This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. This is most important considering when choosing a service: Can non-standard issues be fixed quickly? Can I build a professional relationship with the company so I can ask them things that don't fit a typical "customer support" pipeline? Vimeo has great support and appear to be run by humans with emotions. Youtube basically doesn't have support. It is entirely machine-run like Apple, some national banks, your cable service, etc.
A litmus test for determining whether a company has sufficient "support" is to check whether the following conversation is possible:
"I really appreciate your service X!"
"Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!"
If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. If the response has the jist "This message is miscategorized", you're in trouble. If there's simply no channel to send that message, you're screwed.
There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.
They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed.
And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error.
People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time.
Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.
If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team.
To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.
I am not sure I care about the hierarchy of the company I am working with. If I do have an issue that can not be resolved with a standard “look up in the issue database” method - I need to be switched to someone with the necessary skills to fix that for me.
That is mostly not the case with Google as it usually ends up in a situation where I am meeting a group of their lawyers instead.
They can't call them "customer deflection team" :)
AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.
They provided me horrible support on Gsuite. It took nearly 2 months of badgering them to get them to fix an error on their end with setting up DKIM.
They refused to extend my trial at all while we were getting it sorted out.
I left Gsuite and immediately received much better support from Office 365. I left them for other reasons. I also get good support from Zoho and Fastmail.
Try getting support for anything that's not G Suite or Project Fi (which have arguably good customer support). Sometimes the "support" is just a link to the forums.
"Paid with data" sounds nominally accurate but misleading.
Suppose there were a paid mail service, and another free one with a billion users, and the paid service's spam filtering relied on the free one for accuracy. (Spammers can't very well spam a hundred thousand people without hitting at least a few thousand of the billion.) Would you say that the users of the free one pay with data? They do, but to me, the phrase "paid with data" suggests other data than just the spam you get and whether you click "this is spam" on a particular message.
Curious of the ramifications of the fact that companies normally only have a handful of vendors relative to their employee size, but have tons and tons of "vendor" end-users.
It depends on the kind of business you're in. I work for a sales driven MSP and we have a ton of actually vendors in the normal sense of the word. We probably have more vendors than we have employees but I haven't counted. We spend less time maintaining out relationships with them than we do our customers but that's more because half of them are big impersonal companies like MS which don't require a lot of effort, just a little bureaucracy.
I think that Youtube is in a different situation in that their creators are mostly individuals who use Youtube because it affords them advantages that they can't get elsewhere. If that were to change, either with Youtube becoming less popular or another platform becoming good enough, Youtube would lose a lot of its video makers and that would lose them a lot of business. I don't think Youtube's problem is that they see creators as products so much as that in order to maintain their market position, they have to be all things to all people and they desperately want to automate their business. That means there's not going to be any policy that works for everyone that uses Youtube and no matter what they do, somebody is going to get screwed.
Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.
If something bad happens on their side and it does happens eventually, they must fix the problem by manually editing the system. If they don't allocate human resource for that task or their system is hard to edit by hand, they don't provide the support.
> Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.
If 90% of you customers are phoning to complain the service is down and they can't reboot the modem because the lights are turned off because of the power cut, you can't have skilled support engineers dealing with them. Setting aside the money, the engineers would just go stir crazy and turn into BOFHs.
The trick is to either vet your customers, or enable a shibboleet protocol
How do you propose filtering out the tech savvy vs. unsavvy folks needing support? I think a big problem with "tiered support" (shudder) is that the support folks on the 1st level are often less tech savvy than the people who actually need something fixed... but they deal with so many customers who don't actually have an issue to report that it makes it worthwhile.
Oh, the restart fixed youtube.com for you? Great! Have a wonderful day.
Really? Have you ever tried to use the G Suite admin console?
I'm not at all surprised that Youtube support is so rubbish though. The interesting thing is, if they had better support they wouldn't be in such a disastrous position now.
Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.
I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person.
For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration.
Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to.
Can confirm that you can actually reach developers at Apple by contacting DTS (developer technical support). However, in my experience, the answer was either "sorry that's out of scope" or "can you please report this as a bug" or "this feature intentionally doesn't do what you want.
I once found a bug in Safari that affected reading LibreOffice's OpenGrok instance on iPads. I reported it to Apple, but eventually I managed to find the radar incident, then I was able to find the WebKit Safari commit where an Apple person fixed it.
I emailed him directly and he very nicely replied, though there wasn't anything he could do.
This all worked outside the Apple support system. Ironically, Apple probably have the best consumer support system out of anyone, and they are still not brilliant.
Yes you can. "Additional TSIs are available for purchase in either a 2-pack for $99 USD or 5-Pack for $249 USD in the Code-level Support section in your account."
I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.
I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.
I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem.
But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support.
I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.
No they do not have better things to do. Most developers should be required to spend time with support queries. They might get a better understanding of what they are building and a little more perspective.
I'm going to contradict my earlier comment and say that I agree with you.
At my old company, they made devs do 2 hours of support a week, that was frontline support, so we got all the bullshit queries.
It definitely helped resolve some common issues. For instance, we got a lot of support queries about people forgetting their password. There was a reset password option, but it wasn't large on the screen, so customers missed it.
I made a fix, so that if they got their password wrong, there was a nice big message with the forgot password link. We didn't have a single forgotten password query after that. It was a 10 minute fix.
There were a lot of other support queries that had easy fixes that didn't make it back to the devs.
The ideal case is that the representative is part of the team. Perhaps he/she is in the same office or actually a developer. But it's okay if they're in a different team as long as they can open a communication channel if needed to say, clear up some confusion of a docstring written deep into an SDK by a developer.
Welcome to round N of "Google company only fixes farcical behaviour after it garners huge publicity and/or someone knows a well positioned staff member."
No it isn’t. If something goes wrong with the app I work on users can email, live chat, or call us and they actually talk to a human. That human, who is trained on our software, tries to help them solve the problem. If it turns out it’s a bug in the software, I or someone I work with will be notified and we will eventually try to fix the bug. If it’s bad we will drop what we’re working on and fix it immediately.
That’s pretty much how it works at most places, afaik.
And there are plenty of companies with proper support who will let you enact changes without having to create a PR storm or know someone high up in the company. See: Every company who hasn't had a PR storm yet continues to operate just fine.
No. I remember uk TV shows in the 1980s which featured people going through the official channels to get a problem resolved and it magically only happened when the guy from the company concerned was invited onto the show to explain what was going on.
I don't know why Microsoft or Amazon don't try to launch a YouTube competitor. Vimeo probably has the most reach for an acquisition, but those are more artsy/professional focused. I suppose Facebook is YouTube's largest competitor, but it's such a closed system that it's impossible to use in any manner that isn't strictly personal.
I know it wasn't profitable 3-4 years ago, but I believe it's fairly profitable now. But I'm not sure, I suppose the cost of running a video service can shift so drastically it's hard for it to be steady. I don't think Alphabet breaks out YouTube revenues/profit anymore.
Last year the initial event of the "adpocalypse" happened, which both demonetized a lot of channels, and at the same time roughly halved what advertisers were willing to pay, even for complying channels. Since then a few additional waves of demonetization happened.
Every time Youtube demonetizes a creator they are also demonetizing themselves. The combined effect of all that could have held back profitability significantly, especially considering that they are shooting for comparatively low-margin advertising business model compared to other platforms.
And thats why we see a lot fewer new social networks starting out today. in the late aughts, everyone and their grandma was starting a social network, google started 3, heck even apple started one, everyone was trying to replicate the perceived success of facebook, when even that wasn't yet clear as a viable business. Now that most people know just getting lots of eyeballs doesn't translate to cash in the bank people have cooled off.
youtube is an even bigger issue because video is so expensive to support, so on top of the possibility of not making any money, you also need to front huge costs in infrastructure.
And Microsoft has Mixer, but they aren't YouTube competitors. Maybe for LiveStreams, but nothing else. Amazon is more strict than Microsoft on what can stream and what can't.
No, I think it has to do more with money. I wonder if YouTube is still losing money, and might not even be profitable. It's hard to believe with all the revenue they post and the ads, but they do serve a lot of videos.
Alphabet can't drastically change YouTube, as its brand is so closely tied to Google in the minds of a lot of people. (I'm still surprised how many people don't realize YouTube is owned by Google/Alphabet).
There's PeerTube software, which is self hosting, and people's browsers use in-browser bittorrent to share video amoung people who are watching the video.
How well does that work when a video isn't very popular though? The value of a thing like youtube is that anybody can put a video on there and it will be available for anybody else to play, instantly, for the foreseeable future.
I imagine the non-popular videos are sent directly from central servers. By offloading the most popular spikes to P2P maybe they're able to reduce costs enough to make it worth it.
To add to that, there's also the fact that any user of any ISP that throttles/blocks torrent traffic is probably going to have the same experience. Plus the fact that there's at least two people I know whose ISPs actually cut users' down speed by double of any up speed (in order to "passively" cut down torrenting without actually restricting it). So PeerTube becomes less a YouTube replacement and more an interesting implementation of streaming video via Bittorrent (which some clients already support).
Unless you're a very big player handling excessive amounts of users, the bandwidth involved doesn't need to cost an arm and a leg.
I can see why private individuals might prefer something free, but for organizations or other professional actors which are publishing high-quality video-productions, they already have a budget, and frankly the BW cost is probably going to be the smallest expense on their list.
And when they risk losing their platform and audience at a whim (as we've seen Google do repeatedly to certain types of organizations over at YouTube), I can't see why more people don't consider other options which leaves them in full control over their own content.
I mean, given what Blender is, having tutorial videos accessible by anything other than desktop browsing isn't a hopeless or horrible thing. Every Blender user has a desktop or laptop (or has modded something to heck and back in order to run Blender), so having it be somewhat difficult to access a majority of their videos by mobile, TV, console, etc, might not be such a big loss.
That's pretty neat.
I wonder what happens if it starts to being used like youtube. I see the top LP has 37k views, that's about as much as a video from a medium tier youtuber.
The cost of storing/processing/serving videos is quite high.
On a side note, I have finally gotten youtube red in my country and I immediately signed on. Will it send money to the "demonetised" videos that can't have adds or are they screwed out of youtube red money as well?
I was expecting some crappy 90s interface that was just a static listing of links to download videos or something like that, but this actually looks pretty good.
Isn't it nice when your expectations are exceeded? But seriously, Archive.org has done a lot in the last few years to improve its multimedia streaming - take a look at some of the music, radio shows, and audiobooks they have up there.
As a YT creator with 200k+ subscribers, shit like this scares me. Fortunately, I do not put all my eggs in one basket, and YouTube is just one of 4 ways I monetize my business.
It does not seem like Google is in the wrong here. Unless Blender is willing to pay hosting charges, Google has no obligation to host these videos for free
We hear "it's their platform, they can do what they want," a whole lot. The trouble is the platform is almost a monopoly on user created video. You can't launch on other platforms and hope to be as successful as being on YouTube. Their discovery mechanism and massive user base gives them an incredibly unique positions.
YouTube is from an earlier era, yet still after the dotcom bust. It was still on the rebound of the era of everything is free, we'll just make money on ads (like NetZero and Juno).
That model was and still isn't sustainable, and their dominance gives them pretty unique control over media. Same with Facebook.
Now they are taking that option away. They should get to dictate the terms of use of their free service, IMO. It's still a massive dick move. But what can you do?
A litmus test for determining whether a company has sufficient "support" is to check whether the following conversation is possible:
"I really appreciate your service X!"
"Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!"
If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. If the response has the jist "This message is miscategorized", you're in trouble. If there's simply no channel to send that message, you're screwed.