[hn_throwaway_99]

I didn't previously know what Larry Page's view on customer support circa 2000 was:

But while it's easy to scoff at Page's quirks—his odd obsessions, his unrealistic expectations, his impatience for a future dangling out of immediate reach—sometimes his seemingly crazy ideas wind up creating breakthrough innovations, and skeptical Googlers wind up admitting Page was right, after all. That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google's small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page's suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another's customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page's instinctive brilliance.

https://www.wired.com/2011/03/mf-larrypage/

[gregd]

Yeah but it doesn't work.

It's one thing to be able to "answer questions". It's an entirely other thing to have access rights to actually solve a problem and the authority to do so.

[yaleman]

Worse still, the forums are full of spammers, phishing and malware links.

I've posted in the past and had nothing but fake call centres and phishing links posted, which eventually get removed, but I did click on some of them (in sandboxed malware-analysis browsers) and it took a lot of searching and knowledge to realise that the numbers were fake - and I work in IT secops.