Hacker News Reader

Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

What an asshole. I mean, really, people contact him asking for help and instead of setting up an email rule of "Sorry, this isn't Zynga" he knowingly messes people around.

It'd be one thing to mess with Zynga but people who've just emailed for help? That breaks "Dont' be a dick".

I was expecting an awesome story about how he looked into the game and took on their role and actually helped people but instead we have someone on the internet being a dick.

View on HN

Excuse me? It is stated that he did the right thing first:

> When Zynga didn't reply to his messages pointing out the error, he started doing their job for them.

He then decided to play along, and that it his right. He did not say "delete system32" or such things. The asshole here is Zynga more than Eric I'd say.

You may be interested (or incensed) about Matt Besser's "May I Help You, Dumbass?" project, where he got sick of people calling his phone number, which was previously an AOL support line:

http://www.amazon.com/May-Help-You-Dumbass-Explicit/dp/B003V...

He said he tried to get it corrected. There was a time when I was in $BIG_CORP where I kept getting added to the distribution-list of some upper-management email. I kept telling them I wasn't suppose to be on it, but the emails kept coming in. Eventually, I started replying to the emails telling them to make corrections in the Excel-spreadsheet attachments and started rescheduling meetings. They quickly removed me from the email-list.

You can look at it as punishment for playing those mindless Zynga games :P

Yes, I'm sure most of the people receiving these responses were really "messed around"... They have bigger problems if they were actually taking his "advice".

I would expect Zynga kindly apologizing, for their screw up, to their customers. Eric did do the wrong thing, by making fun of the customers here.

But isint it a huge mistake that you wont expect from some BIG BRAND like Zynga to do? They surely disappointed their users.

First of all, they are playing Zynga games. It's not exactly a mission-critical application.

Secondly, do you really think that each of us has a responsibility to put unpaid time and energy into providing TLC for every misdirected email we receive?

If he actually took on the role of customer support, Zynga never would have updated the email address. They would have accepted the free customer support rep and it would have continued.

That was my reaction too. I am surprised many people here feel otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com