Well, that's their problem.

There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things.

If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.

> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.

If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?

Hacker News is free. Do you really expect to be able to pick up the phone and call someone at Y Combinator to discuss your Hacker News account? Do you really think it's a good idea to make this a legal right?

Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account.

The whole idea is ridiculous. Unless you want most of the free internet to disappear completely (or move overseas) then it's a non-starter.

I am sure there are other cases I have missed, but this should give an idea. The problem will be in defining the rules specifically enough to address your concerns, yet vaguely enough that companies will not find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while violating the spirit.

Yes, Github would fall into the categories above. If, as a result, Microsoft decided they no longer wanted to provide non-paid accounts, then so be it. Their business model was unsustainable if it could only work by abusing their users. Some things of value may be lost.

This right to speak to a human should apply to non "web" companies too.

But, having the last resort option to speak to a human even when there is the ability to reach a human via other modalities can be useful.

There is a large "enterprise" company where the support folks always ignore everything I submit to the ticket, and then ask for all the things already provided. The only way to make progress with them is to get on a call. You are correct, it shouldn't be necessary-- but it is. And, if you do not have that last resort method, good luck. You may be stuck having to reply with the same information to a series of support folks without making progress on the case for weeks.

You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that. If the rule is that you need to provide specific information to recover your account, speaking to a human won't fix that when you don't have the information.

Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.

I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.

Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly

1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users 2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford 3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note 4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users 5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.

That's a much, much, much bigger ask than just "speaking to a human".

It is not necessarily about power, it is about judgement. However clever or 'smart' the systems we design, there is still a vast gap between what automation can understand and what a human can understand. There are countless examples of a system only doing what it was told to do, where any human with an IQ higher than 80 would immediately recognize that the system is being incredibly dumb and wrong in this particular case.

There needs to be some last resort for the victims of those errors when there are real consequences to these mistakes.

It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.

For instance I had an issue with my phone, I had to call support. I got redirected to 5 agents at 3 different companies before I finally started getting anywhere. Note some of those agents even gave me the wrong phone number and basically ended up taking me to some random unrelated companies. The end result was to start doing things over email (basically same as ticketing). After hours of phone calls and even longer on hold I'm finally (maybe) getting somewhere using emails. Still haven't gotten to the destination but maybe I will soon

Places where you "don't pay" still have certain regulations they need to pass.

If you give free food to people on the street (for some marketing event or charity or whatever) you still need to pass the cost of sanitary inspections and such.

>Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account. The whole idea is ridiculous

They way you've framed it, perhaps. Or maybe not.

For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.

Second, notice the strawman phrasing: "If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account". How about them being forced to giving it to anyone with a PAID account?

It's not a win for the hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries who cannot justify the costing. The free account model has massive value to an unimaginable number of people in the world, whereas to those like you and I it's of minor benefit.

goods/services I have exchanged funds for.

Additionally I would point out that Gmail makes plenty of money off our data and we all have written about or thought about how 'users are the product'.

Not sure why there's seemingly a heightened emotional response here.

If you don't pay for it: "You're not the customer, you're the product."

If you do pay for it: "You get what you pay for."

If you pay for it and have a contract specifying you will get it: "Not worth taking it to court."

If you do take it to court: "We must stop all these frivolous lawsuits!"

There is always an answer.

Like how the McDonald's coffee case was called frivolous even when it manifestly was not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

> The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.

[snip]

> Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sure, it's convenient to have a free github account. I get it, I have one.

But what motivates github to give out free accounts? It is most definitely not that they are a benevolent company doing it as a free community service because they're nice. No, they do it for three main reasons:

1. Get individuals familiar with and hooked on the service so they'll promote it as a paid service at their workplace.

2. Build the network effect that helps them. "Everyone is on github", so you must be too.

3. Build a moat against up and coming possible competitors. If the baseline is free, it's harder for a newcomer to build revenue in that space to compete.

All of these are self-serving interestes, they help github (which is fine) but they also hinder potential competition (not good) and build a tendency towards monopolistic services (very bad).

Applying it to all businesses sounds like a bad idea, however. Financial institutions? Certainly. Healthcare companies? Makes all kinds of sense. But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support.

Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing.

Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence.

It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of any human at Giphy. You get a call from your company's HR.

Giphy definitely needs human customer support.

It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar.

Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image.

Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS.

And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls.

No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.

Additionally, you are not a customer of giphy. So now giphy has to reasonably have the amount of human customer support for non-customers? So, essentially everyone on earth?

Yes, you'll need more staff depending on your business' impact on people's lives, regardless if they are "customers" or not. If you have so many complaints you can't pay enough people to deal with it, you should not be in business.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...

Why do you choose such a company to do business with at the first place?

> Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole. As more companies outsource, automate, or severely cut their customer service department, there needs to be some kind of pressure to stop these frustrating experiences from happening.

Look at Dell or HP customer service. Google, Github or Digital ocean will become the same. Yes, you will never get the product designer or systems or devops engineer from those companies. The customer service will repeat the same thing million times over. (I lost Apple account, and unlike Google, I could reach Apple but they just repeated the same thing. (i.e) password is wrong; not our problem).

Also note that if there is direct connection to devops or dev, people ask silly questions to waste time. (i.e) These companies pay just $5000 per year to run their entire business with profits 100X and expect $10,000 per month DevOps will troubleshoot their problems.

> Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.

Example please. As long as it is not w e a p o n s all is wide open market.

This has evolved to the stage where it's endemic in what used to be well functioning societies, that day to day civic economic interactions are now broken, which is what the posted talked about.

The answer is regulating to avoid this race to the buttom.

To use another example - there are various consumer protection laws in the UK and EU. They cover all sorts of things like guaranteeing safety standards and requiring companies to accept returns. They have arisen over time to cover situations where consumers aren't capable of making the decision (e.g. safety which is complex or you might not find out for 10 years) or it's not something companies compete on but it's something you want for customers (e.g. returns).

Different political approaches, such as the more liberal one in the US leaves it more up to competition, the idea being that competition provides for consumers and it's easier to grow and operate businesses so the economy flourishes and everyone does well that way.

I'd suggest that it's not a perfect system and that you have to fill in the gaps. This is why America is rediscovering the union - in theory companies compete for the job market. If one job is incredibly shitty then employees can leave and get another one. This should provide competitive advantage to companies to make jobs non shitty and companies that don't can't hire and die out. In practice, for reasons that I don't fully understand, that hasn't worked out. Covid has been a trigger for some movement here and therefore some pressure, but it hasn't solved all the problems. Instead an alternate approach can work where employees can bargain collectively.

For me, that answer is a clear no, in that you are not (and should not be) guaranteed that the market provides you such a choice nor does it offer you the choice to deny others the freedom to choose GSuite as it sits today in features and pricing.

:shrug:

Are you 'side hustling' to make money and thus having customers?

I think this would probably be addressed in a minimum size (headcount) before the regulation is required, which makes sense because the problem is businesses scaling their customer base and scope beyond their physical resources.

Here are some real world examples that would hold up pre-current state: Club: even if I dont pay for a beverage or cover, I am in fact a customer. Shown by the fact that if I get injured at said club, or other events occur the responsible parties are managing/own the club.

Print shop: Go into a shop, pay for a thing or service, are a customer.

There was a time, that many of us can remember, where automated phone services were nascent, there was no IVR and there was definitely no complex intent recognition paired with sentiment analysis.

The smallest little business needed a phone. When it rang, they answered it. Those businesses afforded it and frankly the min. wage has barely gone up since then so a business, one that exchanges a service/place/goods/my information for money, can afford to do it.

I am in full agreement with my perception of OP's comment.

What do you think about implementing this with a minimum organization size? I just do not see this same problem happening with small firms, generally they are easy to get in touch with. I wouldn't want them regulated unless the nature of the problem changed.

I'd make the discrepancy of revenue generation because otherwise a company may just find itself full of contractors and not enough FTEs to qualify for having this 'right to speak with a human' (like Uber).

wdyt

This 100%. It reminds me of the similar issue of zero-hour contracts and living wages. One person I know complained that putting restrictions on zero hour contacts, and upping the amount that he would have to pay workers, would mean he couldn't hire any (for his extremely early-stage startup with no investment(!)).

In a similar vein, the answer is the same -- if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.

And this applies more generally than either of our examples -- if a company cannot afford to do something ethically, then it shouldn't do it at all. A business that cannot survive when forced to comply with the bare minimum of ethical practices deserves to fail. You cannot simultaneously believe in a capitalist market without embracing with open arms, the failure of companies that couldn't stick it.

I think you underestimate how many services you rely on that wouldn't be able to survive with a legal requirement that they were required to take calls from any human that wanted to contact them. Presumably those services are useful to you and you wouldn't want them to be closed down, yes? And similarly, you wouldn't want to be paying the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center to deal with not only customers but potentially affected non-customers (as in the Giphy example in the parallel comment thread).

You're estimating what, that every customer would on average spend at at least an hour a month on the phone with each and every service they do business with?

There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.

Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.

And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.

If you can't afford to work a job, don't take it.

So long story short he created a supply company with dedicated customer support, but his prices were correspondingly higher (those extra salaries have to come from somewhere). Most people just went with the cheapest option every time, one of the reasons that business failed.

This is ultimately why consumer protection laws exist. A person is smart, people are stupid and "the market" can't be expected to always act in its own best interests.

If I told my cost center that I went with a more expensive vendor because "they were friendlier", that would pretty much open an investigation...

Guaranteed.

Would the people championing this idea be willing to pay $10/month for their Hacker News account because the company was obligated to provide real human support to everyone?

Or $10/month to GitHub just to be able to have a GitHub account?

Or if you plan to start a website or internet company, do you really want to have to put your personal phone number on the project to comply with such a law?

They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.

Besides, there is no way to know in advance that you will have a problem that requires a phone call.

While this is true, it's not an argument for a blanket regulation that requires all businesses to provide human phone support. The cases you describe (a business unwittingly publishes contact information that you have kept private, or a credit reporting agency that has incorrect information about you) are specific types of situations with legal implications, not just a general "I want something from this business that it's not giving me".

> there is no way to know in advance that you will have a problem that requires a phone call

There is no way to know in advance lots of things. That's why we all need to be prepared to accept tradeoffs. For example, that if you want a product or service that a particular business provides, and they don't offer human phone support, you have to decide whether you're willing to use the product or service with that limitation.

> we all need to be prepared to accept tradeoffs

Do we "need" to be? This is why we have laws. We don't "need" to accept that murder will happen, for example. We can legislate that no, you can't just kill someone because you feel like it. Similarly no, you can't just not answer the phone because you just don't feel like it.

In many cases, yes. Not everything in the society you live in is going to be arranged the way you want. That's just a fact of life.

> you can't just kill someone because you feel like it. Similarly no, you can't just not answer the phone because you just don't feel like it.

These cases are not at all equivalent. You don't have a right to have everyone answer your phone calls the way you have a right to your life.

The fact we don't have this right is a problem, and that is the point here: we should. There are many other rights Americans enjoy, and the wealth that companies enjoy here is more than enough to balance out one requirement, especially in the light that the requirement would benefit most businesses anyway.

To draw another analogy, think of anti-monopoly laws. To the standard businessman, they "suck." But on the macro level, for most citizens, and even for most businesses, they are good.

Sometimes, sure. But we're not discussing "sometimes" in the abstract. We're discussing a particular kind of situation.

> The fact we don't have this right is a problem

The fact that we don't have what right? The right to demand support from businesses that say up front that they don't provide it? No, I don't agree that we should have that right. As others have said, all that will do is make it much harder to start a business.

> There are many other rights Americans enjoy

Not everything that is claimed to be a "right" in today's American society actually is. The actual rights embodied in our Constitution and laws are not rights to demand that other people do things for you. They are rights to have other people, and the government, not do things to you that deprive you of your liberty, like jail you for speaking your mind or search your house without a warrant and probable cause or force you to testify against yourself. To compare those things to a business not providing you with the support you think you're entitled to, when you haven't paid for it and the business explicitly says it doesn't provide it, and say the same kind of "right" is involved in that case, is ridiculous.

If you really think it's a problem that businesses offer products and services but don't provide the support you want, here's my suggestion to you: start your own business that does the things you complain that other businesses don't do. I think you will find it a very enlightening experience.

> To draw another analogy, think of anti-monopoly laws...on the macro level, for most citizens, and even for most businesses, they are good.

No, they're not, they're terrible. The main effect of their application has been to make products and services more expensive for consumers, not less. The "monopolies" that were driven out of business or forced to break up under such laws (e.g., Standard Oil or Alcoa Aluminum) got their huge market share by providing their products more cheaply and in greater quantities than any of their competitors. The anti-trust suits against them were not instigated by consumers who weren't being well served (there weren't any); they were instigated by the competitors, who found it much easier to get the government to invoke laws to their benefit (and to the detriment of their customers) than to actually compete.

And as I said, this rule would only apply to companies of a certain size and revenue.

> The actual rights embodied in our Constitution and laws are not rights to demand that other people do things for you

Not true. First amendment guaranteeing right to exercise your religious choice is useless if nobody is out there enforcing that right, protecting it for you. Its very existence demands someone protect it for you. If they don't... well, you don't have that right anymore. The fifth amendment guarantees your ability to use a grand jury. What use is that if the jury simply refuses to serve you? Answer: They're not allowed to not serve you, thus they are forced to do something for you.

Monopolies are bad for consumers because no one can compete with them effectively. To offer "just compete with them" as a solution is just ignorant to this concept. With scale comes efficiency, and when you are efficient enough, you don't need to compete anymore.

> start your own business that does the things you complain that other businesses don't do. I think you will find it a very enlightening experience.

It wouldn't be Hacker News without an assumptive, sneering remark like this. Consider that this is a website full of startup entrepreneurs and that maybe you can't safely make this assumption after all.

Your reasoning is specious. The government is only obligated to protect particular rights under the Constitution, not any "right" you dream up. A grand jury is not serving you; it's serving the government, in the course of the government protecting your rights. If we want the government to protect our rights, of course we have a duty to do things like serve on grand juries. But that is not a service to the individual defendants; it's a service to us as a society, through the government.

> Monopolies are bad for consumers because no one can compete with them effectively.

If no one can compete with them because no one can offer the same products and services at an equally low price and in equally large quantities, that's not bad for consumers. That's good. What's bad is when the government steps in at the behest of the failed competitors to break up the monopolies, raising prices, lowering supply, and making things worse for consumers, as in the historical examples I gave.

If no one can compete with them effectively because they've bought special privileges from the government (which is often the case--for example, that's how railroad barons in the US in the late 19th century avoided competition, by getting the government to give them exclusive rights over particular routes), that's a reason to have less government regulation, not more.

If no one can compete with them effectively because no one is even trying, then someone should try. For example, if having guaranteed human phone support is something valuable to customers, then customers will pay for it. So there's an obvious business opportunity (and all the startup entrepreneurs you refer to on this site should be champing at the bit to take it). If it's not valuable enough to customers for them to pay for it, then why should the law step in and require it?

> A grand jury is not serving you; it's serving the government ... it's a service to us as a society

These are contradictory. If it's a service to the society, it's a service to me as well, as I am part of the society. True, not "just" me, but I also never advocated for any right that applied to just me. The discussion was always about creating a right for everyone to discuss with (reasonably sized, reasonably financed) companies, their reasonably-chosen concerns.

> If no one can compete with them [...] that's not bad for consumers. That's good.

Yes, individual transactions become cheaper when the business is large. However, choice is greater when the business is small, because then there are more competitors. We can agree that it would not be efficient for the economy for every establishment to be its own business, meaning that every hardware store and every restaurant was its own corporation. However can we not agree that it is also not efficient when a very large business goes bankrupt and we either have to urgently reshuffle the economy and/or bail them out?

And additionally, do you not think predatory pricing is a thing? This is something recognized to be used by institutions such as Wal-mart and Amazon.

> if having guaranteed human phone support is something valuable to customers, then customers will pay for it.

How would I even tell the company I want this feature, if I can't get through to them on the phone in the first place? How would they know it's wanted, if they never hear from anybody? And if they can't even answer to people who have paid them for their core product, why would they to anyone else?

[1] https://www.hg.org/consume.html

You're quibbling. The grand jury has to do its duty regardless of how the defendant has behaved. A business does not have to give you what you want regardless of how you behave. These two things are not in the same category, no matter how you try to twist words.

> The discussion was always about creating a right

Yes, "creating" a right that currently doesn't exist, just because you feel entitled. That's not how rights work.

> choice is greater when the business is small, because then there are more competitors.

And the best way to discourage such choice is to pile more and more regulations on businesses. If you want more small businesses to provide choice, you need to make it easier to start a business, not harder. All these "rights" people think businesses owe them have a cost. If you as a customer are willing to pay the cost, then it's not a matter of "rights" at all; it's a straightforward business transaction, value for value. If you as a customer aren't willing to pay the cost, where is it supposed to come from? Things like grand juries ultimately get paid for by all of us as taxpayers. Are you willing to raise your taxes so the government can pay for phone support for all businesses?

> We can agree that it would not be efficient for the economy for every establishment to be its own business, meaning that every hardware store and every restaurant was its own corporation.

No, I don't agree to that. What size of business is most efficient in a free market gets decided by the market. What size of business is most "efficient" in our current society, which in many ways is not a free market, gets decided by lots of things, most of them having to do with various ways the government interferes in the economy. See further comments below.

> do you not think predatory pricing is a thing?

No, I think it's a buzzword used by people who have a political axe to grind but don't understand basic economics.

> This is something recognized to be used by institutions such as Wal-mart and Amazon.

And claims like that are, as I implied just above, bogus. Wal-mart and Amazon have the market positions they do for two main reasons, one good and one bad. The good reason is that they make use of economies of scale to provide products and services at prices nobody else can match, which is good for us as customers. The bad reason is that part of what enables them to do that is taking advantage of government interference in the economy (such as cheap loans for building facilities like warehouses and distribution centers that they can get but mom and pop small businesses can't) and bullying their supply chain in various ways that often cross the line into regulatory violations, but of course those regulations aren't enforced the way regulations are enforced against small businesses who don't have deep pockets and lots of lawyers.

> How would I even tell the company I want this feature, if I can't get through to them on the phone in the first place?

This is silly. Do you call companies on the phone to tell them about all the things you would like them to provide? Of course not. Nobody does.

Companies don't adopt these business models because they don't know that support is a valuable service. They adopt these business models because they don't think they can provide the support people would want at a price people would pay for. And in many, if not most, cases, I suspect they're right. That's not something that can be fixed by government regulation. It can only be fixed by either customers changing how much they are willing to pay, or some innovator (like, oh, I don't know, a startup entrepreneur on HN) figuring out how to provide that kind of support more cheaply and selling it as a service.

For every right, before it was created, it didn't exist. This seems tautological. Why would it have been created if it already effectively existed? The whole idea of rights is that it legally enforces something that wasn't any kind of guarantee before, and its absence caused all kinds of problems.

> No, I don't agree to that. [...] What size of business is most "efficient" in our current society, which in many ways is not a free market, gets decided by lots of things, most of them having to do with various ways the government interferes in the economy

You were just arguing that a monopoly is the most efficient thing to do business with on account of how it's cheaper. So now you are saying that it isn't necessarily. So I can only assume this means I can now argue that just because something became a monopoly, does not mean it is the best entity to do business with. And yet, it is a monopoly, indicating a non-ideal situation for the consumer, because there are more efficient ways to spend your money, but because they're a monopoly, you can't spend them that way. Hence how it's not ideal for consumers.

> This is silly. Do you call companies on the phone to tell them about all the things you would like them to provide? Of course not.

What do you think a user research call is? How do companies build their backlogs at all? Normally not by not talking to customers or potential customers.

> they don't think they can provide the support people would want at a price people would pay for.

This is the exact problem. Companies don't know the exact value of providing phone support because it is hard to measure. It's especially hard to measure at a societal level. At the very least, lack of phone call becomes an externality like pollution.

What if people's basic rights weren't "created" by anyone? What if they just have always existed? Or at least have existed at least as long as human societies have?

This is pretty much the view the Founders of the US had. They did not view the Constitution as creating rights but as acknowledging that people already have certain rights and requiring the government to respect them.

> This seems tautological.

I think you need to expand your thinking. See above.

I don't have anything further of substance to add to the discussion at this point.

Because when it comes down to it, people don't care about speaking to a human when they can get a product or service for less than the competition. Both corporations and consumers min/max their expenses, at the cost of service or humans.

It's one reason why I'm in favor of nationalizing things or keeping things nationalized; take away the drive for min/maxing profits and change things into a public service, and (in theory anyway) things will improve for the better.

I have a business in NJ where the state unemployment department has made an error. After hundreds of phone calls and multiple physical letters, we have received no response in over 16 months. The issue is still outstanding. Governments are no better than businesses in this matter.

You can call them the minute the offices open for a month straight, and get the same “high call volume, call back next business day” message.

The solution is to get a state politician’s ear who back channels their way into getting a government employee to take up the problem. But that is the same as getting a post to top of twitter/Reddit/hacker news and hoping a google employee decides to act.

In fact, my girlfriend's state job involves working with people over the phone to fix problems and help them get what they need, and she's great at it.

A reminder about state governments; You get exactly what you vote for, and no more.

The more you nationalise the more communism you have and if you have too much you die as we all know. Its a meter god put to balance Pvp in the endgame.

> History has proven this to not be true.

Norways energy grid is nationalised and it is one of the best investment funds in the world

Meanwhile the UK privatised trains in the 70s and has the oldest, slowest and most expensive trains in europe.

History exists outside of 1970s america vs soviet russia stereotypes

You might want to lookup what the word if means.

As a prime example look up peoples common complaints about airlines and then ask them why they don’t just fly first or business class, in most cases a cheaper price is favorable to most of the people complaining about airlines. I have a feeling that whatever services this guy is complaining about that a company offers a product that is much higher priced that includes knowledgeable and helpful support that they have simply chosen not to buy.

The cost of customer support is much, much bigger than people realize. For a low-margin business, a single customer support interaction might wipe out an entire year of profit.

Even the most optimized ad-supported companies like Facebook have revenues (not profits, that's before expenses) in the range of a couple dollars per user per month. A typical ad-supported business might have profits as low as a couple pennies per user per month. A single customer support interaction that takes 5 total minutes could take years to recoup.

I know people want to speak to someone, but the reality is that they like their $0 services even more.

Besides, we really aren't talking about low-margin businesses. If you are a low-margin business, chances are, your overall impact on society is not that high, and the importance of regulating you is not high either. If we introduced regulations like this it would be restricted to businesses of a certain headcount and revenue, probably.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2476867112525530?id=3...

The cool thing about having real, talented human beings doing that job instead of some undertrained call center? We treated them as part of our Fraud department. Someone calls in and tries to illicitly get access to cards they don't own, and the support agent had the training and knowledge to often be able to spot that and prevent it.

We didn't charge customers a cent for this privilege.

Obviously, we need to avoid abuse especially automated abuse, and this in turn becomes difficult.

So... perhaps it makes the most sense to roll this issue into regulation against dark patterns.

Or... fund an organization exposing dark patterns and helping consumers choose companies that avoid them.

It's important to write out and acknowledge that people cost money.

Not exactly a bank breaker for a vast majority of businesses.

That is completely dependent on the support burden at the margins of an additional customer. If your business is high-touch, your business won't scale.

Which is perhaps the problem. Companies should not scale beyond what they ought to (when additional scaling hurts those at the margins).

I think the right should be there - but the cost must also be associated with it. For example, there should be a plan for which you pay an upfront cost and get a human.

A) my skillset deserves $300k/y in comp B) I'm not paying another $10/m for my bank just because they'll have to have a human spend a few hours a year supporting me

You mean the zero fucks model. What they really want to do is build a money-making machine that requires no humans to operate and somehow generate MRR for them. Hey we all would like to retire some day which requires low effort MRR, but a business serving people often requires a bit more than some fancy infrastructure and a drink on the beach.

However most services you use (ISPs, consumer internet products like gmail, consumer electronics) are making a fair share of profit and attempting to a zero human approach through other major CRM/CX players to keep growing that margin.

The amount of reliance on poorly installed, and still nascent technology is staggering and leaves many consumers in endless automated loops with no hope for resolution.

Now that offices are also harder to come by, we have created our own kafka-esque situations.

It's a bit like what I imagine being inside the total perspective vortex is like.

> The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

> Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

> “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

> And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.

> Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

> To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.

Thought such thing wasn't even possible.

This summarizes well why the only solution out of this growing nightmare (of accounts and data being disappeared left and right, no recourse anywhere) is through legislation. It is not possible for the companies to fix this of their own initiative.