| ▲ | koolba 4 hours ago |
| > Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first. This also works for Google support. > And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards. I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests. It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions. And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project. |
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| ▲ | debugnik 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests. Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book. |
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| ▲ | amdsn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled. | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works. | | |
| ▲ | Paracompact 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works Where does this myth come from, and how does it survive? It's either an excuse for parasitic corporatism, or an expression of learned helplessness. Nobody has been successfully sued for prioritizing the long-term health and reputation of a company over self-starving quarterly profit. Is there a perverse incentive toward the latter anyway? Yes. But it mostly serves current leadership, who are evaluated and paid on short horizons, at the expense of the long-term investors who own most of the equity. | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Definitely not a myth, friend. Read this article from Harvard Business School: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors "Accepting funding from investors puts you in a fiduciary role in which you’re responsible for managing their money and putting their needs above your own" | | |
| ▲ | mindcrime an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The reality is "it's complicated". But the strongest form of this - that "companies must maximize profits over ALL over concerns NO MATTER WHAT" is basically a myth. See: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co... https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/archives/56/5/end-sharehol... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value So yeah, "fiduciary duty" is a real thing, but that's not quite the same thing as saying that every single decision has to be focused on nothing but profit maximization. | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | So you think making bad business decisions is holding up to fiduciary duty? You can't throw money at every problem that you'd like to solve, calling that malice is silly was the point I was trying to make. | |
| ▲ | 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tripletao an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nothing in that article says you're obligated to maximize profit, and you're not: > To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... Executives are free to pursue near-term profit at the expense of everything else if they choose, and the shareholders are free to replace them if they don't. That's a choice by those executives or shareholders though, not an obligation. | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I said it's their biggest priority, not their only priority... solving a problem that doesn't cost money and the solution doesn't make money is bottom of the barrel. Come on guys, be real. | | |
| ▲ | usefulcat 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | FWIW I totally agree with that. What I (and several others) disagree with is the idea that the concept of fiduciary duty confers an obligation to pursue profit at the expense of all else. Is there an incentive to do that? Yes, or at least it's obviously quite possible. But is there an obligation? No. |
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| ▲ | usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where on that page is there anything to indicate that hiring more QA or mods would be so bad as to be considered a breach of fiduciary duty? That seems like a pretty big exaggeration, at best. This behavior is a matter of incentives, not obligations. No need to apologize for them. "Fiduciary duty" does not mean "pursue profit to the exclusion of all other considerations". |
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| ▲ | usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors "Obligation" is the wrong word. Should be "incentive". | |
| ▲ | mistrial9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | many readers here have not experienced a standard of customer support that was common decades ago. Google in particular created a new standard for ignoring the customer on a large scale, in my own experiences. Secondly, the customer paid money to a company for service, while an emergent business form does not take money from the customer directly, blurring the definition of customer. I strongly agree that failure to stand for consumer rights is both learned helplessness and an apologist cooperator psychology. CA Voter here. |
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| ▲ | hyperhello 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat. | |
| ▲ | ruined 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | how does anyone expect to solve AI alignment when we can't even solve corporate alignment | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Life sure ain't perfect.. not much you can do about that sometimes. |
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| ▲ | majorchord 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you provide evidence of these claims? | | |
| ▲ | csomar 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean we are in the thread of evidence right now? | | |
| ▲ | veverkap 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | GitHub support is full of amazing, hard working people. It is also comically understaffed. This is not because they can't find people to work - it's not given the budget necessary. | | |
| ▲ | nikanj 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They might be amazing and hard working, but that doesn’t free them from the yoke of policy and script |
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| ▲ | elAhmo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is a problem they could solve if they want to. They have billions of profits per quarter. They just don't want to. Not malicious, just ignorant and disrespectful of their users. |
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| ▲ | rkagerer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m sure they are swamped with such requests Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer. |
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| ▲ | someonebaggy 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Remember when Google lost a lawsuit for defaming a business in their AI search results? |
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| ▲ | alightsoul 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| YouTube already does it autonomously with seemingly no legal consequences for them because you agree to it in their tos |
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| ▲ | dogleash 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests. It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are. |
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| ▲ | vkou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests. Handling these requests at whatever scale they operate is their responsibility. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to take on all of their customers. |
