Honestly, making people pay for an app that only uses a public API you’re not paying for, and no form of fallback is asking for trouble. This is not a responsible way to do business and I hope people reading this thread will understand that.
Since ~15 years, people got the idea that all the WhatsApps, Instagrams or Twitters around them aren't companies, but kind of public infrastructure. They all knew that it's a wrong assumption, but it's sooo convenient, and at some point, people around you force you in that direction, even if you don't like all those walled gardens. And once this wrong philosophy was established, people started escalating it to some smaller shops, I guess. Those are also the guys that complain when some 3rd party Reddit or Youtube hobby clients must disappear. They just have no understanding at all about some basic mechanics of human interaction. The biggest problem: There are entire generations of people nowadays with that misunderstanding.
Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes.
I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.
The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve their problem in a 1min conversation rather than spend hours figuring it out by themselves. The company is extremely profitable btw
Just recently where I work, we dropped a major supplier of single board computers because their customer service was almost entirely unresponsive the one time we needed their support. We spent a million or two a year with them. Small potatoes in the big picture, but still significant money that is now going to one of their competitors.
That change was a significant cost to us as well, as it meant that the system we were using the boards in had to be redesigned to accommodate a different board.
Yeah, with B2B it's possible at least, since the businesses that pay for your services actually make money. Good customer support can directly and visibility impact their bottom line by reducing hours on debugging and any costs from downtime.
Average people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to provide such level of service.
Average people would switch to a $10/month service instead of $12/month. For internet, mobile plans, people in all sorts of circles brag about what a deal they were able to get with a service provider by haggling. Even when it's a $2 monthly difference. They are proud about their negotiation skills and how they pitted the service providers against each other to make the lowest bid.
Maybe once after they have received unsatisfactory customer support, they would consider switching, but passionate, skilled, caring and creative customer support would cost far, far more than that. Even if you employ enough customer support to provide a human out of the gate for everyone, you would only get people following the same script as the basic chatbot would. People and especially creative people wouldn't stay at this job for long, dealing with entitled customers. In most cases, it's mostly a thankless, dead end job that will get to your mental health.
> customer support would cost far, far more than that
That's not at all a given. Taking the example of $2 more per month, if the average customer needs a support call every two years, they could spend a whole hour on the phone with a support agent making $30/hr and the company is still ahead since they charged an extra $48 over those two years.
An realistically most support calls don't last an hour. Fifteen minutes maybe.
That's why I use Sonic for my ISP for example. I've only used support a few times in over ten years, but when I do, I want to talk to someone who knows what an IP packet is and what Linux is, not someone who just reads from a script telling me to find the start menu and click reboot.
Google has Google One that includes support (including by phone) and Drive/Mail/etc storage. You can literally pay them to get support and other things if you want to.
I don't know how well it's selling, but going off Internet comments here and there, people seem offended they are asked to pay to get support for an otherwise free at the point of use service.
Oh, one has been spectacularly useful to customers, by hallucinating a new, more customer friendly refund policy that courts held the company liable for:
Oh that is just excellent. I love the pathetic excuses they came up with trying to weasel their way out of having to honor promises made by their agents.
> Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.
This is disappointing, though. Can I weasel out of contracts if I say that the information I'm providing may not be accurate before signing?
I vividly remember coding, moderating IRC channels and playing StarCraft while being alone on a Christmas night, lobbies were full of joy and wishes, games were fun, and I felt way less lonely than while spending time with people I didn’t really connect with.
Christmas is seen as a moment to be spent with people, but IMO this day is only what you make of it. It is not bad to want to be totally alone, or connected with online randoms!
There are many people in these virtual worlds that you probably share something with if you spend Christmas alone or are reading this message on Dec 25th. I’m glad HN exists.
And if you really want another experice, go east if you can afford it, and enjoy in places where Dec 24/25th are just regular days.
This Metaverse / NFT thing is depressing, I wouldn't recommend this.
If you are alone, better take the "celebrations" as an opportunity to discover people that are a little bit of your usual circle by inviting them for a dinner or movie.
The COVID-19 makes more people lonely, and actually, it's a positive thing for people who are usually alone because it makes it easier for them to live with the social stigma of being alone.
We are looking for Rust, React (preferably with Typescript and or with experience with React Native), and Solidity developers to build consumer finance tools leveraging blockchain infrastructure and bridging it with the traditional finance world. Through our DeFi platform, we’ve made a decentralized euro stablecoin, and we’re currently expanding our product offering to payments and more.
This is an opportunity to join a fast-growing and well-funded startup with a tech team mixing specialists and generalists with a successful track record. At Mimo, a significant part of our management speaks code, so we respect developers a lot and do not get in their way.
The ideal candidate should be familiar with production software development practices like heavy testing and code review. We have top industry players audit our blockchain code, so we tend to have high standards. Flexibility in language preferences is greatly appreciated as well.
Familiarity with the cryptocurrency ecosystem is a plus but not a must, as long as the interest is very strong.
We pay very competitively, are flexible with hours and location, and are hiring developers and DeFi specialists. We’re also hiring in other non technical roles so feel free to connect.
Please reach out to my username at mimo.capital to learn more!
META: The hate for pretty much anything blockchain-related in the comments is real. I clicked on this link expecting the usual load of criticism, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Now, to actually add to the discussion, it would be great to see clearer use cases that Cloudflare has to help publishers and users of web3, as the blog post describes what’s behind the name but goes only very briefly on what Cloudflare actually wants to bring to the table. A very fast, yet privacy-focused or anonymous, and affordable decentralized CDN would be interesting.
Just as real as the fascination... there are two sides to any idea, more often than not. To your point, indeed it's not very clear to me what does Cloudflare want to achieve in this area.
What it sounds like is that in BigGo, exposure matters a lot, which is not very surprising. At scale, people pushing their own agenda might come at odds with what the consumers want.
It obviously sounds like a flawed incentive system, but it begs the question: What else works at such a gigantic scale? Is there any BigTech where Exposure Driven Development isn’t dominating?
Which toxic world have we built that let people think that tinkering, exploring different facade of life, and not being able to find a programming job at 22 is called failing?
The glorification of 400k packages right after graduation, of founders becoming paper billionaires before they have their first gray hair, the lack of representation of various software dev career paths... All this (and more) is giving an unrealistic and fake vision of what we do and become as software engineers.
Many of us here like to look down on what social media does to the life of teenagers, creating insecurities and disturbing development, but we’re doing the same exact thing in our industry.
The last sentence in the post gives a glimpse of hope, but the general tone resonates with something I’ve heard too many times around me. Life is short, yes, YOLO if you want, but no, not being a top software dev at 22 is not “having failed”.
As dangerous as it sounds for the industry, this article tells us they’ve discussed with the SEC without telling us what was said on their side. It’s difficult to share their confusion if we don’t know what they have fed the regulator.
Common sense makes it sound like Lend is clearly not about securities, but the SEC has generally been looking for settlements or discussion instead of straight litigation. Why the change of motus operandi? Is it because Coinbase is big and it would make an example, or maybe somewhere in Lend there’s a business model that makes the product act like a security? Who knows at this point?
More information from Coinbase would help us empathize.
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