If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?

I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's truly scalable or sustainable. And eventually we as consumers will learn. This whole tech pump and dump (or promise something and change it later when it's time to profit[1]) wave is new, and we're just beginning to learn how companies change once they have enough leverage.

I'm sure if they don't take customer support seriously, they will pay a price for it in the long run.

Would just like to clarify, that I don't think expecting personal support for non-paid services is reasonable. But as a paid customer (for e.g. of Uber), one should at least be able to call an IVR. But these cos. deliberately make it harder for you to get their numbers.

[1]for e.g. how youtube was free speech and niche artists, how google would get you to the result the quickest

Update:

10% of 1B is 100M.

100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.

500M minutes is 8.3M hr. Full-time is 2080hr/y, so ~4,000 people.

Separately, your time estimates are much too low.

Thanks for correcting.

True that 5 mins per ticket is too less. But I don't think any paid tech service has 1B customers. (users yes, customers, I don't think so).

That's a side effect of too much centralization. Grocery stores handle billions of customers daily and have no problem processing even 10% of them complaining about something, because there's lots of stores and each handles complaints themselves. Customer support scales linearly with the scale of the sector.

You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.

Yes exactly. A good example of this in a centralised system however, is Indian Railways.

They have a billion customers and still have a simple phone number, a mobile app and physical counters for customer service.