you you can't do it, than add that no-brainer functionality... But then again, I'm running my mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
The fact there exist reasons something sucks does not make it suck less for the user, even taking into account the user's awareness of these reasons' existence.
It's the "Of course, but maybe...": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc
While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account?
What's the really common use case for changing the location of a file from one directory to the other?
>While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account?
This blows. Is the word here "just"? Did you read how when I record videos and I say "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and then it hits me that I'm using "simply" and "just" incorrectly because the steps are not easy.
The above is YouTube specific and requires to know channels and brand accounts. We're talking about moving something from A to B in the same context: like a file from one directory to the other on your interface, you should be able to move a video from one account to the other.
Look, you're claiming that videos are obviously analogous to files, and should thus support the same operations that files do. But that's not the case, they're more complex objects.
For example, moving a video can't be unilateral. For reasons that should be pretty obvious, you have to have both the old and new owner consent to the transfer, which is going to be a fairly complex flow. There's no analogous concept in any filesystem I've ever seen.
Given that my original comment described an actual, real, use case with the actual problem I faced, your take that I did not have a use would be wrong.
The solution in your first comment of moving the "channel" to a brand account is not acceptable. Therefore, the fact they were "just" two well documented steps is irrelevant because it's not the right solution. If I want to move a TV from one house to the other, I shouldn't have to transfer the house as well.
>Look, you're claiming that videos are obviously analogous to files, and should thus support the same operations that files do. But that's not the case, they're more complex objects.
At some point, they are stored somewhere, right? Database, object storage, filesystem: something on disk.
>For example, moving a video can't be unilateral. For reasons that should be pretty obvious, you have to have both the old and new owner consent to the transfer, which is going to be a fairly complex flow. There's no analogous concept in any filesystem I've ever seen.
I am the owner of both. Simple enough scenario in my case.
Are you using words like complex and obvious without really giving details because you're speaking knowingly of the internal challenges YouTube is having to move one video from one place to the other but can't go into details, or do you not know of the inner workings of YouTube?
Would you agree that the user experience of being unable to move a video from one place to another sucks, notwithstanding the existence (or inexistence) of technical challenges?
Would you agree that you start with a desired user experience and then solve the engineering challenges, not get a user experience that sucks and spend too much time telling the user why they're wrong and how it doesn't make sense to want to move one video from one place to the other, and that there are complexities for obvious reasons, and that they're not like files...
This is not news it’s just red meat for clicks.
Its a startup, business, and tech link aggregator
This covers the ramifications of poor customer treatment (business practices), and also acts as a warning to startups that might be looking at ghost as an option for their company's blog
https://web.archive.org/web/20200815091537/https://postapath...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210407222630/https://news.ycom...
Even Steve Jobs would commonly take customer complaints about Apple's products sent to his E-mail address, and forward them down to engineering with a terse note "Why?"
"Sorry, this is a bug and we're working on fixing it" would have been such a better response.
I'm annoyed primarily by OP's entitlement and vitriol, and secondarily by the CEO's typos and grammar.
EDIT: not extremely rude and condescending, just unnecessarily condescending
https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/1449194810749845512/photo/...
Shrug, I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault. More commiseration than lecturing. Again, I hope.
> I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault.
I had a very bad experience with Chase. (They took $900 without explanation, and still haven't returned it) In my many calls, I had some heated venting sessions. I usually at least once told the person it wasn't personal, but they were the Chase rep at that moment.
As an aside, responding to this thread with a throwaway created during this thread, everyone is going to assume you work for Ghost.
Huh?
> I usually at least once told the person it wasn't personal
:thumbsup: Common courtesy
> As an aside ... everyone is going to assume you work for Ghost.
Fair. I don't, I make a new throwaway for every hn thread I bother to comment on (happens roughly every 4 - 6 months), but there's no reason to believe me. I don't even really know what ghost is; pretty confused why you have to pay for it at all if it's decentralized.
Could be shitty — just thought the thread author's reaction was unjustified from the facts she posted.
Did a poor job of mixing pronouns. By "you", I was referring to the CEO, not you the HN commenter.
> Years ago, when l was younger and knew better, used to be very aggressive to companies on Twitter and lecture them about how they should do business. It was awful, honestly, and I regret how I behaved.
Even ignoring the obvious typo, it is a little condescending indeed.
> Later, I started my own business. Ghost. And after 9 years of doing this, my perspective changed a great deal.
The cycle is complete.
This is a bit different than say... Walmart talking down to a single mother who tried to use an out of date coupon.
For example, I note that nobody is contending the facts regarding the customer onboarding and payment process. I also note that the Ghost CEO provided an ad hoc fix with no discussion on whether their policy is good. That implies there will be a next customer who faces the same situation, notwithstanding any obnoxious Twitter followup — and who knows, perhaps another ad hoc fix.
That is beyond unprofessional
But when I thought it over, I believe that industry rules will eventually catch up to your customer expectations. I would never expect a mainstream company that deals with data, such as Notion or Airbase, to replicate the same behavior as Ghost.
edit: There were some threads on this in the past that are worth checking out. Public service announcements like fire notifications are pushed out by public agencies through these services and they can't go to the intended audience when put behind the wall. Public sector really needs to be compelled to adopt interoperable and freely consumable protocols.
https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+login+wall+site:news...
The deal was we give them free content for eyeballs to serve ads and they give us a platform for exposure. Requiring login as well is a long trend I don’t like.
“ You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. ”
Limited to friends and completely anonymous people I guess!
To anyone else reading: that’s a shared inbox, behave.
1 https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect 2 https://nitter.net/
At the very start the reach is not very enticing... but your home, your rules. (As long as you don't break the law, you'll be fine).
Some people go through life "learning" the same lesson over and over.