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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.

AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.

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Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".

NGL that phrase reads as an "ESL-ism" where the intended phrasing is "towards AMD moderators/employees/whatever" i.e. "Don't be a dick to the people trying to help/answer questions" not "don't be mean to the company".

Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.

It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.

The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.

Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?

Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.

The entire point of support staff is to stand between unhappy customers and the rest of the company. If they don't think their pay reflects the responsibilities that that entails then they should ask for a raise, not make excuses to ignore customers that the company has failed to serve.

Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.

Poor nations just pirate.

AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.

AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.

And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.

Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”

AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations

Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.

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