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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> but also the tone of both emails was quite antagonistic

The customer is always right.

> They may have had slightly better luck if they'd been friendlier and not attempted to school the Discord staff on how their app should behave.

Or not. Besides, it should not matter, either they did something bad or they did not, the tone of the message may upset the recipient but when you ban someone just like that you can expect them to be upset and your first line support people should be able to take that sort of heat in stride.

Sucking up to support staff when your account has been banned for no particular reason should not be a pre-requisite for having it dealt with professionally, in fact a good first line support worker will be able to de-escalate such a situation quickly by showing some competence and making sure the user is dealt with as they should.

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> The customer is always right.

This meme needs to go away. The customer is not always right, and it's deeply unhealthy for businesses to adopt this attitude. Even very customer centric businesses do not adopt this mantra.

I mean the statement has never been about infallibility or anything it just means “the customer’s feelings are always valid” but was coined before such language was common.

Some say it means "the customer's spending (or refusal to spend) is inarguable reality," without dragging the customer's feelings into the picture. Granted an angry customer is less likely to buy.

For free services, I'm the product, not the customer. I understood this and used Discord regardless, because at the time it was the easiest way to talk to certain communities (mostly gaming related).

If I was using Nitro, I'd have to agree with you, but I had a clear stance not to give a dime to a company I do not support.

> For free services, I'm the product, not the customer.

That's been beaten to death by now. Let's start with that I don't agree with it. If the service is free the price is $0, that does not suddenly transform the person who the product is being delivered to into the product itself. It merely changes the revenue stream into another one that is invisible to the customer. The company then has many options in order to get paid, none of which involve selling the customer. They might sell data about the customer (illegal in many places if that data has been collected for different purposes), or they might attempt to upsell the customer on a different service.

But in no way does the actual customer get sold.

The whole thing smacks of defeatism: we don't pay so therefore we have no rights as customers so don't whine. But that simply isn't true, users are not cattle to be sold at auction and companies should not treat them as such. And users should not tell each other that they only got what they deserved.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used that phrase, but I felt it would resonate with people more immediately than any other choice of words. In any case, I don't pay for Discord so I am definitely not a customer, whether or not I or my data is a "product".

There is nothing wrong with the expression or the idea behind it. We all know what it means, and what you mean when you say it. We all (seem to) need the reminder.

It would be nicer not to be the product, but the world isn't always nice. Sometimes it is.

Most of these "free services" are very far from free. They cost (and sometimes cost a lot). It's just that what they charge isn't in the form of currency.

You are still supporting Discord by using it and Discord still needs non-paying members. Without those members, Discord won't be as popular and the paying members wouldn't stick around.

By all means, you are still providing value to the service and they need you as much as their paying customers. However, a lot of companies lose sight of this logic once they go big.

>The customer is always right.

That means the same as "there's no accounting for taste". If the customer prefers the neon pink lunchbox over the blue lunchbox, they are correct.

It does not mean they can do no wrong.

Sure, but customers being pissed off when their accounts are terminated is fairly predictable. The customer being always right is a long established business dogma, the reason is simple: the customer is the person that ultimately powers the business, without the customer there is no business so if you want to stay afloat you'd better make it so that the customer has their expectations met.

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