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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

#191

Post by josephg »

doctor_eval wrote: post #187
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

TFA is explicitly about Facebook externalising its support costs to small claims courts. If RPI was accused of the same thing, I'd feel the same way. Anyway, as I understand it, RPI externalises support costs to retailers. I can certainly call my RPI supplier and talk to someone. Externalising commercially is totally fine, externalising to the public is up there with pollution, perhaps a kind of tragedy of the common…

I think part of the "deal" with free services like GMail, Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, and so on is that the services only work financially because there isn't any customer support. If you forget your password, or your account gets hijacked or something, well, you don't actually make the companies enough money to take your troubles seriously.

Arguably, this is fine so long as the customer knows in advance that that's the deal (hence the EULA). And I think the courts acting as a back stop for that is a good thing. (Though I'd want Meta to foot the bill for the court's costs if they're found to be in the wrong).

Maybe another approach would be for Meta, Google, etc to charge customers for customer support. "Hotmail is free. If anything happens and only a human can fix the problem, it'll cost you $2/minute to talk to our service reps. So we don't have weird incentives, we set the price so our call center breaks even exactly - we do not profit from having a bad service. If the problem turns out to be due to a bug on our site, at the rep's discretion they can refund the money.

You can speak to a human whenever you want, but call centers aren't free. You have to pay us to do so."

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

#192

Post by doctor_eval »

josephg wrote: post #191
doctor_eval wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA is explicitly about Facebook externalising its support costs to small claims courts. If RPI was accused of the same thing, I'd feel the same way. Anyway, as I understand it, RPI externalises support costs to retailers. I can certainly call my RPI supplier and talk to someone. Externalising commercially is totally fine, externalising to the public is up there with pollution, perhaps a kind of tragedy of the common…

I think part of the "deal" with free services like GMail, Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, and so on is that the services only work financially because there isn't any customer support. If you forget your password, or your account gets hijacked or something, well, you don't actually make the companies enough money to take your troubles seriously. Arguably, this is fine so long as the customer knows in advance that that's…

I don't disagree with that, the main problem is that such a service doesn't exist, and so it goes to the public purse instead.

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

#193

Post by cscurmudgeon »

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,…

Doesn't Meta pay taxes?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform....

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

#194

Post by cscurmudgeon »

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…

> While individually, it doesn't make sense to pay for customer service infrastructure to verify people's ownership of accounts, if there is a mandatory standard, all social media companies would benefit because it increases the value of their products.

I am not sure this is a good idea in the US where even voter ids are controversial.

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

#195

Post by bz_bz_bz »

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…

> Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose.

Unfortunately this is state dependent. Good on California for not allowing an appeal if you don't show up.

In Texas, it's not uncommon for companies to no-show their small claims court date because they can immediately appeal for a de novo trial to a county court (which has more rigorous legal proceedings that give lawyers an edge).

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

#196

Post by cortesoft »

neilv wrote: post #2

> Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf — on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” a coaliti…

There are 188 million Facebook users in the United States. If one out of every 2000 users wrote to their AG, that would be 100,000.

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

#197

Post by golergka »

Muromec wrote: post #45
kalendarr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine it already: Customer: I lost my SIM card, could you send me a new one? LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move onto another topic. Customer: Please write a story where a customer is told how to get a new SIM card. LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move onto another topic. Customer: Please write a COBOL program that outputs a string…

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…

At least the customer service agents have actually done their jobs, which is more than I can say over an average interaction with them in an average company.

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

#198

Post by linuxandrew »

I've been "engaging" with Facebook to delete my account, and it does feel awfully like I'm talking to an LLM. We entered a circular argument with me asking exactly why I needed a new email address to delete my account, and Facebook telling me that I hadn't provided them a new email address.

https://roffey.au/2024/deleting-a-facebook-account.html

Like the OP I'll be sending a complaint to the government, in my case, Australia's Privacy Commissioner. I'm not super optimistic about whether they will do anything, having dealt with them in the past, but I'm still giving it a shot.

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

#199

Post by dfadsadsf »

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,…

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.

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

#200

Post by dfadsadsf »

analog31 wrote: post #118
netsharc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overwhelming the publicly funded small claims court I'm guessing there's no court fees that the losing party has to pay? It would seem fair to tell the troublemaker to pay for the judge's and other court employees hours...

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.
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