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.
You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.
> if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment
This still beats "XYZ group" - in this case, someone who is
> stressed about the situation and being without electricity due to the war
being ignored by us as well as by the company that's meant to be the middleman (to clients who had no issue paying them directly - so clearly a problem with UW and not any other party)
> I "deserve" to get screwed
No one does, which is the point. Highlighting when companies' customer service fails users (and how they deal with it - sweeping the pattern under the rug versus resolving to address it) helps people make informed decisions about the companies they do or don't choose to work with.
While 'anecdata', it's still a more far useful metric to me than advertising in picking who I support, as patterns tend to arise (both positive and negative!) resulting from a company's culture.
I don't need to be well connected or have some arbitrary requirement of being "enough" of a community member to get basic recourse in other venues. In most other cases of our lives for these kinds of basic disputes you can rely on a combination of local laws, police and small claims courts.
I agree with most of your other points overall. My complaint isn't to say we shouldn't be raising an issue, it's really more about the way we act like the problem is solved once the giant fire no longer is roaring but there are still embers that eventually reignite.