Comment by chucky123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chucky123 | Hacker News Reader

This sucks to hear. Having dealt with Meta properies, they won't be interested in helping you.

I had something similar happen to my Instagram account.

A few weeks ago, I got a popup inside IG to verify my age. Not wanting to give them my real age, I set my age as 0. The popup playfully said that my age can't be 0. So I set it to 20 years and the popup got stuck. After a few taps, my account was marked as underage account and I had to send my photo id to get it back else it will be deleted permanently after 30 days.

I though about all the photos and messages in my account and while it would be sad to let it go, I reckon IG's ban was a blessing as the quicker I let it go, the free'er I would be from Meta's clutches.

In in the end, I didn't verify my account. By now, it would be wiped out by a cronjob.

---

The sooner you realize these companies(and Meta in particular) don't care about you, the better. These are all rented platforms and should be treated as such.

Don't invest too much in these platforms and if you must, invest in a personal blog hosted on your own domain.

I wish they would wipe accounts. Instead it will be kept probably forever and your backup email will be spammed forevermore. I started creating an account more than a decade ago. Maybe entered my birthdate and university and stopped. I get so many facebook emails and cannot stop it and I never used it. I don't have the password to recover and im sure it would be flagged if i tried.

It’s been said too many times, I know.

You’re the product! When the product is spoiled, you throw it away! Recovering spoiled product doesn’t do anyone a damn bit of good.

I think it’s even worse than that. I’ve been locked out of my Uber account for years, and that is not an ad based company. It’s just that at a certain scale , it’s not cost effective to handle edge cases.

Probably what, if it was inclinded to do so, the universe thinks about humanity.

> invest in a personal blog hosted on your own domain.

It appears that's how the problem arose in the first place.

I was gonna say the same thing. If she didn't use her domain for her email address and used e.g. Gmail, this problem wouldn't have occurred.

> By now, it would be wiped out by a cronjob.

You are an optimistic person.

FB employee here.

Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. Things happen, people are striving to be better, but scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly.

At sufficiently large scale, there'll be people who have bad experience with the platform. The teams are always working on improving it, and security of accounts are obviously important, but sometimes things go wrong for some unforeseen circumstances like in this case.

> scale and sometimes incompetence.

This would mean that automation is built for trust, not for "don't call us anytime".

Everything facebook so far has automated when it comes to customers is actively helping scammers taking over accounts more easily, rather than helping actual real people that are who they say they are.

But, facebook's incentive is ad business, that's why things like this will never get prioritized.

There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people.

> There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people.

Not to be terribly facetious, but ads pay the bills. I'm not aware of any significant money-making ventures Meta is involved in outside of ads. In the end, that makes all employees "ads people". All ventures, projects, features, enhancements, and bug fixes are to serve the ads machine. Unless, of course, there is legitimately a new market opportunity that will create revenue without ads.

Even the Oculus arm of the company is really just a new platform for ads in the end.

alpha_squared: that's a little too much extrapolation. people outside of ads don't really care much about ads, to the point i find kind of annoying (i am in ads). non ads teams in general have non-ads metrics they care about more. obviously revenue is being kept in mind, but it's more of a guardrail and not the goal (for non ads teams).

It doesn't help sell ads if there's nobody to sell ads to.

But the "monetizable eyeballs" are interchangeable, 100% so.

A lot of businesses have significant overhead staff. Cost centers are notorious for having skeleton crews, regardless of their relative size.

> Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence.

I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corporations.

At sufficiently large scale there will be employees that just don't care about their users. It doesn't mean every individual at Facebook is like this, but Facebook as a corporation, and a certain percentage of employees, do not care about the users. That's not to cast judgment on you or your team, I believe there are people who genuinely try to help at all corps :)

Unfortunately, like you said, the reality is that as the scale of a product increases the quality will decrease on both sides of the transaction for some people.

Of course, there will always be someone who won't care about their users, it's inevitable. But knowing how sausage is made, there are different trade offs when it comes to authentication...

I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs.

I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843

There seems to be a loose consensus (which I agree with) that takes a bit of a dim view toward patronizing a company (any company) where the scale is such that there’s no effective relationship between the company and non-paying users. I think that’s probably a better way to capture and elucidate the sentiment than “scale goes up, quality goes down.”

There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably.

It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.

I think this is fair. Part of the issue is as the number of users increase, the support staff has to increase, which in turn would increase the "attack surface" where a support staff might go rouge etc, and cost also increases probably super-linearly.

Google took the opposite approach and delegated everything to automation, which had other problems.

Being a paid user also probably helps with contractual side of things, but ianal.

Everything here is my personal opinion if it weren't clear.

I think future tech like Kilt protocol would go a long way to helping solving this problem. But I think generally there is a lot of solution options such as KYC processes that could take steps to solve it, some countries would perhaps be easier than others to solve initially. Is there not a team/ think tank working purely to solve these types of problem?

Solving this type issue should matter most above all, its the grass roots of users that's made FB what it is.

Try doing KYC and people will go bonkers(americans in particular).

I personally don't give out my passport info unless i absolutely have to. IRS recently implemented this id.me id verification thing and I only went through it because i had to.

Also people use Fake Ids all the time. Even when you present an ID in person, it would be somewhat fakeable.

Imagine now doing it over laptop camera, with tech like deep fake it will get even easier eventually.

In my IRS case, automated system couldn't get me verified, so i had to wait i forgot how long to get to a person who just said "yup, you are you" and had other limitations and probaly would quickly run into scale problem if it were peak times or peak use cases.

No, you should definitely assume they don't care. As soon as they can no longer extract profit from you, the economic incentive for them to care simply vanishes. To believe otherwise would be completely foolish.

If you want to put a positive spin on things, you can assume that their intention is to not let spammers overrun the platform, or kick off legitimate users, as a matter of protecting their brand integrity. The costs of being 100% effective at this are prohibitive due to diminishing returns in any such enterprise. Within the organisation there are probably a great many people who would love to help an embattled user, trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare of having to deal with the corporation. It's just a matter of jumping up and down and screaming loudly enough. You can chose to see that as a positive example of the kindness of humans, even humans who work in gigantic corporations, or you can chose to see it as an example of offloading costs on to the consumer to protect profits. Tomato/tomato.

FB doesn't care.

"Assume scale and sometimes incompetence" means basically the same thing to me as "they don't care about you." In either case, it's "we're okay with not making things right for a number of people who have done nothing wrong."

0.1% * 1B users = 1M users. 0.01% * 1B users = 100K users.

I don't know if anyone ever designed a fool proof system with 0 bad cases, but feel free to prove me wrong.

I tried once. No one could route a connection through the epoxy in the Ethernet ports :-(

> feel free to prove me wrong.

Yeah my money is definitely on 'they don't care'

But I do know people who have designed systems to make it more difficult for those 0.01% of people to contact a human or get anything done about it because that increases their profits.

Okay, maybe you're fine that some amount of people are just collateral and the system is not going to be adjusted to minimize that because there are other priorities (eg. meta's share price).

But when people need to spread their wings and fly off in to a fantasy world in order to pretend that isn't happening, then it's probably not going to end well for them / be conducive to their mental health in the long run.

If a company's answer to 100K of its users having insolvable problems is "it's scale, deal with it", maybe that company has no business being so large. And yes, that applies to Google and all the others as well.

I don't know if you can really say that for a social network or a search engine. They naturally grew due to their network effects.

A weird analogy would be saying "US should have no business growing to 300M if it has XM people under poverty level". Sure it should strive to do better, but doesn't mean that number can reach to 0. Sorry i couldn't think of anything else close to a billion users with systemic problems that's not a bigcorp so had to use government.

Shit happens, indeed. The question is what recourse there is when shit happens. Usually, one would contact the company and figure things out with a support rep, if the company is any good. In facebook's case, that's virtually impossible. And that is pretty much by design.

If most people having no recourse to a problem that they face is just a problem of scale to the company, then may be the company doesn't deserve to operate at that scale.

> assume scale

Scale is an excuse used by corporations to get away with whatever they want. Blaming things on scale is exactly equal to calling your customers a mere statistical data point.

"I'm sorry, we through your meal out the window, but 98% of the current customers dining in got their meals successfully. Here's a website with no contact info to help recover your meal."

If these "scale" corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the ilk actually cared about their puppet customers, then they'd go read the work by Stafford Beer and other complex systems thinkers and learn how to take care of unhandled variety rather than creating it behind the excuse of scale.

"...there'll be people who have bad experience, unfortunately". The bad experience is the frustration of a kafkaesque process that dead ends with an ID submission form without the personnel infrastructure to actually support it. It's there to shrink from saying what you just said. You shouldn't need to come to Hacker News to get the real answer.

"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."

Blaming scale is just another way of saying FB won't fund enough user support. And if FB won't fund it, it doesn't care about it.

collects $10k/week paycheck

"Scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly"

"Things happen"

have any more substantive comments besides ad hominem attacks?

it's 10pm, and i reported this problem a few hours ago - i probably either care about the problem, or i am nerding out on HN, or both.

Money doesn't define how i think of problems, if it decides yours, power be onto you.

It's not ad hominem, it's an observation about senior FANG engineering

Is it an observation about specific people? I doubt it.

Also it's clearly directed at me. Hard to spin it otherwise because it's using things i said

either whay you are saying sound more like a stereotype. I doubt you observed enough people in person to make a stereotype worthy conclusion.

You most likely care (otherwise you would have stayed out of this thread). But when the recourse for many users are getting their issue on HN, it’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that Meta on an organizational level doesn’t care.

Or rather: It’s value-based customer service. If the monetary value of fixing one user’s issue is less than the lifetime monetary value of keeping them as a user, then fixing it is a net loss and so it shouldn’t be fixed. When a user gets their issue on HN, the calculation changes.

Choosing scale over service was a conscious choice your employer made. They didn’t have to make that choice.

If you get more and more users do you say sorry, we are an exclusive club of 2m[1] we won't let you have a chat/group/event with your other friends who were late to the party.

That sounds wrong.

[1] rando number, large enough to brag about probably small enough to have easier support problem

Scale is multi-dimensional. It's not just a question of user base; there's also all the different features they have added over time as well that they have chosen to dedicate resources to. Also, support has cost, and putting service as a key feature of your brand often means sacrificing margins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com