[tahseen_kakar]

I'm going to be honest with you: I've been on the receiving end of many bad tech support forums.

The worst one is Apple's. There's a reason why they're so famous for their snobby customer service: they don't need to put in any effort because they know most people are going to throw their hands up and buy a new computer instead of trying to fix whatever issue they have.

But I also can't stand Microsoft's forums, because there's always at least one guy who chimes in with a condescending tone, like he thinks he knows more than you do about your problem. And then there's Google, which doesn't even have a real forum at all—just an unresponsive help page that sends you back and forth between different sections until you give up out of sheer frustration.

[thrwawyFrtco675]

Throwaway account.

As an employee I used to help out on the forums, giving non-PR helpful answers.

Then someone extremely angry about a semi-related issue took one of my posts out of context and emailed the executive team, using my truthful post as supposed evidence of the company's wrongdoing against its customers.

It didn't hurt my career and I didn't even get in trouble... but that is not the kind of attention you want to get from your SVP.

I don't post in the forums anymore. There are way too many angry people who will weaponize anything you say against you. Too many journalists looking for a story. Too many YouTubers looking for the next clickbait video. Not worth the risk.

[sircastor]

This is tangential: I wrote a Mac client for a popular internet service early on. I did it on my own time, without any programming background, learning as I went, spending my own money to get it done.

I remember someone on a forum very angrily posting that the program didn’t have all the features he wanted, and all the bugs weren’t being addressed, and of course Mac users were being treated as 2nd-class citizens.

I was shocked at how presumptive he’d been, and tried to explain without going off how much effort I’d put into this, and how wrong he was. It was a harsh lesson on user expectations.

[Normille]

As well as the annoyances you point out, there are also the people who haven't a clue but decide to weigh in with their half-baked opinion anyway.

This seems especially prevalent on the Apple forums. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some poor sod advised by some 'know nothing know-all' that the answer to his/her problem is to "reinstall MacOS" when their issue could easily be solved in seconds by deleting a corrupt preference file, or fixing an incorrect permission.

[solarkraft]

On Microsoft's forums these stupid suggestions are the official answers ("trouble shooting"). Have literally any issue? Why don't you reboot, reinstall, switch your hardware piece by piece and bake me a cake?

No diagnosis. Just 3 weeks of work for the reporter before they'll even look at the problem.

"Hey, I'm an MVP. Fuck you. Hope this helped."

[musicale]

Know-nothing know-it-alls are the scourge of these "support" forums.

At some point Apple/Microsoft/etc. seem to have decided "let's incentivize know-nothing know-it-alls to copy-paste useless non-solutions to every problem in the hope that our users will just give up and go away."

[speedyapoc]

The Apple forums are consistently aggravating. With every question, cue the level X “community specialist” telling you to reset your SMC.

[kaelwd]

Same deal with Microsoft and sfc /scannow

[bloqs]

I believe there is an accessibility/competence matrix here.

The sorts of people who are on these are overwhelmingly types who ended up there because it was the first result on Google. You see, oddly, a disproportionate amount of 'moms' and older people who use the word 'web'.

Apple support threads where Kathy from Winsconsin or whoever suggests solutions like "oh you shouldn't need your screen to go any brighter, have you thought about getting you thought about getting your eyes checked?" Is an example of this.

The blind leading the blind.

Another good one is asking a basic question about windows performance on the Microsoft forums results in 4 people not understanding the question and suggesting things unrelated because, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

None of them got any further in the Internet, thats as far down the path as they got. They get their news from the default Bing homepage, oblivious.

[Terretta]

Today, Apple’s third level support engineer told me my problem with sync was “You have too many photos.”

So it’s not just Kathy from Wisconsin.

// 150K photos, 2K videos

[bloqs]

Fair enough!

[musicale]

I've had nothing but bad experiences with Apple's useless online "support" forums. Apparently they decided to follow Microsoft's approach of incentivizing unpaid idiots - or possibly robots - to copy-paste completely uselss non-solutions to every problem.

However, I've had mostly good experiences with their in-person support in Apple stores, probably because they are actual humans who have some training or relevant experience and are actually paid.