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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

How many of those washer/dryer units do you think they sold? Hundreds of thousands? If it's a super common model, maybe millions?

Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.

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Every problem looks daunting until you have the right incentives to solve it.

If the problem is too big for Google and Facebook to handle, maybe Google and Facebook shouldn't exist

There are good benefits of having centralised services though. I don’t like this either, but I don’t think the solution is as simple as “they shouldn’t exist”.

I think the issues come down to incorrect or misaligned incentives.

You have the choice to not use Google or Facebook. What I hear you saying is that you don't like the fact that I'm using Google and Facebook.

I think you're losing sight of the argument. People know Facebook and Google don't take customer service seriously, but then seem amazed when they have a problem and Google and Facebook won't solve it. Meanwhile, one side says that these problems could be fixed if big companies wanted to spend some money on it, and others who say it's not a problem because it hasn't inconvenienced them yet.

I can fully respect a smug "told ya so" attitude. But this "maybe xyz shouldn't exist" attitude irritates me. I accept there's a risk to using these low-touch services... and that's my decision, no?

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