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.
I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.
Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system. It seems like we do better when we can put a face and a story to a problem.
I agree and I'll never say that people trying to solve these kinds of problems on social media networks is deplorable or pass judgement on them. I've been there. I know very well what it's like to be screwed by a large company because they doubt you'll have the reach to spread the word.
> Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system
That seems very inaccurate, sadly. Most of these systems have closed loops where our ramblings are never integrated into the loop. My impression is that usually at best someone goes into said systems and marks it as "manual" to take it out of the system then resolves it. I imagine there are many cases where the system continues completely untouched and it's "verdict" is considered by the internal models to still be valid and the company simply cuts a check or whatever is required to brush the problem under the rug.