Comment by koolba
3 days 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.
> 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.
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.
Can you provide evidence of these claims?
I mean we are in the thread of evidence right now?
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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.
> 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.
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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.
how does anyone expect to solve AI alignment when we can't even solve corporate alignment
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>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.
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.
Remember when Google lost a lawsuit for defaming a business in their AI search results?
Unfortunately this is very true. It often takes someone pretty high up on the food chain to see it on HN, X, or get an email/LinkedIn message asking about something for it to become a priority.
I don't see that changing for any of the large companies unfortunately, anytime soon.
YouTube already does it autonomously with seemingly no legal consequences for them because you agree to it in their tos
YouTube also totally fails to remove obvious fraud videos, even ones they mark verified. (If someone takes over a verified channel and renames it, they keep the verified flag). -- also with no legal consequences.
> 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.
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.