Welcome to HN where we provide support after large corporations fail to do basic due diligence.
replies(4):
> there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads
I’m guessing that Upwork is not a YC company.
I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the hope that if I suddenly lose my XYZ account I will be able to get redress through the same avenue.
The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed.
If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines.
If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus.
If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings.
I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.
If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not.
Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork.
> If these kinds of posts are disallowed here
I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out.
> Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.