Comment by parineum
5 years ago
> That's fine when you're a plucky growth startup. Less fine when you run half the internet.
It's never fine.
The abdication of responsibility and, more importantly, liability to algorithms is everything that's wrong with the internet and the economy. The reason these tech conglomerates are able to get so big when companies before them couldn't is because it's impossible to scale the way they have without employing thousands of humans to do the jobs that are being poorly done by their algorithms. Nothing they're doing is really a new idea, they just cut costs and made the business more profitable. The promise is that the algorithms/AI can do just as good of a job as humans but that was always a lie and, by the time everyone caught on, they were "too big to fail".
> It's never fine.
It kind of is, though.
The idea is that the full algorithm is "automation plus some guy". Automation takes care of 99.9% of it, and some guy handles the 0.01% that's exceptional, falls through the cracks, and so on.
The problem is when you scale from 100,000 events per day to half a trillion, and your fallback is still basically "some guy". At ten failures a day, contacting The Guy means sending an email, and maybe sometimes it takes two. At a million failures a day, your only prayer of reaching The Guy is to get to the top of HN, or write a viral Twitter thread.
There are some things which are important enough that they can't be left up to this formula, and maybe you're thinking of those. I'm not, and I doubt the person you're replying to is either.