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by exikyut 1970 days ago
[Posting here on the assumption the parent comment will likely stay at the top]

What about... a service, that helps walk you through these kinds of situations, handles country-specific implementation details, can help figure out the best approach for a given scenario, and give you the best chance of getting things sorted out...

...and...

...is NOT a "welcome, welcome, one and all" type of environment, and requires Twitter, GitHub, an HN profile, proof of long-term domain registration (eg, Internet Archive history) - the kinds of things that would be infuriatingly difficult for a scammer to successfully clone?

HN is absolutely big enough that "the HN crowd" would use something like this.

In fact, a service like this could theoretically develop working relationships with contacts inside Apple and Google, build a history/reputation of forwarding accurate, high-signal issues, and maybe help to mitigate the current mess of "problem must attract 10K views to be fixed".

2 comments

That sounds suspiciously like a "union rep."
Maybe an "app store developers union" wouldn't be such a terrible idea
Yeah I'm sure Apple would love this idea and wouldn't try to penalize union developers in the least...
Sure, but that's par for the course in any unionization effort
Totally down for this. Walled gardens should have unions. That seems like a perfectly logical way to keep them in check.
It would depend what they get out of it. It wouldn't have to be called a union. A certificate, code of conduct kind of thing would already be interesting.
Hmmm. What about the second aspect of the GP though? A union is the epitomization of welcome-all/accept-all. I'm imagining something that imposes restrictions on who can apply for assistance, both to ratelimit overall demand and also to make it incredibly hard for scammers to get anywhere.

On the surface (ie, legally speaking), it would absolutely be an exclusive environment. The idea (and probably secret sauce) would be figuring out how to delineate between scammers and legitimate devs.

Intellectual property lawyers do this (for big bucks) and Reputation Management services kind of do this (for smaller bucks).

I think what you're describing is interesting as it is sort of a different ground to tread, like a specialized version of the above.