I haven't lost a customer service fight in seven months(sudomoin.com) |
I haven't lost a customer service fight in seven months(sudomoin.com) |
The only dispute I had in the last year is some $3 tweezers I ordered on Amazon that never shipped, and Amazon automatically reimbursed the money.
I feel so triggered right now… /begin rant/ VendorPay doesn’t summarize the total payment is a bug? Nope, working as intended. Put a vendor “on hold” still permits all new invoices to go into the payment queue a bug? Nope, working as intended. Want to test/prove an integration with your new ERP? Nope, got to buy and sign contracts. I could go on and on about all the annoyances of small business SaaS in the accounting space. Don’t even get me started about not responding to the actual question of an email—like if you went into a restaurant and asked for a steak medium-rare and the server said, ok. One steak well-done /rant
I get the topic—-abusing customer service. I’m just not feeling SaaS right now. There are conflicting incentives that I just don’t understand. I feel some SaaS are taking plays from the enshitification experts.
A year with only a $3 problem in it sounds nice, honestly.
I recently switched car insurance carriers. My old carrier required a phone call to my agent, which I made, but then they never stopped billing me. It took more phone calls to sort it out, I was right in the end. I ended up with a check rather than a bill.
Maybe I'm old and jaded, no corporation is going to take advantage of me without a fight.
In the last year alone I've sued my HOA, employer, and fired off a litany of demands for a cumulative total of 10x that amount.
I went to the dentist recently. They wanted to do a "deep cleaning". cost: somewhere between $0 (covered) and $5k (fully out of pocket). I asked the obvious: that's one hell of a range. "Depends on how much the insurer will pay." They weren't happy when I demanded to know that number before committing, as it takes them hours on the phone.
In my self-made accounting system, written in a self-made Lisp, I used accrual accounting, associating all transactions with their correct dates, and remitted taxes accordingly.
This resulted in some amount owing (looking like underreporting).
I used reports from my accounting system to document my case, and they agreed with me: I did my accounting and reporting the right way, and that company should not be using cash-based day-money-changes-hands accounting.
In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.
But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.
As you look at everyone’s healthcare, we have every provider adopting an agentic billing solution and every payor adopting an agentic dispute solution. Two AIs fighting over their $200 payment while my deductible is $5k
(yes, they can and do use AI to handle some of that themselves, but they need some humans in the loop at some point to ensure they don't get prompt hacked into offering much more significant compensation or to confirm that the legal threats issued by Claude are indeed not applicable, or to get mobs of angry agents to leave their executives alone on LinkedIn)
In the past year, I've had to spend quite a few hours just finding replacement parts and solutions for issues manufacturers were responsible for and would have handled previously. I may have to reevaluate and have AI handle more of these matters.
I would try focusing on building a more unique style of writing, this feels like it went through heavy alignment to Claudes distribution. For the general audience maybe they aren't that sensitive to it yet, but for those that have to use LLMs at work, having to read more of it is grating.
In most formal publications of The Before Times like newspapers and magazines, you did not want much of a writer's specific tone to come thru bc the organization had its own writing style. We used to value "correctness" because too much variance (without intent) made things hard to read—it was like context switching and came with a cost.
Nowadays though, so many people are already reading Claude writing day in and day out. I would venture to say that the opposite cost is being incurred now, where as soon as I start to see the same language patterns, some attention mechanism in my brain just starts to drift off. I literally cannot mentally focus on reading when the prose is 1:1 the same distribution as Claude. Some kind of fatigue happened by reading its output over and over day after day at work.
Anyway, just think about changing it up if you're interested in writing (even if it means your output is "sloppier").
I applaud to the author for creativity and I'd be tempted to try (elements of) it in practice next time, but I don't see anything good coming out of it at scale.
I have a feeling that some people were sheltered by the system in their belief that they don't have to take responsibility for what they sign with their own name. I had zero issues with LLM writing so far, I think it's because I always pay lots of attention to what I sign with my own name, no matter how exactly it was written. People like the person you describe, ones willing to apply the tech mindlessly, get found out. Maybe it's ultimately for the better.
Having being on the receiving end of many walls of AI-generated slop. I stand by every message I send, read it thoroughly, and keep it short and precise as to not add to the slop pile.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly. Like for example I don't how how to say that the amount of my own words I put into the LLM exceed (sometimes double or triple) the output that I end up posting online.
> To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.
> Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.
It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).
It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.
Flagged, dead, moderator dang weighed in, and you felt the need to repost it verbatim?
Customer Experience Quality In The US Falls To An(other) All-Time Low | https://www.forrester.com/blogs/cx-index-2025-results/
The part that worries me the most is our regulators and arbitration queues getting saturated with slop by people just letting AI agents run wild.
> this hive of nobodies is allowed to run rampant here, with no moderation
You're quite right that there are many bad comments that don't get moderated on HN. The simple reason is that we don't see everything that gets posted here, or even 10%. There's far too much! It is humanly impossible to read it all (and would be, even if we didn't have many other time-consuming responsibilities, which we do).
Moderation is inconsistent, not primarily because we apply the principles badly (though perhaps we do—we're certainly imperfect), but because you're looking at a rather random sample of comments that have had moderator attention, and a whole lot more that haven't. Cnsistency is impossible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), for much the same reason that not everyone who is speeding on a highway gets pulled over.
Therefore, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Unfortunately, this all boils down is a bad look. Anyone who reads HN a lot will see a lot of bad posts, including many that break the site guidelines and get away with it. That is going to create annoyance and irritation, and a lot of that is going to get directed at the moderators for being a bunch of... well, I'll let you fill in your own pejoratives. Too bad for us, but it does go with the job.
I have no idea if you’re an ideologue or not, but my perception of the moderation team here is that political ideology and general SV narratives dominate your moderation strategy.
While we’re on the topic — it would not be very costly for you to employ a local LLM cluster and work queue to auto-moderate geopolitical topics that aren’t “tech enough” from ever seeing the light of day. Because the way it’s working now is the “I hate Trump” people spew the most insane flamebait imaginable, but they ensure ALL replies that disagree are flagged.
Clear thinking and rationality is not being prioritized here like it used to be. If your team is trying to do that, then whatever methodology you’re using is not working.
We can’t lose HN. But it feels like we are.
As the post mentioned, I suspect it's going to get worse and harder to recoup losses as these companies remove more humans from the loop on all sides of their operations.
My own abstract is: there's been a collective understanding that the only terms a dominant party needs to adhere to are the ones that can be enforced by the little guy. If a rule can't be enforced by the little guy, the big guy can and will violate it with impunity.
It defies all fiduciary sense as well. Rather than let me go and pay the severance I'm owed, I've caught (with hard evidence, lawfully obtained) three different managers pretexting or executing steps toward my constructive dismissal. The most insulting part is that they think I'm too stupid to notice, or too weak to fight back. Now they're inviting EEOC investigations, DoD audits and worse as I complain and share a decade's worth of unrelated dirt to everyone with a public reporting hotline.
They could just settle and make me go away, but I'd sooner expect they'd send a hitman after me than concede a single dollar. It feels almost personal.
> I do use LLM editing
What we're seeing is that LLM editing leaves nearly as many imprints on a text as outright generation, leading to two things: (1) it ends up sounding like AI, which most readers (at least on HN) don't want read, and (2) it ends up getting classified by the classifiers as genai anyhow.
What we're telling people (especially non-native English speakers) is to do their own writing and editing in their own voice and not to worry too much about minor mistakes - they are rapidly becoming signs of authenticity anyhow! Just worry about major mistakes, i.e. whether your main points are true.
That's part of writing, and it gets faster and easier the more you do it.
then it's just LLM writings prompted by you
how do I know which part is made up by the LLM or it's own interpretation or it's own opinion etc?
how can there be any value if I have to scrutinize every single word and decide whether it's truly what you intended to write or if it's mangling things, or if it's all just made up for engagement?
I use the model in the same way a non-native writer would, for clarity. So it's critically important to me that there is no model interpretation or opinion added to my own.
I agree that whether it still counts as "my own" is up for debate. Made more complicated by the fact that I'm mostly using voice-to-text these days, so I'm dictating more than writing.
You need more practice doing it (with your brain, not the model).