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Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

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

#141

Post by godelski »

lorenzsell wrote: post #132

My Facebook account got hacked last year and it was a nightmare. They got access to my ad account and racked up $4k worth of charges. And, somehow they were able to get into my account over and over again. I’m super technical and careful about these things. Even after changing all my passwords and resetting everything, multiple times, the hacker was able to steal my account. After being locked out for several days, I…

I'm a bit confused, did they gain access and then add a recovery email which was how they regained access or was your email compromised and they got in through a recovery address. Either way, clearly you weren't the one submitting those ads.

I actually routinely get gmail spam that is trivially identifiable as spam. Such that a naive bayes could detect it. But what's interesting is the original emails have over 18k words in them. They're hidden though unless you look at the original. Otherwise just an image.

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

#142

Post by doctor_eval »

josephg wrote: post #127
SoftTalker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#143

Post by Arrath »

thegrimmest wrote: post #128
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,…

No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands. Dispute resolution is what courts are for . Meta already pays taxes that fund courts. If courts are unable to keep up with demand generated by the modern digital economy, let's fix that . Making losers pay court fees would go a very long way towards solving the problem. Re: Walmart, the other option is to just cut the a…

> No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands.

So I take it you're against Lemon Laws or other avenues of consumer protection?

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

#144

Post by autoexec »

exe34 wrote: post #101
autoexec wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a different beast entirely. People in the EU get a lot of rights that people in the US don't. That said, one of the many many problems of the "free market" is that it depends on there being a company willing to leave huge stacks of money and power on the table. Maybe some company could take a few customers from their competitors by offering great refunds and fair terms when no one else will, but why would t…

all that freedom and you can't return a faulty product?

Long before we started keeping more of our citizens locked up behind bars than any other nation on the earth "all that freedom" has been mostly just advertising, but the free speech is pretty nice.

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

#145

Post by thegrimmest »

Arrath wrote: post #143
thegrimmest wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands. Dispute resolution is what courts are for . Meta already pays taxes that fund courts. If courts are unable to keep up with demand generated by the modern digital economy, let's fix that . Making losers pay court fees would go a very long way towards solving the problem. Re: Walmart, the other option is to just cut the a…

> No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands. So I take it you're against Lemon Laws or other avenues of consumer protection?

Yes! We just need better, more effective, more efficient courts, more capable of coping with the demand generated by an increasingly interconnected economy. Lemon laws are just a hack to paper over the side effects without addressing the root cause.

Edit: I see a world where small claims can be adjudicated online, not terribly differently from how lots of customer service works, with the added advantage of an impartial mediator and a clear process of appeal.

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

#146

Post by Arrath »

jiggawatts wrote: post #64
Muromec wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had amazing sid card story with one provider, where they simply failed to send it upon registration. For a month and a half I wrote to their alive and embodied customer service agent once every 5 days explaining the situation. Each and every time they promised to resend it to me anew to the same or even to a different address. The place I live in never loses a single letter in a post system and delivers most of the…

They stopped paying their outsourced SIM Card burning and shipping vendor. This isn’t a state in their support database, which dutifully queued up requests as-if everything is fine. Eventually they paid their vendor and the requests got popped off the queue.

Based on my experience with corporate accounting, this is all too likely.

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

#148

Post by Atotalnoob »

wojciii wrote: post #121
Salgat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. AWS support will literally log into your ubuntu server (not even an official AWS AMI) and debug your problem for you if you ask for it, that's how dedicated their support is. No idea how google cloud platform support operates, but I have my doubts they're as reliable.

This is highly unexpected. I use other Amazon services and their support is crap. Why is aws different? Is it earning them so much money they find the support to be worth doing?

Yes.

Large companies with large AWS spends will have dedicated AWS support folks who are essentially “professional services” AWS support

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

#149

Post by garrettgarcia »

c-linkage wrote: post #93
Animats wrote: post #23

Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose. Not that showing up means a win. I'm surprised that someone had trouble serving a subpoena on Facebook. Looking up "Meta" in California Corporation Search brings up everything with "Metal" in it, which is a hassle. Their actual company name is "Meta Platforms, Incorporated". Search for "Meta Platforms" here.[1] California company…

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,…

You're saying that spending thousands of dollars in court settlements and man-hours for each of these cases is somehow advantageous to Meta?? That they want to be sued?

If they bothered to appeal, I expect Meta would win most of these cases. As long as there are very few of them, it's not worth the cost. Trying to twist the situation to seem like this is somehow a good thing for Meta is well... twisted.

Also, as someone else pointed out already, Meta pays taxes which pay for those courts. The guy flying in from New Jersey does not.

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

#150

Post by okanat »

JohnMakin wrote: post #119
ModernMech wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't use Google services anymore, they've all but removed their customer support. You can't get them on the phone for anything. If your problem is that you're locked out of your paid YouTube prime account, their advice is to contact customer service by logging into your account (I can't, that's the problem). If you want to cancel the subscription, the best advice the internet has is to close your bank/…

What you described is exactly what happened to my old Google DNS account. I had a credit card issue so they locked me out of my account, but when the issue was resolved on my end, kept charging my card. They told me the exact same thing, log into your account and contact customer service. Luckily, I did not use the domain anymore, or I would have had absolutely no way to maintain it. I ended up cancelling the card an…

It is always a mix of incompetence and malice for corporates. Malice is the part of infinite profit system. The economic system pushes malicious people up who are under the pressure of more malicious ones to increase profits. Most of the time their core competency isn't delivering the best results to a customer but to the management.

Competent people are expensive to keep and maintain. Creating competent systems to handle support cases is even more so. They are usually easy targets to enable profits by cutting "costs". Therefore incompetent but cheap workforce, who is forced to work under high pressure and incompetently designed structures, is hired.

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