Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 314 posts

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#201

Post by dfadsadsf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #173
dfadsadsf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it mean…

> state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost Revenues might be a better measure. Otherwise, sites like Wikipedia would have to block themselves to comply.

Wikipedia is still multi-million dollar company with lots of employees. There should be an opportunity to pay Wikipedia $1000-5000 or whatever amount is reasonable for them to verify and remove a clear case of defamation. Right now your only option is to pay editors under the table.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#202

Post by lesuorac »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #200
analog31 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least my state requires the losing party to pay court costs. Let me guess that big companies simply don't pay.

Big companies not paying court fees is not a thing in any state.

Also big companies not paying court fees in the state they have a ton of assets in is not going to be a thing either.

No way FaceBook is going to let somebody foreclose on their data center over court costs.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#203

Post by dfadsadsf »

SoftTalker wrote: post #113
dfadsadsf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it mean…

I don't actually think it's unreasonable. Meta probably earns $2,000 in a span of a few seconds. They can afford to provide users with basic services such as account recovery, that allow users to use the services under the terms that were agreed upon when the user's account was created.

Account recovery is actually extremely tricky as it's very time consuming to verify that user is who he says he is. Hackers are really good at social engineering and with AI even video checks are not realiable.

The only way to make it robust is to bring it to physical life with real ID and photo/face check - that will cut out on 99.99% of abuse and impersonation attempts. The problem is that it is extremely expensive and frankly can't be funded from ad revenues.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#204

Post by dfadsadsf »

doctor_eval wrote: post #142
josephg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta might make a lot of money, but the profit per user is probably quite low, and they make up for that by having billions of users. Customer support scales with the number of users, not the profit overall. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost (on their end) of a single customer support call to meta makes you a net financial loss for them. And how many customer support reps would they need to handle support for billi…

Doesn’t that just mean that the company is externalising its costs and privatising the profits? Frankly, I think this is the problem that needs to be solved.

Small claim courts has filing fees and courts mostly pay for themselves. There is no real externalized costs other than to users who do not have reasonable way to recover their account. That's the deal with using ad supported services.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#205

Post by throwawaycities »

I recently wrote an Ask HN post[1] about obtaining my trademarked X & YouTube handles (neither is registered by a user/both are being “protected” from being registered by the respective platforms).

Since 2022 I’ve worked with legal/support teams and successfully climes my trademarked handle/username from:

Meta (IG & Threads) Microsoft (GitHub) Reddit TikTok Amazon (Twitch) Kick

Similarly, no user had registered my trademarked name on those platforms either, but I couldn’t register it because they were all “protecting” the name/brand from being registered.

Of note, Meta’s legal team was the most responsive and transferred me the accounts within 24 hours of sending my Trademark Notice, following a couple back and forth email confirmations.

Unlike every other platform a Discord user did in fact register my trademark and is holding himself out as “CEO of {trademark}” with the “TM” trademark emoji following the trademark. After authenticating me as the owner of the trademark Discord’s legal team concluded they could not determine who the actual owner was and informed me I would have to sue the user and give them a copy of the Court Order. Really bizarre they would throw their user under the bus, not consider I could also name them a defendant, and that Discord was confused as to the owner of the trademark meets the legal burden of proving trademark infringement (likelihood of confusion standard).

I detailed my frustration in the post of not being able to actually speak to a human at X or YouTube, which would no doubt immediately resolve my requests like every other platform. I even noted in a comment the likelihood I’d have to file lawsuits to actually speak to a human which I believe would result in an immediate resolution/settlement.

Perhaps I will sue X, YouTube and discord, but I really shouldn’t have too and these companies should pay damages when a customer can show no human support was ever given.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030899

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#206

Post by renonce »

jjmarr wrote: post #155
analog31 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least my state requires the losing party to pay court costs. Let me guess that big companies simply don't pay.

Even though it's much more expensive to lose a lawsuit over an issue than it is to resolve it through customer service, most people choose not to sue. Facebook can fulfill all of their current legal requirements by simply not showing up to any court hearings, losing by default, and paying whatever someone won. If that is cheaper than providing real customer service, they will do it. And real lawyers cost $100s/hour s…

Not showing up is an arbitrage opportunity which means everyone can sue Facebook and get a win for free, which would not be sustainable.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#208

Post by throwawaycities »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #199
c-linkage wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this appears as a way to outsource customer service to an external entity funded by a cash flow to which Meta does not need to contribute. The courts are always going to exist, Meta is always paying its lawyers, so why bother hiring extra people to staff a support line? And by making support have to go through the legal system you've already cut out 90% of the support calls you would normally take. Financially,…

The article says that small claim court has $100 filing fees - considering that every case is heard for 10 minutes, it sounds like small claim court should be able to mostly if not completely self-fund.

At the scale of these tech companies and the number of customer service issues the courts would be overrun and this hurts the other cases. Courts can’t scale, even at $100 per small claims case filing fee they are losing money, Courts aren’t meant to be profitable businesses nor even self sustaining, they provide a public function and service paid for by tax dollars.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#210

Post by drewg123 »

hansvm wrote: post #181
dfadsadsf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it mean…

> go somewhere in person to show my ID My experience is that you can get all your Google issues resolved if you show up to Mountain View in person and ask politely. Might a similar strategy work for Meta?

I’d love to hear the story behind this
Post reply on HN