I'm frankly sick of hacker news being a facebook/google/whatever ticketing system. And yet, there's no alternative.
/s
I’m pretty sure the math of 28.83B - 28.82B is 0.01B or ten million dollars to support 2-3 Billion users worldwide.
Which is laughable.
If you hire the cheapest WFH customer support in the world, and provide a minimal service that was slow as heck, you couldn’t even setup a global program legally and in most languages for users for $10 million a year even if you charged for support tickets.
The legal and localization costs will be massive.
I'm reminded of a national tour put on by Nissan for the All-Electric LEAF when it first came out. We were told by our presenter that there was an aluminum cover under the hood designed to look like an engine block - apparently it was discomforting to people to open the hood and not see that component.
I mean, they are crypto bros. They can crypto pay someone under the table.
There's no transparency or even a support system. If the person gets caught, 99% chance facebook just lets them go. Their internal ticketing/debugging/support systems are very likely outsourced or low-pay workers or foreigners, and it won't be worth it to the company to sue them. Then people will know it happens.
The problem is, Due Process means a human - probably paid very little - gets the power to overrule any technical controls. So maybe your account is protected by $$$ A+ security, no chance it can be breached, but oops, the "Due Process" person was just handed $100 cash to override that and allow this random person to become Justsignedup.
So you might actually be better off with a Google situation where the company can't be bothered to hire anybody to be in that role, than a situation where they hire a bunch of minimum wage workers in the cheapest economy with plenty of Internet and don't care about oversight.
One of the major problems with social networks is zero due process, and clearly corporate backed networks manipulate and censor their users in pursuit of the above (e.g., see Twitter Files), but lack of fairness is not unique to corporations. Moderators who are drawn to the role "out of the goodness of their hearts" are among the most vicious, petty, vindictive, capricious, hypocritical, narcissistic, and unjust arbiters I've ever encountered. They also are the best of the best, but those ones are few and far between, and many tend to burn out as communities grow whereas the former type are a dime a dozen and thrive in the role. This is the main reason why I'm not all that hopeful for mastodon or not-corporate social networks.