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Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

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Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#181

Post by bckr »

lghh wrote: post #153
BoppreH wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Has this actually happened? 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?

Aren't there laws in some jurisdictions requiring a company to provide and/or delete all data about a customer upon request? In which case there absolutely must be a way to contact someone, in order to facilitate this process.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#182

Post by _3u10 »

oldsecondhand wrote: post #110
_3u10 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation doesn’t make unprofitable businesses exist. If the business model is unviable with support those businesses will simply not exist or cost an amount of money that is unappealing.

It's your baseless assumption that people are unwilling to pay money for these services.

It’s your baseless assumption that it’s a baseless assumption. QED.

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.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#183

Post by fourseventy »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #80
ironmagma wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that it’s a bad business model. I don’t mean “bad as in won’t make you money or keep the business running,” I mean “bad for society.” Hence the desire to regulate.

While true, this is how the system is set up for at the moment, because if one company doesn't cut costs, someone else (with a lot of investor money) will come in and undercut the market. 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 hu…

So you think communism will out perform capitalism? History has proven this to not be true. Once you take away the drive to make profits you take away all drive for innovation or to make quality products.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#184

Post by kelseyfrog »

lghh wrote: post #153
BoppreH wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Has this actually happened? 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?

Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. Giphy has the choice of one of two extremes: provide human customer support to everyone, or provide no customer support predicated on the idea that take down requests necessarily require human level support?

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#185

Post by PragmaticPulp »

rmbyrro wrote: post #102
PaulKeeble wrote: post #16

I think its important to recognise that quite a lot of modern web based companies are running their business on the 0 cents model. That is they take the marginal cost of a customer and push it down to zero and rely on scale to make a profit from it. They can't add anything to their business that would scale with the number of their customers that has any real cost, computing resources even are heavily optimised for l…

I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human.

> I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human.

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?

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#186

Post by robcohen »

There's really no need for this.

The solution is simple, separate the cost of the product from the cost of support. You need help with a product? ok, pay for it. Charge users for the cost of the employee they want to talk to.

There are an unbelievable amount of users that have zero problem solving ability and refuse to attempt anything without a human telling them what to do. I have zero desire to have the price I'm paying increase to pay for the support for these idiots. I also don't like having to go through a byzantine path of phone options to get someone when I have a legitimate problem. Solve this easily by aligning incentives, users want support -- pay for it.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#187

Post by brap »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #17
endisneigh wrote: post #6

How much would you pay for that right?

The company profit, the executives, and the shareholders will take a share of paying for it as well.

How are you going to enforce that? Are you going to force them to pay from their own salaries and dividends, by law?

Well, they'll just bump up the salaries/dividends to offset the cost. The money is coming from customers. Either way, customers are the ones paying for support.

Many companies let customers directly pay for support, if they want. No one's forcing you to buy from companies that don't offer this.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#188

Post by bobabob »

rmellow wrote: post #103
radarsat1 wrote: post #53

I recently had the experience of trying to do a banking operation that required an in-person visit. For some reason this bank required me to do this operation at the branch that I originally opened the account, which is not where I live anymore, and it's very inconvenient for me to go there. So, while I was in another city of that country, I decided to try and handle that problem. I went to a branch and asked them to…

My partner bought some clothing in Brazil and wanted to exchange it at the store for something else. Unfortunately she lost the receipt, and the alternative which is providing your SSN is not available to her (not a citizen). The exchange was denied. We walked into another store location. They were sympathetic to the foreigner situation, and made an exception. Takeaway: Computers can't see that a process is flawed an…

There is no SSN in Brazil.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#190

Post by JonChesterfield »

robcohen wrote: post #186

There's really no need for this. The solution is simple, separate the cost of the product from the cost of support. You need help with a product? ok, pay for it. Charge users for the cost of the employee they want to talk to. There are an unbelievable amount of users that have zero problem solving ability and refuse to attempt anything without a human telling them what to do. I have zero desire to have the price I'm…

And when the support needed is because the vendor has broken their product? E.g. they've charged you multiple times for the same event, or they're constantly sending incoherent contradictory letters to your door?
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