It is. It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. Other organizations that are smaller by multiple orders of magnitude still regularly fail at it.
I originally just down voted this comment, but I feel it warrants a response rather than a down vote. I removed my down vote so here are my thoughts.
Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole.
The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me".
Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service.
That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
I think this perfectly illustrates the different business models between these companies. On the one hand, a company with billions of users where no money changes hands and each interaction is worth maybe $0.01 in advertising, and on the other hand a service for which you are paying hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars each time.
Don’t forget that just last year we were watching videos of innocent passengers being violently dragged off planes that they paid to be on. Despite some feel good anecdotes, airlines are by no means a bastion of customer service nirvana. Airlines hold 2 of the top 20 spots among the “Most Hated Companies” in the US.
Good customer service, even when your ASP is tens of thousands of dollars per customer, is probably the single hardest thing for most companies.
Whether it’s Airlines, Search Engines, Phone/Computer Manufacturers, Car companies, etc., we’ve seen basically every otherwise beloved brand fall on their face when it comes to customer service at scale. (And that’s when we’re not discovering their products are faulty, dangerous, secretly crippled over time, spying on us, exploiting our personal data,...)
Of course there are weird process gaps. Here we are seeing an account being flagged for incarceration, possibly because the account is actually being attacked by someone submitting fraudulent requests in an attempt to get it closed.
I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t want one. But if that isn’t a weird process gap I don’t know what is.
Just 3 years ago BA went above and beyond for me when I left a wallet on a plane, but didn't find out until I was in a different terminal (45 minutes later), and couldn't go back due to security/visa checkpoints. BA sent runners to the plane in the other terminal and they physically carried my wallet with all cards/cash in it to me.
I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
I had a similar thing a few years back. Left my mobile phone on my seat, had already passed various gates and checkpoints and they did exactly the same thing. Within ten minutes I was re-united with my phone. I couldn't thank them enough.
Left my keys on the plane seat, and remembered once I was at baggage claim. All Delta would do is let me fill out some paperwork. I ended up having to have a locksmith come out to the airport parking lot to make a new key for my truck.
You got customer service when you were in fact a customer.
You don't get customer service from an ad platform unless you are a paying advertiser. Complaints from the eyeballs carry less weight than complaints from the money shovelers.
This sentiment is so often expressed, nobody challenges it as not making sense. Who redefined "paying" as meaning cash payment?
If you are a supplier of eyeballs, you are purchasing stuff in exchange for eyeballs. You are purchasing things, so you are a customer. Also, when you pay for an Android phone, you are a paying customer of Google, with cash, credit, or whatever. Lots of other things, but those are the first that come to mind.
“Paying” as in “cash payment” is literally the standard dictionary definition. It’s also where the top line number of any financial statement comes from. You are, in fact, the one redefining “paying” to suit your purposes.
In what way is that relevant? Which one are you providing FB for the privilege of using their service? Do you disagree that the dictionary definition of “pay” is as I described it?
It seems relevant that the idea of paying with things other than cash is pervasive and has been for longer than either of us has been alive.
I usually pay for things these days via an odd ritual in which I insert a small plastic card into a slot, and then, believe it or not, it is actually returned to me.
If I give you something in exchange for a chicken, and you maintain "I did not pay you, because a chicken is not cash", do you think the IRS will be convinced there was no transaction? Or s/chicken/bitcoin/.
So you do disagree with the dictionary definition? Is that what you’re saying? The fact the IRS wants to tax you for bartering with a chicken doesn’t change anything about the English language.
I'm not aware of disagreeing with a dictionary definition.
However, if a dictionary definition is presented to me, and it doesn't include a usage of which I am aware, that doesn't mean I disagree with it even then. It likely just means that something was left out - maybe because people still hope to sell dictionaries, or alternatively because, having given up on selling them, neither accuracy nor completeness is required to sell online ads.
I never "paid" attention to formal grammar in school, but this would seem to be the use of the word as a verb without an object.
As such, definition #13 seems applicable - "money, goods, etc." can't possibly be construed to mean "money and not goods, etc."...can it?
Definition #17 might also apply - you "pay" to use Facebook, oh how you pay...
Anyway, I don't have any particular issues with this entry, and I think the very first definition demonstrates that payment is commonly understood to include "doing something" which is an extremely broad category.
What’s debt do you owe to Facebook that you have to settle as in definition 1?
Definition 17, while fitting, is outside the scope of this current thread.
The point is, Facebook only cares about your experience with their service if you are paying them money. Even the IRS doesn’t care; Facebook doesn’t send you a 1099 for your use of their service, do they? The IRS doesn’t charge them tax on your data, do they? This would seem to indicate that the situation falls outside the “exchange of value for value” type definition of “pay.”
Pointing out that the IRS includes certain things in payment that you don't isn't a claim that some definition they use limits the usage of the word payment. The point is not that everybody should use the IRS definition for words. The IRS provides evidence about what people do in the world; you don't have to (nor was I asking for you to) accept them as the authority.
If I understand your dismissal of definition (1), you are implying that it is significant that definition (2) by contrast only says "money" and uses an example of dollars. I think that's too legalistic and just an artifact of the way things were edited. Dictionaries aren't written to prevent lawyers from finding loopholes, so I don't think you can count on everything being repeated absolutely uniformly. In actual legal documents, they define terms or phrases used repeatedly up front to reduce the repetition, and dictionaries don't seem to customarily do that. So again, definition (1) is evidence about how people behave in the world, not necessarily the definition we are using and from an unimpeachable authority.
No, you do not understand why definition 1 does not apply. The question was: what debt do you owe to Facebook to settle? I claim there is none. Therefore, you are not acting in accordance with definition 1 when providing information to or viewing ads from Facebook.
And if you have a g suite account, even if you're only paying a few dollars a month, you can call a "Google Support" number and get help. They say it only covers g suite services, but I've gotten help with issues with unrelated Google products through it.
In fairness, I did buy a phone directly from Google, and when it died recently, I did get actual support, at least someone to chat with who gave me an RMA. Perhaps I should have asked her my gmail questions.
Yes, google has real people in the support still. They usually ask "Is there something else I can help you with today?" That is a very open question :-)
Well, try this on for size: You aren't a customer of Facebook because you aren't paying Facebook... Facebook is paying you. For the privilege of being able to sell your eyeballs, they pay you a great deal more value in their services. They're putting down a non-trivial amount of cash on providing these services to you that you put no cash down on.
Cutting you off at the scale they are at is just no big deal to them, but you may in fact miss your payment.
What ruins HN for me is that people downvote for disagreement. The rules, last I checked, forbid that --- downvotes are for poor behavior, not because you disagree.
I've not seen any evidence that downvoting patterns have changed on HN in recent years, and the rules haven't changed either. If the community is being ruined, something else must be doing it.
Honestly I'm kind of baffled by (what I assume) is the moderation teams' stance on downvotes. I see so many seemingly reasonable comments with "edit: why am I being downvoted into oblivion". I'm not saying the site is ruined, but I can easily ask: how is that productive?
The whole point of having a downvote system is to correct people towards more productive behavior, no? If people don't know what they said wrong, how can they fix it?
If the the user can't figure out why they're being punished, and someone like me who has been on this site for a long time and is also going "why on earth did that get downvoted", then what purpose does it serve other than as a public flogging device?
Then again, considering that the site design hasn't changed to even have a up-vote button that works on mobile, I'm not exactly holding my breath that anything here could ever change.
It's not when the user falls down a weird gap in the architecture that is frustrating and dehumanizing. It's that there's almost never a way to get ahold of a human to explain what's broken. There is apparently no straightforward way to simply contact Facebook support. I'm not sure they even have support.
The frustrating thing is, if they had a support team, they'd be inundated with really simple questions. A few years ago an article discussing some new Facebook login feature became the top search result for "Facebook login". What happened next? Thousands of comments on that article in the lines of "I want to login to Facebook, why am I seeing this page instead, please give me back my Facebook!". Google started offering an open-to-the-public question and answers on search results, and some people think that's the place to book a restaurant table after googling said restaurant.
There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work...
OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
Perhaps it is time to charge for advanced support like AWS. If you want priority support for Facebook where stupid questions are entertained and your hand is held, 99 dollars a year. Considering the value of social media these days, it is not too much to ask, especially if you are an enterprise customer. For everyday customers with non-critical problems that can be solved by Namecheap-style support teams in Eastern Europe, 5 dollars a month.
I don't want support for 99 dollars a year. I'd be happy with $1 a minute or whatever. It's fine to discourage 99% of the support calls normal companies get. Just have something for extreme situations.
Instead of a recurring support plan just charge up-front per ticket, something like 50$ or so. The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault.
This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
> The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault.
Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
That’s true, but look, nobody made them get that big. They worked really hard to make it happen. And good for them, but scale is not a get out of responsibility free card.
It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap.
So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better.
If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
If it's "too big to care", then perhaps it should be trimmed down to size? Industries where you have many different companies competing for customers somehow manage to have decent customer support.
If those gaps are that rare, then how hard could it be to employ a few human beings who are empowered to help the vanishingly-few users who fall through the cracks?
Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
Your intuition for the size of the problem here is off. If "vanishingly few" means that a tenth of a percent fall through some crack each year, that's 2 million cases annually. In practice, I bet Facebook does even better than that, but I would be very surprised if it were a workload that could be handled by just a few extra people.
Assuming 200 working days a year and that 1 CSR can handle 10 cases a day, that means 1000 people can handle the case load. Given Facebook has ~43k employees right now, and assuming they actually have nobody to handle these cases, they would need to hire 2% more employees.
I’m not sure if that meets the definition of “a few extra people,” but FB could easily do it if they wanted to. 1000 people being paid $60k apiece plus $60k worth of additional carrying costs (benefits, etc.), that amounts to $120M in additional expenses. Naively subtracting that number from their 2018 net income of $6.88B leaves $6.76B (actually more due to the additional expenses being tax deductible).
So, basically, we see that FB cares less about user support than making an additional 1.7% profit. Yeah, they don’t give a shit.
No, that would be considered shockingly low. There are about 300 million cars in the US, and it's hard to find good statistics on cars breaking down, but AAA makes about 30 million service calls a year. So AAA alone gets the number to 10%, two orders of magnitude higher. (But I don't mean to exaggerate the difference - Facebook accounts must be significantly easier to keep running than cars.)
I think your math is wrong. 30 million a year means about 82,000 a day ("in the morning"). So that's about 2.7 hundredths of a percent. Another way to independently estimate, is that I've been driving for about 7,300 days and had an alternator failure twice that prevented my car from starting. That's...just about 2.7 hundredths of a percent as well. So I think that 0.1% is 3-4 times higher than normal.
Would you please not be a jerk on HN? This was gratuitous.
We've had to ask you many times about this kind of thing—for years already. Continuing to break the site guidelines is eventually going to get you banned. I'd rather not have to do that, so if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Do they? They get moderately annoyed, certainly, and they have every right to. But the DMV issues mistaken suspensions all the time, and I don't think many people see that as either a critically important issue or proof that the government is evil.
I think people do, the idea of being stuck in a bad situation due to a heartless bureaucracy with no way out is something people obsess over, and are disturbed by it happening to even a single person. Have you ever seen "Brazil"? Read something by Kafka? Talked to a (US-style) libertarian or conservative, particularly about the early Soviet Union?
Or that a human working for FB can make a mistake and put someone else "in jail".
No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers!
It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
I’m reminded of the old comic where it shows that Facebook’s users are the product. The advertisers are the only customers. Why should they care to deal with one billionth of their product if it is accidentally marked bad?
This is something people always repeat, but it's nonsense. Facebook (and similar companies) is a middleman between users and advertisers. Neither party is uniquely a "customer" versus the other, and advertisers have basically the same problem of being a very small part of the business and therefore unimportant and without leverage.
