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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the "monetizable eyeballs" are interchangeable, 100% so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Solving this type issue should matter most above all, its the grass roots of users that's made FB what it is.
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.
I don't know if anyone ever designed a fool proof system with 0 bad cases, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Yeah my money is definitely on 'they don't care'
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.
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.
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.
"Scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly"
"Things happen"
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.
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.
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.
That sounds wrong.
[1] rando number, large enough to brag about probably small enough to have easier support problem