I don't buy it. Apple, Amazon, Google have virtually infinite money and there's a whole spectrum between "malicious actors can abuse the system" and "the decision is final, there is no recourse."
Yet people keep parroting the "malicious users are the problem" party line. Please tell me, which tech companies were brought down because of customer service abuse?
Here's what's going on. Having real humans not even making decisions, but reviewing false positives costs money, and the company justifies it by saying it's to prevent abuse from malicious actors. But it is simply a cost saving decision. So, again, I ask why are we quick to defend the company when they could afford to do better by us. Is the entire tech community suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
I don’t know of a service that hadn’t been forced to add advertising and captcha just to stay above water due to stolen bandwidth and human hours dealing with abuse. The internet has become a trash dump of toxic users to the point it is legitimately difficult to isolate legitimate cases of failed algorithms.
Apple, Amazon and Google have good margins, but I would hardly say they could afford to do better. Human hours are incredibly expensive and the number of people attempting to get something for nothing often exceeds the number of people with legitimate complaints. I have run across whole farms of people who found some cheap online job reading off scripts trying to rip off large companies and any knowledge they get about bans they change the scripts for all.
It is has become a hostile relationship unfortunately and it is not due to companies not trying. I have seen for Apple at least they sometimes have people show up in person with lots of documentation and identification at stores and you legitimately cannot tell the scammers from the people who think it should just not be their problem.
I am not trying to justify that they fail. They often clearly do. It is just not an easy problem, especially with the amount of anger and frustration involved.
Yet people keep parroting the "malicious users are the problem" party line. Please tell me, which tech companies were brought down because of customer service abuse?
Here's what's going on. Having real humans not even making decisions, but reviewing false positives costs money, and the company justifies it by saying it's to prevent abuse from malicious actors. But it is simply a cost saving decision. So, again, I ask why are we quick to defend the company when they could afford to do better by us. Is the entire tech community suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?