Another fun “this decision is final” happened for me with Amazon recently.
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.
I feel for you, but just banish Amazon everything from your life, and convince others to do the same. We lived fine without Amazon before they existed, and we'll live fine without them once they're gone.
I'm on the verge of getting banned
as they've warned me I'm returning too much, and have had enough negative interactions with their support that I'm in a similar boat.
It's been somewhat freeing giving them up. There's plenty of D2C out there we've been neglecting due to AMZs marketplace...
I've tried my hardest to eliminate any Amazon order from my life this year. Whenever I needed books, or a receiver, or a nose trimmer I've made sure to shop at the category leader instead of Amazon. I've resorted to them twice, for weirdo stuff I couldn't readily find anywhere else. Well turns out the weirdo stuff only Amazon carries is crap, and I'm two for two on returns this year with Amazon.
haven't ordered at amazon for many years. and I order a lot online. so, I confirm it is possible without any problem ... provided some IT-literacy. and that's usually why people fail at it. most people are unable to manage their emails or even organize passwords. heck, most people don't even know what an internet browser is ...
Why the fck shouldn't I fight for the rights of my disabled son/grandparents/friend? Just because something does not impact me personally (yet), it's ok to just ignore it? What you are really saying is that you don't want to be bothered by all those pesky plebs out there and that they should be happy with what the status quo deigns to give to them.
Because only roughly 5% understand what it is all about. The rest, roughly 95%, use opportunities like that to show what great justice warriors they are, but failing totally to represent the wishes of the disabled correctly.
I am sure you feel differently regarding your son. But as a person with a disability, I can tell you that this never worked in my family. My mother might be motivated to do all sorts of things, but most of them are not helpful or even subtly counterproductive.
To sum it up: If you speak for someone, you are likely patronizing them.
I'm conscious of that. But my son literally can't speak for himself so if I (or my partner) don't speak in his interest, who will? And while other people with disabilities can speak for themselves better than I could ever hope to, there is a difference between amplifying / supporting their concerns and being patronizing.
The sad reality is that the mainstream does not want to think about the challenges facing disabled people and they are all too happy to simply ignore the (perceived) minority which is directly impacted by them. All these absolute assholes who park on parking spaces for the disabled come to mind. Those people will only ever be convinced if they are not confronted by a broad section of society. It is simply not something that a minority can ever hope to achieve without the explicit support of at least some part of the majority.
Ha; I’d forgotten my experience with LIFX bulbs and Amazon Warehouse Deals back in 2017 when we originally moved to USA, this exact situation happened across 50+ bulbs.
They’d sold a LIFX to Customer A who bought a $0.69 BR30 from Home Depot, substituted into the LIFX packaging and then returned to Amazon, who refunded them, and listed the item on Warehouse Deals.
On that one Amazon CS was also somewhat useless but they did at least refund us.
When it eventually came to a senior leaders attention, Amazon got it sorted out properly. They ended up auditing all their stock in Warehouse Deals for this type of item and discovered widespread fraud. Sounds like they fixed smart bulbs but haven’t fixed GPUs though!
Is a credit card chargeback not possible? You case sounds very strong. If not possible, definitely try small claims court. It will make for a great blog post or Twitter thread.
No kidding. Catch-22, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you don't, then Amazon just stole 250 USD from you. Where hell are the regulators on issues like this?
There absolutely needs to be some sort of law preventing companies of a certain size from being able to do this if customers decide to file a charge back.
It's a tough one. A lot of charge backs are fraudulent, so this would open retailers up to more fraud.
The ability to do charge backs will probably disappear in future. When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today and many jurisdictions didn't have small claims courts.
That's fine, it would motivate large companies to develop alternative techniques to mitigate fraud which could benefit smaller as they could implement them.
I'm tired of these giant companies having their cake and eating it too. These companies have structured themselves in such a way that it's win-win for them, and lose-lose for the customers and smaller businesses around them.
> When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today
The problem is that for any of the new security features of cards to drive any of those kinds of changes the old mag-strip style of card authentication has to be deprecated and removed - which is likely not going to happen in the next 20 years.
Visa and Mastercard (and the layers between them and the merchant) have tried pretty hard to apply financial pressure (extra fees) to promote chip-only transactions and it still hasn't stopped mag-stripe from reigning supreme.
We're basically in an IPv4 and IPv6 situation in the payment industry =/
I agree that small claims court is a viable venue for attacking large companies, especially if it's a coordinated effort between many people in many jurisdictions but can a small claims court force a big company to continue to do business with a customer that has conducted a charge back?
You need a country with strong consumer protection laws, such as Australia. In NSW, I’d go straight to the Department of Fair Trading, and they’d fix the issue.
Possibly? We’re in Washington State, but honestly unless it’s literally point-click-done and without a need to drive and appear in a courthouse, it’s just not worth it for $250 (to me).
I expect this has been considered when creating policy at the largest companies — what’s the ease of obtaining recourse for unhappy customers?
What’s additionally interesting is I thought Amazon CS had a degree of goodwill factored into policies based on LTV or some other calculation. We saw zero goodwill here despite having spent >$100k on Amazon.com in the last 5 years.
Both this and the YouTube example seem like bad business; you’re disincentivizing your most ardent users from continuing to tolerate your services. They hadn’t looked at shopping on Walmart or B&H with every purchase previously and now will. They hadn’t considered Twitch or other places to serve video and now will.
People buy beats??? But they are expensive for such poor audio quality…
I don’t understand Amazons destruction policy. I ordered some stuff a few years ago and it never arrived. Amazon replaced the order for me which arrived in 4 days. About 5 months later the original package showed up… I tried to contact Amazon about it and they just said keep it…
Yet when my kindle stopped working after a month they sent a replacement and asked for the old one to be destroyed…
Beats Fit Pro are decent exercise headphones for me. They’re largely immune to sweat and behave like any Apple earphones — easy pairing. They’re also less prone to falling out for my ears than the AirPods Pro.
I once had a very annoying problem with a DHL parcel station (in Germany). at some point I was so fed up that I looked up the names of the C-level management, guessed their email addresses and sent all of them a message. didn't really help much in the end but I got a response and it was internally escalated apparently.
I did similar when I was planning to move. The new place was just a block away from my old address and my ISP told me my new address does not exist. After more than a month of arguing with their customer service people and being told there is nothing they can do, and with time running out for my move date, I got lucky. I somehow found the email address of a vice president at the company. After one thoughtfully crafted and well targeted email, 45 minutes later I had a supervisor and a technician at my house to do a site survey.
I did a similar thing. We had two identical pairs of AirPods. One pair had a bad battery on the right earbud.
I thought those were mine, which had a specific extra warranty purchased from the store (Not Apple's own). Returned those to the store to get it fixed. Turns out they store and check the Device ID and I found out we've switched pods with my SO at some point.
They wanted a "spurious return fee" that was more than the value of the AirPods. I just didn't pay it and they destroyed them.
I'm sure there are plenty of problems at Amazon caused by badly used models, but this problem is probably a lot more to do with hiring X number of drone workers to do Y amount of support work and providing incentives all around to cut corners and solve the most basic 95% of problems as fast and cheap as possible while more-or-less just writing off the failures of the remaining 5% as "the cost of doing business at scale".
Let's say they integrate chatgpt like AI and are able to resolve most cases to customer satisfaction.
But, because of their scale and the number of fake items on the platform I think their number of returns will also increase along with their costs. I'm sure some executive will then try to minimize costs by "fixing" or retiring the AI.
I'll not be surprised if this has already happened in one way or another.
If it's oh so difficult for Amazon to properly handle this function of a business, that is AMAZON'S fucking problem.
Neither the customer nor any other outside entity forced Amazon to construct itself as the operation it is. They very deliberately and actively did that of their lwn volition and over the sustained course of decades.
Back up and revisit just what is and is not a sane perspective here. Poor Amazon can't be expected to deal with all the scammers they created for themselves? But can still rake in the benefits of their scale and insane staff:customer ratio 100x more than any normal shop?
They absolutely CAN deal with their fraud, the same way every other business in the world before them had to, by actually having whatever number of employees it takes to service their number of customers.
They just can't do that and still have 1% of the normal overhead every other businesses has.
Incredible that anyone is even for a second considering the plight of poor Amazon in a case like this.
I hate this practice of these companies to state "This decision is final", it's insulting and childish when everyone knows that people and especially automated systems make mistakes.
It makes it even worse wenn we all know that if a person has enough clout or gets enough attention it isn't final.
If you are going to say stuff like that, then you should keep your word and when you do make a mistake don't undo that mistake. Live with the bad press you are going to get for being the assholes you are.
For me it’s more the “there’s not more we can do on our end” language. The fuck you can’t, you implemented the suspension. Don’t go talking like it’s an act of god that you have no control over.
If they’re not willing to change their mind, at least say so.
happened to me a few months ago on github. Apparently "sign in with" lets the dev do whatever they like with your account.
In reality, i simply signed in with github because why not and suddenly everything is gone. A single email from github about "engaging in illegal behaviour of star farming so my account is deleted".
I signed in to github, i just clicked a bunch of buttons simply out of form fatigue and in the background, the dev had used my account to star their repos.
the problem is, why not punish the dev and why me? if the workflow was sign in, why did it allow my account to be used for stars farming? secondly, why to blame me? did i willingly engage in stars farming when i clicked on "sign in with" ?
they said the same thing, "decision is final". I made a bunch of noise on HN and tomorrow everything was back in order for me.
That's horrible, I'm so sorry that happened to you. But I think that's the wrong learning outcome. As a technology, OAuth uses scopes to grant permissions. You mentioned that you didn't read the permissions before granting access. An app that requests zero scopes is still safe, as it can't star repos for you, but the burden falls on you to read. This is inherent to the design of OAuth.
There is a problem with GitHub scopes being overly broad, and users can't audit what an app actually does with those permissions. GitHub and others should be policing apps that request unreasonable permissions.
1. If you can't be bothered to read the terms, then don't use OAuth. This is GP's conclusion.
2. If you are willing and able to carefully read the scopes, and you are willing and able to abandon the app if the scopes are too broad, and you comprehend the meaning of the scopes, then use your discretion. But that's a lot of conditions, so...
3. All scopes should be revokable by the user, and potentially spoofable at their discretion.
4. The resolution of scopes should strike a balance between being understandable and following the principle of least privilege.
5. GitHub and other OAuth hosts (even all app platforms?) should audit apps for misbehavior, both in abuse of permissions and unnecessary permission requests. Especially when the user regrets the actions taken by the app.
Unless and until GitHub fixes its combination of allowing overly-broad authentication/authorization scopes and victim-blaming over abuse of said scopes, the above is precisely the right learning outcome. At the very least, if GitHub supports programmatically adding 500 stars, then it should be downright trivial to support programmatically removing those 500 stars and giving the user a slap-on-the-wrist warning if the user really is the one at fault.
> There is a problem with GitHub scopes being overly broad, and users can't audit what an app actually does with those permissions.
Auditing is only one problem.
Why is granting permissions an all-or-nothing approach?
Way too many apps are requesting all the permissions. If I want to use it, I've got zero choice. I want an 'Advanced' option with a way to deselect certain permissions.
If they're requesting all the permissions then you shouldn't use them. If a random note taking app asks to read my contacts the first time I launch it then I'm going to assume it's malicious.
I meant more in general terms - apps are requesting more permissions than I want to grant them. I would like to see services allow users to limit the permissions actually granted.
JIRA wants all the source code for your entire organisation.
Tailscale wants to read all the organisations you're a member of.
The problem is not just limited to Github. Grafana's Slack apps want to be able to read the entire Slack organisation, post messages as me, and a whole bunch of other things I'm just not comfortable giving it.
> did i willingly engage in stars farming when i clicked on "sign in with" ?
Yes? You clicked accept to give access to an application to do stuff on your behalf. It is 100% your fault you didn't read what the very clear prompt said to you.
That being said, the owner(s) of the application in question should be banned for their malicious practice of stars farming, and I don't see why you would be.
It's final unless you know someone who works inside the company, or manage to catch enough traction on some news site to catch the attention of someone who works there
My favorite part of the response he got is "there's not much more we can do on our end." Coming from the same company that did the suspension. Among things they could do:
* Have another team review the complaint
* Be more transparent as to the "offense"
* Have an appeals process other than direct messages
* Click the button to unsuspend the account, since they run the software
* Give him a phone number to call to talk with a real person
Remember, when using Big Tech products, you are not a customer, you are the data.
I may agree if these were paying customers we were talking about, but keep in mind they aren't. Youtubers don't pay youtube anything. They use youtube's service to host their videos and capitalize on youtube's marketing and ad services to profit. Youtube should've handled this situation better, but they are providing services for free and are entitled to suspend that service as they see fit. The customer complaints they must actually handle well are from advertisers who actually pay them money.
YouTube is running ads on those videos and taking that money -- they may or may not give some to the video producer. YT also takes a large cut of subscriptions, tips and "superchats".
YouTube is making money here.
The issue is that YT (Google/ Alphabet) is making so much money from so many folks that they don't consider it significant to mistakenly screw over one producer at a time, because they've got millions of others.
Even for large channels, YT allows false copyright claims by large companies to hit the producer in the wallet, because Channel Bob 1M Subscribers doesn't compare to Mouse That Thanks China For Filming Near The Concentration Camps.
But the whole time, Youtube is making money on ads.
Hang on, you are suggesting that youtube generates more money for youtubers than the youtubers generate for youtube? Those advertisers wouldn't pay anything if there weren't a steady stream of compelling content to which to attach the pre-roll ads...
All businesses must mitigate against big tech companies cutting them off.
If that big cloud hosting company decides they don't like your company anymore, and you've put all your eggs in that one basket - that's your fault.
There's ample evidence now that big tech companies are elephants that don't even notice the ants they're stepping on as they lumber around.
Built your entire company on AWS, or Google or Azure? You're a fool if you haven't built it to survive a cloud chucking you out.
Most unfortunately, there's no alternative platform for YouTubers. Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft - until there's an alternative platform, YouTubers just have to hope they don't stray in the way of the elephants foot.
> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube
Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now but mainly through heavily injecting ads. It would be difficult to disrupt them because of the network effects of all the content, viewers, and creators. And it would be hard to compete on price (whether subscription cost or amount of ads) without having the kind of infrastructure Google has.
It might be done in the future, but it will be anything but easy.
HNers are more likely to use an ad blocker so they may not quite appreciate how severe this has become. I recently switched my casual/kitchen computer from an old MacBook Air (where I’d browse with Firefox and uBlock Origin) to an iPad (where I use the YouTube app) so I got to experience the difference first hand. The amount of adverts is horrendous - two sometimes-skippable ads every three minutes. I guess they want me to go for YouTube premium, but I have simply been put off from using YT altogether.
So that’s now Twitter and YouTube who have lost me as a user just through sabotaging their own product :-)
Exactly, it is the same philosophy with which VCs will pour billions of dollars into a business to prioritize growth over everything. When all competition is eliminated, there is no one left to challenge you and you get all the benefits of a monopoly.
> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft
Plenty of companies have tried to take on youtube in one way or another - Vimeo was a very similar product before they pivoted; some youtube creators also post to Floatplane, Utreon, Nebula, Odysee etc; and many social media sites that used to be awash in youtube links now have their own video hosting.
While it does seem a bit odd that all 3 of his channels have almost identical names[0], YouTube/Google's lack of response to its own creators & users is still a disgrace.
Good reminder to back up all of your Google data[1], just in case they determine you've violated some random policy and terminate your account without any warning.
This happens way too frequently nowerdays. A friend of mine had his Youtube account banned. He never even uploaded a single video nor post any comments. How could it even possibly have created a reason to be banned? Of course support requests went into the void and he just gave up. Luckily his gmail was not affected.
A company I was involved with had a business account with Wise (Transferwise). One day out of the blue they froze our account and said only withdrawals from now on. The "reason" they provided was Violation of Acceptable Use Policy. They wouldn't even say which clause or give any details whatsoever. When asked for review we got an reply that after extensive review they can't reinstate the account, the decision is final. During the whole process it was painfully clear that they didn't read our messages or even try to understand the situation. After a few weeks and many emails with supporting evidence that we really can't see how we broke any of the terms the account was reinstated - a surprise to us. It seems like eventuall someone actually did take a look at the issue. But we never heard why it was frozen in the first place or what made them reinstate it. We probably just got really lucky. During that time we couldn't do payroll. We couldn't collect customer payments. It could have killed us did we not quickly scramble to get an alternative setup.
The common theme is that a company makes ill-advised banning decisions that have a big impact on a single user and then appeals are not treated seriously. This can have devastating effects. Usually this happens after the company who is running the platform grows to a certain size where they don't need to care about a low percentage of users anymore and rather save on support staff costs. And to add insult to injury they lie in your face about having conducted "extensive" reviews and having "carefully" decided all the while it being clear that they spent no energy or time on the matter. What's the solution here? Some mandatory third party appeal service which you can call upon? Many victims of wrongful banning would be glad to carry the costs of a review by a real human to get their accounts back.
TransferWise done this to our business account too. Couldn’t explain how we broke their terms (because we never) but we never bothered to fight them, we simply let customers transfer from International countries with our proper business account - which unfortunately just caused customers to pay more fees as a result.
The more that I read about the "international wire transfer" business, the more I think it is untenable at the current prices. The amount of "bad people" trying to launder money with your low priced wire transfers is incredible. Plus, the regulatory pressure only increases (year by year), which means you need to hire humans who can think to do AML/KYC. To be clear, good AML/KYC needs people who can think to evaluate "red flags". You cannot hire a bunch of paper pushers at minimum wage and think this will cover you against the regulator -- it will not. I don't see how it can continue. Soon these businesses will all be expensive or bankrupt, and we are back to the megabanks with mega fees, but more effective AML/KYC. It's tough.
I know people like to hate on crypto in these parts (mostly for good reason) but this is a great use case for it. You could remit billions of dollars worth of USDC to another country for ten bucks in gas fees.
This was different, admittedly. Their account got session jacked and taken over by a crypto scamming farm. Google was in the right to shut down the account until it could get resolved.
The fact people can get session jacked by Google, though, is still wild. Linus explained that their access control granularity is woefully underdeveloped, especially for such a large company.
Still, the way they handle it is extremely bad. It takes a long time to get the account re-instated and they just take down the whole thing in the meantime. What they should do is make the account read-only and if it was taken over by a malicious actor then just rollback to a previous state asap. For accounts with millions of followers they should have emergency contacts and a process that resolves this within less than 24h. These Youtube channels generate serious revenue that easily would justify the costs.
That's just insane. Imagine Mastercard or Visa shutting down card payments for Amazon.com randomly without anyone with half a sense doing a proper review. No circuit breaker in place to stop automated takedowns of huge accounts.
Google and especially Youtube seem to be run in a reckless, careless and incompetent way in this regard. Similar to Youtube seemingly being uninterested in solving the huge comment scam problem. I don't buy that the company that successfully filters out billions of spam messages in Gmail can't detect these really obvious spam/scam comments on Youtube. It's just baffling.
I wish Google employees had the same empathy about their own customers as signaling about civil rights. Maybe you would be able to change the company for good.
And no “Google decides”. Google is not an AI (yet), people make decisions so everything “carefully reviewed” is [not] done by a human.
But honestly it’s high time to break up Google. 0 customer service and 0 consequences is incredibly crazy in 2023. Imagine getting away with stuff like this in a retail store, regulators would shot you down in a second.
In general I think they do. The reason that these types of threads work, is that employees create a stink internally which results in issues being resolved.
TGIFs would often shed light on such policies and issues which resulted in behaviour changes. No idea if that's still the case though.
One thing I do have insight to from working at multiple companies is that for every error in applying policies there are often 10s or 100s of individuals trying the scam or abuse the same policies for their own gain. The amount of attempted fraud for non-profit / charity programs is eye opening. :/
So, no poor people get this. I mean, it is the cost of nearly 7 hours work if you only make minimum wage. It doesn't really matter if the money will be refunded - it can't be used on food while the company holds the money for weeks.
Honestly, they should be required to simply have a case worker look at everything if the person has exhausted other options. Those other options should be easily found on the company's website (or facebook page, etc). And the case worker should actually have the power to decide either way, free from coercion and without quotas leaning either direction.
They will pay someone on the other side of the planet 5 cents to spend 30 seconds applying a checklist of strict conditions against your case that if not met means you're SOL.
I like the idea, while thinking the next steps in case that goes wrong gives me a pause. What do you do if that person you get for 50$ seems incompetent? Exponentially increasing fees to get a review?
Remembering again, perfection is the enemy of good, what we have here is more than good enough for most of the cases perhaps.
In 2041, Google begins offering a service where you can pay $28 ($50 in USD2041) for a human to review your claim. Since it costs them $8 to do this, they will allow you to appeal their decision as many times as you want.
In 2042, a data analyst discovers that routing claims to a specific subset of reviewers maximizes this revenue stream and updates the business logic accordingly.
This is a business model for many hardware vendors who sell support and insurance with gross profit margin of more than 50% so I don't think it might improve the situation all that much in the long run.
There kind of is this with many companies these days. It's called arbitration. Someone did it with PayPal a while ago for example (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658). In many cases it's free, but in some (especially b2b) there might be terms that say each needs to pay their own fees or that winner needs to pay loser's fees.
I know people say "but they cant give good support at their scale" but really at some point, with the amount of money they make, the real answer is that they choose not to give support and therefore choose to treat people like shit. It shouldn't be accepted as it currently is.
It's like how physical manufacturing will choose to save a few pennies on a part reducing the overall cost per unit, saving themselves millions at the expense of the actual quality. It's fine when you do it with one or two part, but when you do it with all the parts, you're just creating a crap product.
There are supposedly 2.7 billion active users. How many employees would they need to actually offer what people ask for with personal support? The size of these companies are incomprehensible for most people.
If this was a comic strip (or some other kind of parody/satire), I imagine it would have been explained by Google noticing that "the decision is final" is not great to write in public, wondering how to improve it, and deciding on this informal-looking style, instead of fixing the wording itself and/or actually fixing the issue.
dammit this just happend to me too. my fifth ASMR live octopus mukbang react channel was unfairly terminated for impersonation, but luckily my live lobster crush mukbang, baby spiders ASMR zit popping prank react and disney elsa spiderman yoga morning routine main channels are still doing quite well
Are you going to provide the funding? Going to court is expensive in any case, against a multibillion dollar with double digits billions of profits every quarter? Good fucking luck...
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.