Live data from Hacker News

I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

gamefromscratch.com

351–360 of 362 posts

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#351
post #342
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, I've worked on the anti-fraud/abuse system of a large hosting/internet provider in Europe. It was a flexible "if then scoring escalation/ticketing rules". I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system. Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people: how old is the account of the "reporter" ? is the…

I doubt you came close to 10% of the complaints YouTube gets via its reporting systems. It's the largest video hosting platform in the world.

You could be right, in 2008 we handled about 10^5 complaints per day, and the volume seemed to double every year(most of those were automated complaints from external systems complaining about our customers spamming/phishing/etc), I don't know what the figures are now.

My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules.

It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue. There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one. One thing…

A bad company devides available work in so many different departments and job titles the actually people with authority that is able to execute is by design very thin spread. This company could also pay higher salaries, give better training and enable more call agent autonomy because that is what is takes to deliver a frictionless delightful customer service. That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune…

Putting the customer at the center of their business is a very flamboyant term that many companies say they do but appear to perhaps not do.

I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios.

If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright.

I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales.

My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do…

The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue. There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one. One thing…

> One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.

I worked alliance support for a major database vendor in a former life. My experience is that enterprise customers are usually realists. They run a very complicated environment and are aware that things, especially software, is not perfect. They expect good service (and pay through the nose for it) and can be demanding. But ultimately they're realists.

The ones that think the world revolves around them and their issue must be fixed RIGHT NOW! are usually the ones that bought some ODBC driver for 40 bucks 12 years ago, which don't really have any support entitlement to begin with.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#354

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

But it's YouTube controlling and profiting off the platform that they created and continue to actively put out there.

If it turns out to be "a really hard problem" to control, that they just can't quite manage, then it's not okay to say "well at least you tried your best" (but you still get to profit off it).

What if we had our current state of self-driving cars on the road already, with all the problems that would entail, and people would say "well, to be fair, it is a really hard problem".

The point is, we don't care whether it's "their best" or if they're even barely trying, what matters is that it's good enough.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#355
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should hire more humans to do a proper job and provide actual customer service, using their excessive profits. The AI/automation stuff is just cost cutting and its lowering the quality of service.

Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute [0]. There's no amount of "excessive profit" that can scale humans to review it all. [0] https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/

So they built this thing that is too large to properly manage.

If they can't manage it they should scale it down. See some diversification in the online video space.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#356
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.

It's very product specific. Google Cloud Platform and GSuite have support plans and offerings distinct from other Google services for example. In a prior life I was one of the Googlers handling those support inquiries (all while also trying to scale the support operations)

As far as I remember YouTube still isn't directly profitable for Google in terms of ad revenue and YT Red. For services like that Google would probably naturally try to minimize spending as much as possible.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#357
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as email: Peertube = email software In order to have an email account you don't go to "email.com", you have to go to an email service provider. Peertube works in the same way so they have a list of providers: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances If you can understand email, you can understand peertube.

So the site is mostly promoting the technology, right? Is there any popular platform that uses PeerTube and actually has interesting or exclusive content?

If you want to think of it as promotion, yeah. You check out the promoted content.

It actually has a list of instances too where you can watch videos. I'd suggest picking one and simply having a look.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#358
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very product specific. Google Cloud Platform and GSuite have support plans and offerings distinct from other Google services for example. In a prior life I was one of the Googlers handling those support inquiries (all while also trying to scale the support operations)

As far as I remember YouTube still isn't directly profitable for Google in terms of ad revenue and YT Red. For services like that Google would probably naturally try to minimize spending as much as possible.

Do you have any recent source for this?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#359
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're now making a new claim that there's some continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. I don't think that was the original claim, and that's not what I'm claiming. I simply wanted to point out that a statement like "Companies that are wildly profitable should not shirk customer service responsibility" is not logically equivalent to saying, "Companies that are not wildly profitable…

> I think you're now making a new claim that there's some continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. I don't think that was the original claim, and that's not what I'm claiming. > "No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service. What you're descri…

The responsibility to provide customer support is the same, but the judgement for failing to provide the support is different depending on the excuse for not providing it.

E.g. "I couldn't hire more customer support agents because I'm broke," and "I am one of the most profitable companies in the world, but I still refuse to hire more customer support agents because I'm a monopoly and don't have viable competitors so it doesn't matter anyhow"...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#360
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're now making a new claim that there's some continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. I don't think that was the original claim, and that's not what I'm claiming. > "No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service. What you're descri…

The responsibility to provide customer support is the same , but the judgement for failing to provide the support is different depending on the excuse for not providing it. E.g. "I couldn't hire more customer support agents because I'm broke," and "I am one of the most profitable companies in the world, but I still refuse to hire more customer support agents because I'm a monopoly and don't have viable competitors so…

> The responsibility to provide customer support is the same, but the judgement for failing to provide the support is different depending on the excuse for not providing it.

No, this is incoherent. If the judgment for your failure to provide support is "that's understandable; we could hardly expect you to do any better" -- that is the same thing as you not having a responsibility to provide support.

Post reply on HN