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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

Another day and again another complaint about lack of proper (human) support from a big company. When are we all going to realize that Facebook, Apple, Google and all the big names use automated moderating and they don't want to allocate resources for proper moderation? They're not going to put in place a proper resolution mechanism and they don't care about the average user that got his/her email banned, page deleted or app removed. I'm sure they're checking the numbers and the false positives/negatives are not that many that would require for these big companies to put something in place so as to not lose profit. Let's all of us stop complaining and accept the current situation or even better find a cheap solution to real human moderation :-)

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It's honestly not clear to me that many of these companies can afford proper moderation. Twitter's revenue is about $1.20 per user per month. Facebook's is about twice that. Proper moderation is expensive, with each incident requiring significant time from one or more smart people with native fluency and cultural understanding plus deep familiarity with the platform rules and all the tricks bad actors will try to play to get moderators to do the wrong thing.

These companies explicitly and intentionally cultivated profit models built around providing services for free and subsidizing them with data collection and advertising. Their low revenue-per-user is a direct result of that, and if they can't afford to provide proper moderation, that's entirely their fault, and does not absolve them of the responsibility to provide it anyway.

Exactly. If your car company cannot be profitable with airbags, then you shouldn't be in the car business (to use an analogy).

This is the absolute best analogy I've ever seen for this situation. Kudos.

Oh, totally agreed. But I think this is one of those things that kinda crept up on us, and so status quo bias may mean they can keep getting away with it.

As an example, look at the flu. It kills way more people than drunk driving, [1] [2], but society has been pretty casual about that. The massive covid-era drops in influenza deaths show that it was always possible to do much better; we just never cared much because we were used to it. Similarly, I think we're used to Facebook and Twitter being Facebook and Twitter, so there won't be much outcry for change unless they do something especially bad.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html#:~:text=Figu...

[2] e.g., https://www.valuepenguin.com/drunk-driving-statistics

Apple is nothing like Facebook and Google in this respect. One of the reasons I gladly pay a premium for Apple products is that I can talk with a human, over the phone or at an Apple Store.

Doing business as a software developer through the Apple store is a different beast. Putting in tickets to see why your software failed can be a nightmare if it isn't a glaring mistake. They may treat their customers well, but they don't always treat their devs with the same respect.

EDIT: I will note, it has been a few years since I've submitted to the app store, so I hope things have changed.

It hasn't changed, I'm basically treating the whole platform as legacy now and "best effort".

And I'm only talking about the normal process, good luck if you happen to have a buggy developper account which loops during the sign-in...

Apple is a scummy, back-stabbing business "partner." Everyone from small-time developers to publicly-traded companies gets screwed by Apple burying their apps (or simply not showing them at all) in searches that spell the publisher's name exactly right. They lie about app discovery to developers, lie about it to judges, and lie to the users doing the searches.

However, the public hysteria over "big tech" should not be dragging Apple into everything, because developers are essentially the only aggrieved party. Unlike Google and Meta, Apple is not the gatekeeper to the Internet for millions of people. And I can almost always get a human being on the phone or chat from Apple, which today is truly worthy of praise.

People praise AppleTV for not having ads, but the app search there has the same promoted ad protection racket stuff.

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