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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things.

> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.

If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?

Hacker News is free. Do you really expect to be able to pick up the phone and call someone at Y Combinator to discuss your Hacker News account? Do you really think it's a good idea to make this a legal right?

Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account.

The whole idea is ridiculous. Unless you want most of the free internet to disappear completely (or move overseas) then it's a non-starter.

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A heuristic such as, right to speak with a human, if a) Customer pays for the service b) Service stores any data of the customer's (e.g., email provider, cloud storage provider, facebook, youtube, instagram, etc., but would need a threshold i.e., a simple throwaway comment would not have enough value to trigger, but an article, photo, or document would). c) Service acts as IdP where being locked out might result in being locked out of other services (e.g., "login with facebook/google", Okta, etc.)

I am sure there are other cases I have missed, but this should give an idea. The problem will be in defining the rules specifically enough to address your concerns, yet vaguely enough that companies will not find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while violating the spirit.

Yes, Github would fall into the categories above. If, as a result, Microsoft decided they no longer wanted to provide non-paid accounts, then so be it. Their business model was unsustainable if it could only work by abusing their users. Some things of value may be lost.

This right to speak to a human should apply to non "web" companies too.

What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person. If you called instead of ticketing, you'd talk to the same person, which now means responses would be slower because phone calls take more time than ticket handling. The phone person won't be any more empowered than the ticket person, so you'll still not have the issue resolved. The only difference is that there's a human to yell at.

Personally, I want a "human" option to be on the first menu of every phone robot menu. A site that only supports a web-based chat option would have to have humans at the other side rather than some crappy chatbot. 'Contact Us' pages should include email addresses that are monitored by humans. It would be a huge improvement if contact a human via any means was available at every company.

But, having the last resort option to speak to a human even when there is the ability to reach a human via other modalities can be useful.

There is a large "enterprise" company where the support folks always ignore everything I submit to the ticket, and then ask for all the things already provided. The only way to make progress with them is to get on a call. You are correct, it shouldn't be necessary-- but it is. And, if you do not have that last resort method, good luck. You may be stuck having to reply with the same information to a series of support folks without making progress on the case for weeks.

This doesn't address the question I asked. What does speaking to a human accomplish? Why does that solve your problem in a way that a ticket doesn't?

You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that. If the rule is that you need to provide specific information to recover your account, speaking to a human won't fix that when you don't have the information.

It at least changes the cost dynamics away from the companies just shafting users because only the users wear cost.

Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.

I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.

Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly

1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users 2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford 3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note 4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users 5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.

But see this is my point, it's not just about "speaking to a human", it's about having an empowered ombudsperson who can circumvent the normal systems of authority at the company to resolve user issues for certain people.

That's a much, much, much bigger ask than just "speaking to a human".

> You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that.

It is not necessarily about power, it is about judgement. However clever or 'smart' the systems we design, there is still a vast gap between what automation can understand and what a human can understand. There are countless examples of a system only doing what it was told to do, where any human with an IQ higher than 80 would immediately recognize that the system is being incredibly dumb and wrong in this particular case.

There needs to be some last resort for the victims of those errors when there are real consequences to these mistakes.

Of course it's about power. If the answer is "we can't recover your account by security policy", speaking to someone who believes you isn't going to help you (and in many cases, this is a good thing, as tricking account recover techs is something scammers are good at).

Extending your point: the status quo probably leads to more lawsuits because there’s no way or working with the company directly (between customer support ticks) and a lawsuit. Twitter? Lol

>What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person.

It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.

What happens then when companies decide to outsource speaking to a human. Each human agent only handles very specific set of things. When you call you are constantly redirected and on hold. Nobody is willing to help you because your specific problem is outside of what they are comfortable with. Nobody cares about customer service because they are just outsourced. People who are working at outsourcing company's are underpaid and don't care much about any individual customer. In order to keep you from giving them a bad review/comment they just transfer you.

For instance I had an issue with my phone, I had to call support. I got redirected to 5 agents at 3 different companies before I finally started getting anywhere. Note some of those agents even gave me the wrong phone number and basically ended up taking me to some random unrelated companies. The end result was to start doing things over email (basically same as ticketing). After hours of phone calls and even longer on hold I'm finally (maybe) getting somewhere using emails. Still haven't gotten to the destination but maybe I will soon

>If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?

Places where you "don't pay" still have certain regulations they need to pass.

If you give free food to people on the street (for some marketing event or charity or whatever) you still need to pass the cost of sanitary inspections and such.

>Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account. The whole idea is ridiculous

They way you've framed it, perhaps. Or maybe not.

For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.

Second, notice the strawman phrasing: "If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account". How about them being forced to giving it to anyone with a PAID account?

> For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.

It's not a win for the hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries who cannot justify the costing. The free account model has massive value to an unimaginable number of people in the world, whereas to those like you and I it's of minor benefit.

I think we can presume the author means:

goods/services I have exchanged funds for.

Additionally I would point out that Gmail makes plenty of money off our data and we all have written about or thought about how 'users are the product'.

Not sure why there's seemingly a heightened emotional response here.

There's always an answer.

If you don't pay for it: "You're not the customer, you're the product."

If you do pay for it: "You get what you pay for."

If you pay for it and have a contract specifying you will get it: "Not worth taking it to court."

If you do take it to court: "We must stop all these frivolous lawsuits!"

There is always an answer.

Respectfully, you’re begging the question that it would be frivolous. If the contract says they must have a human respond within so much time and the company fails to do that, the lawsuit would not be frivolous to a rational person.

It wouldn't be frivolous, it would be called frivolous.

Like how the McDonald's coffee case was called frivolous even when it manifestly was not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

> The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.

[snip]

> Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.

The internet isn't free; we pay with our privacy! I would be far happier if I could pay for random internet services with credits from my browser (possibly refilled by my ISP every month) rather than selling my privacy off to some unknown advertiser I never really wanted to be associated with if I actually knew what was going on. Micropayments built into the browser would really be an improvement and better align the interests of platforms with the interests of their users.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, research shows that only 5% of customers care that their privacy is being sold off. The rest don't care. Accuweather, for instance, (which is so lousy with ads that it compromises the experience of using the app,) offered a deal where you could pay $5/year and not be tracked or have ads. I took advantage of the offer. But so few others did that Accuweather cancelled the service. I guess it wasn't worth their trouble to keep track of who had paid and so didn't get ads for less than 5% of their users to sign on.

I too won't bother to sign up for a $5 per year subscription to a website, as the pain of a potential credit card compromise is more than the $5/a subscription is worth. That's why I think it needs to go via a browser / ISP based system. Using credit cards is simply too much friction for micropayments. Give me one place to signup that covers the majority of websites that I use and it's a completely different value proposition.

> Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sure, it's convenient to have a free github account. I get it, I have one.

But what motivates github to give out free accounts? It is most definitely not that they are a benevolent company doing it as a free community service because they're nice. No, they do it for three main reasons:

1. Get individuals familiar with and hooked on the service so they'll promote it as a paid service at their workplace.

2. Build the network effect that helps them. "Everyone is on github", so you must be too.

3. Build a moat against up and coming possible competitors. If the baseline is free, it's harder for a newcomer to build revenue in that space to compete.

All of these are self-serving interestes, they help github (which is fine) but they also hinder potential competition (not good) and build a tendency towards monopolistic services (very bad).

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