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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

A moderator replied to me a couple months ago that these kinds of posts are usually penalized so HN doesn’t become a support site, but I still see them quite often on here on the front page. I had been commenting that when such posts are made for YC companies, they rarely make it to the front page.

> there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads

I’m guessing that Upwork is not a YC company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816

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It actually works in the opposite direction: we moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC startups are the story. Lots of past explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

That said, customer-support-of-last-resort threads have been so repetitive lately that we started downweighting them more in general.

I was going to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 and then I saw that it was the reply I posted to you last time! Nothing has changed since then.

Any chance for a dedicated section?

Do you mean would we add a dedicated section on HN for 3rd party customer support issues? That's a legit question.

This is when it's particularly helpful to have only one thing we're optimizing for [1] because it means we can replace that question with another: would it make HN more intellectually interesting? The answer is clearly no, I think, because those threads tend to be so repetitive.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Knowing which company, that your live depends on, know how to make things right is crucial knowledge - thus the popularity of those threads IMO. When years of your life gets deleted in seconds, and the company starts ignoring you, that's the red flag that needs to be public. I'm not advocating for separate section, but the public have spoken - the popularity of those threads means it's crucial part of this community.

That's not how HN works. If it did, then the front page would be filled with sensationalism and rage and the same few hot topics repeated over and over—because those tend to get the most upvotes.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations.

I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the hope that if I suddenly lose my XYZ account I will be able to get redress through the same avenue.

> Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations.

The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed.

If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines.

If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus.

If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings.

I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.

But at least when posts about major tech companies' customer service fiascos show up here, there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better.

If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not.

Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.

> there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better.

The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork.

> If these kinds of posts are disallowed here

I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out.

> Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.

It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.

> I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.

I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.

Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system. It seems like we do better when we can put a face and a story to a problem.

> I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.

I agree and I'll never say that people trying to solve these kinds of problems on social media networks is deplorable or pass judgement on them. I've been there. I know very well what it's like to be screwed by a large company because they doubt you'll have the reach to spread the word.

> Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system

That seems very inaccurate, sadly. Most of these systems have closed loops where our ramblings are never integrated into the loop. My impression is that usually at best someone goes into said systems and marks it as "manual" to take it out of the system then resolves it. I imagine there are many cases where the system continues completely untouched and it's "verdict" is considered by the internal models to still be valid and the company simply cuts a check or whatever is required to brush the problem under the rug.

I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.

> I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.

My comment isn't exclusive to HN - it's a much more widespread issue on many social media platforms.

> the magical sequence of fellow accounts

You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.

> if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment

This still beats "XYZ group" - in this case, someone who is

> stressed about the situation and being without electricity due to the war

being ignored by us as well as by the company that's meant to be the middleman (to clients who had no issue paying them directly - so clearly a problem with UW and not any other party)

> I "deserve" to get screwed

No one does, which is the point. Highlighting when companies' customer service fails users (and how they deal with it - sweeping the pattern under the rug versus resolving to address it) helps people make informed decisions about the companies they do or don't choose to work with.

While 'anecdata', it's still a more far useful metric to me than advertising in picking who I support, as patterns tend to arise (both positive and negative!) resulting from a company's culture.

> You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.

I don't need to be well connected or have some arbitrary requirement of being "enough" of a community member to get basic recourse in other venues. In most other cases of our lives for these kinds of basic disputes you can rely on a combination of local laws, police and small claims courts.

I agree with most of your other points overall. My complaint isn't to say we shouldn't be raising an issue, it's really more about the way we act like the problem is solved once the giant fire no longer is roaring but there are still embers that eventually reignite.

I don't really think its normalizing anything, this is unfortunately a pretty consistent pattern with the wider world. Kinda seems unrealistic to think HN or twitter could be better than the environment they're within.

People "deserve" things in our world for far far more arbitrary reasons than what you give here unfortunately.

Without these there's also not as much to counter survivor bias in the stories/recipes of successful use of rental economy, freemium services, etc.

I think the fear is that you'll see a lot more of them in the future if they're allowed.

The hope (generally unjustified) is that corporations will feel shame about their practices, or perhaps more realistically that people will decide not to use their services or work for them.

yup, if there was going to be one place to do this, HN would be a good one

maybe a Help HN! subsection could be created?

where people who work for the companies users need support from could gain +25 karma for helping out, or something

Maybe for smaller YC companies, but this story on Stripe got 1624 points, which meant it was probably on the frontpage for multiple days, and inside they say they only brought it up because someone else mentioned having a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

The number of upvotes is not a reflection of whether or not it was on the front page, but maybe that one was. But the post linked above (about Airbnb) had received a couple hundred of votes in less than one hour, but was not on the front page due to moderation (confirmed by the moderator), while most posts with that level of votes in such a short time would be very near the top of the front page.

We moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-related startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

It is also the middle of the night where HN mods usually live (USA).

I guess he woke up because this quickly dropped to the fifth page!

Good morning dang! Happy Saturday. :(

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