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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

#171

Post by OptionOfT »

jjmarr wrote: post #160
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…

I half-agree with the above, which is that loser-pays is a good system and it's necessary to stop enabling companies. The problem with your theory is that market forces incentivize firms to take action that reduce everyone's profits/benefits so long as the action is individually profitable for the company. Which is why there are "lemon laws" on selling used cars or food regulations. The used car industry as a whole b…

Sidenote: car sales in general are not ethical. When you go to the dealer & talk to a salesperson, and subsequently talk to the $ guy, you will be required to sign a piece of paper stating that you cannot derive ANY claims on what the salesperson told you, except those written down on that form. And that form is empty.

Also, I wish there was a nationwide requirement for warranty. Not that I have a problem with selling as-is per se, but it incentivizes used car dealers to take in every vehicle they can on trade, erase the codes, and try to sell it. Again, they can lie to your face about how well this car was maintained, how it was taken care off, etc, and you cannot derive ANY value off those quotes.

I find it insane that in 2024 I cannot get a print-out of a car on how well it was maintained, and how many times it was floored on a cold engine.

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

#172

Post by nradov »

photonthug wrote: post #90
nradov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGs aren't dictators. They have no direct power to levy penalties. Which specific law do you think Meta is breaking here? Please to provide an exact citation.

IANAL, but let's be real, it's essentially a DoS attack, which the Facebooks and Comcasts of the world have enthusiastically and successfully prosecuted in the past. In a perfect world, we would just replay any abuse-of-service lawsuit that they won in this area back against them. Without even invoking cybercrime, a quick search says that DoS against private interests has apparently been prosecuted under chattel tres…

You haven't addressed the legal issue. Courts have generally found DoS attacks to be a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030, which doesn't apply to the issues in this article. So, which law has Meta broken? Please to provide a specific citation.

But from a political standpoint I completely support AGs making public statements about anti-consumer behavior. There's nothing wrong with calling out Meta for being jerks.

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

#173

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #106
bsder wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't Meta getting hit with punitive damages for this crap? If Meta needed to cough up a million dollars to the state of California every time they lost one of these, they'd set up a proper customer service line tout suite. I know that small claims is limited in what it can award to the plaintiff. However, I don't think that applies to punitive damages against the defendant.

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.

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

#174

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> Doesn’t that just mean that the company is externalising its costs and privatising the profits?

On its own, no. Rasberry Pi not providing phone support isn't externalising any costs.

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

#175

Post by alright2565 »

sharkweek wrote: post #53
kube-system wrote: post #7

The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. And soon, LLMs will be used to attempt to solve this problem again, and they will fail again. It is easy to look at the historical information in a ticketing system and make the conclusion that the vast majority of the issues can be solved by pointing the user to frequently-encountered solutions. However, t…

Agreed - I've almost never called [Insert Service Provider Here] and had one of their automated responses be helpful in any meaningful way. I'm calling because I have what seems like an exception to deal with. I learned pretty quickly as a young man that the fastest way to get my problems solved was to hit 0 on my phone as many times as it took to get that sweet, sweet "Okay, I'll transfer you to a live representativ…

When I contact Google Fiber's chatbot about an outage, it will let me know they are aware and give me a rough ETA.

First time I've experienced a useful chatbot.

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

#176

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomcam wrote: post #166
garrettgarcia wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

If they wanted to handle this using minimal automation, they could. > That they want to be sued? Q.E.D. It has been demonstrated by their system design.

> Q.E.D. It has been demonstrated by their system design

Have they been getting sued until recently?

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

#177

Post by hot_gril »

int_19h wrote: post #65
whimsicalism wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’m pretty partial to the idea that this is not somewhere government needs to be involved

On the contrary, ensuring fair trading practices is precisely the area where government needs to be most actively involved in economic matters. What is the downside of clamping down on borderline fraud, exactly?

If this is the way things go, the govt had better follow its own rules first with the IRS support systems.

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

#178

Post by insane_dreamer »

Salgat wrote: post #96
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/…

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.

the difference is that AWS support is pricey

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

#179

Post by garrettgarcia »

tomcam wrote: post #166
garrettgarcia wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

If they wanted to handle this using minimal automation, they could. > That they want to be sued? Q.E.D. It has been demonstrated by their system design.

If they could handle it using minimal automation, they would. They can't, so they don't.

Figuring out which real human owns an account that was never verified to belong to that human in the first place is not easy to automate, if possible at all. It's expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. And if not done carefully, it makes it far easier to steal accounts than it already is.

I understand that many commenters have magic wands. Unfortunately, Meta does not.

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

#180

Post by dimatura »

jeremyjh wrote: post #17

I don’t know if it is still the case, but at one time you had to pay something like $50 to talk to a 3rd party customer service agent for the government agency that issues US Passports. The reason was because they hadn’t had a funding increase (and couldn’t legally raise prices) in 30 years and had to choose between making passports and answering questions about when the passports will be made. So they decided to mak…

I once had an passport-related emergency, but as a foreign resident in the US this was a matter for USCIS. Getting ahold of them via phone was pretty much impossible at the time- the lines were just permanently busy. I sent them an email enquiry, the only other option. I got a reply literally two years later, basically saying "Well, apologies for the delay, we hope you've figured out a solution by now" (thankfully, I had). I gladly would've paid more than $50 if it was an option.
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