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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.