We need a new sub category [Support HN] when we need high level intervention from the CEO or at least a product manager. YC startups get an immediate notification if their name shows up there.
In other words, a community (hacker news, some subreddit, or perhaps an independent site) would invite people to post problems that ought to be easily solved by customer support except that the company is failing at customer support. Because problems tend to repeat themselves, the people who spend time on this forum would be able to identify (and sometimes provide workarounds for) the majority of cases -- all at no cost to the company that was failing at customer support.
The remaining cases could be ranked by the community according to how egregious they were. Then the company that was failing at customer support could assign a tiny amount of actual attention to look at just the top few issues sorted by the community.
It’s bad enough companies started outsourcing deciding which features to implement. I don’t want them also outsourcing deciding which cases to support.
HN threads also rank very highly on Google so even for future users researching the service may gain some value from it.
Like I was interested in trying out fly.io for a long time but after reading so many recent threads about their mistreatment of users I've decided to defer.
These threads are really very useful.
Unless we find a way to turn it into some [AITA HN], so that it’s not just drama but also a bit of introspection.
On the other hand, they are often heavily subsided by aforementioned VCs in the name of building momentum. So if you use them cautiously with all this in mind, you can often treat it as an informal piece of redistributative taxation.
The other consideration is DX where these startup infras shine. They make it easy to deploy and that can be tempting. But I am not convinced it is that much easier. Learn the slightest amount of devops (a weekend) and you can script what they did for your usecase. Use github actions or whatever but not too much! Just get that to call a bash script that does what you want.
I think there is a lot of value of trying to keep off locked in paths. But it is a delicate path to tread. And for startups growth is everything. But a few seconds of thought into tech choices and not just jumping into every freemium shiny tech is probably a good idea.