[notRobot]

> Complaining on the internet should not be a support channel. Developers should not have to rely on the internet attention lottery.

None of the huge tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/Amazon/etc) have an easy (or in many cases any) way to contact human service representatives. This is intentional.

People have been complaining about this for more than a decade. Every week there are multiple writeups on the front page of HN about apps and extensions being killed off.

These corporations will never fix this. They have no incentive to do so. They don't care about individual users or small developers, and don't want to get involved in their "petty" issues.

Why? Because these have no impact on how much money they make.

The only way to fix this is through government regulation, but good luck with that.

[dlgeek]

> None of the huge tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/Amazon/etc) have an easy (or in many cases any) way to contact human service representatives. This is intentional.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us/ - I have never failed to talk to a human that way.

(For AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/)

[HenryBemis]

> Complaining on the internet should not be a support channel.

Oh the many times I have written to a company's "Support" forms and never got a response. And then I wrote to them on Twitter (message) and I got my answers in 2h or less... Unfortunately social media tend to be the escalation point..

[elmo2you]

I fully agree with that. But I think there is another angle to this that is often ignored/overlooked.

With their (intentional) behavior you described, these companies often violate even basic legal principles and sometimes even specific laws (depending on country/jurisdiction). Moreover, these same companies (again, intentionally) also use their financial/legal weight to pretty much stifle/kill any individual attempts to bring them to task for those violations. In fact, that itself is illegal (antitrust) behavior in many places.

This isn't just about governments failing to regulate these companies, but probably even more so about their failure to even enforce existing rules and protect citizens against such abuses.

It's a pretty good demonstration of how bad the state of class (in)justice really is, including all the corrupt governments that keep it a reality.

[pas]

Could you explain, maybe with a few examples, how they are doing illegal things with this behavior?