[fosefx]

Tangent: Instagram managed to lock me out of their service for a week or so a couple of days ago. My browser was signed in into my account, but I have not used it for like a month.

Got logged out. I log back in (using 2FA btw). "Please give us your phone number so we can verify it's you" I enter my phone number. I don't really get the point of this because they did not have my number before, so what are they actually verifying here? Anyway, I trust Facebook with my phone number lol. I get a code, I enter it. "Your account activity is suspicious and we will limit your account for a bit" That was it. No redirect, no link to click, nothing. So I go back to instagram[.]com and have to do the same thing again?

Well maybe my browser is on a block list now or sth. So I go to my phone (where I was signed in). And the App is broken completely, looks like the session was invalidated.

I log out, log back in, do 2FA, enter the code again. Same result.

I checked back in a couple of days ago and it seems like I have access again.

It is unfathomable how this can happen. How can the front gate to your multi billion service just not work to the point where you DOS yourself?

Also this account has 0 images, and just a couple of followers, so there is literally nothing to protect.

In moments like these you really start to notice the missing communication channels to the big tech companies. Is there any other industry that has zero customer support?

[smartaz42]

I'm sure that they have outstanding customer support. But you, however, are not the customer.

[moloch-hai]

I'm confident they don't have outstanding customer support, even for actual customers (who are not you).

Outstanding customer support would entail expense, threatening profits. The money of happy and unhappy customers turns out to be the same color.

[unqueued]

This makes me worried, because I am pretty sure Google is going to start removing keys based on attestation certificates.

I believe that this is much more about rate limiting than about security for the end users.

[bmitc]

It seems like most industries are moving towards no support because "we need to scale at all costs and to the detriment of customers" seems to be the capitalism drumbeat. Customers these days, to many companies, are just statistical artifacts in their system.

I had a case the other day where I called my insurance company. The automated system couldn't understand my answers (I was actually trying to answer the given prompts rather than just repeating "representative" over and over). It replied "it looks like we're having a problem" and proceeded to just say goodbye and hang up on me. More than infuriating, and that's an understatement.

[Nextgrid]

The problem is that there's zero law enforcement against corporation-vs-consumer fraud. Companies have noticed and are taking advantage of it (basic market pressures - if they don't, their competitor will).

Why make it easy for our customers to contact us (presumably to make a claim - ie the whole reason insurance products exist) when we can just pretend it's easy, collect money based on that lie and get away with it?

[willnonya]

This isnt capitalism. It's more corporatism.

Capitalism responded to market forces and the needs of the customer.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, companies which have real customer service will in theory have a competitive advantage over companies which have a voice response system that hangs up on the customer.

What often happens though, is that consumers go with the lowest price above all other considerations. Then they get the hard lesson in "you get what you pay for."

It's the same reason that air travel is so awful. You'd think that one or more of the airlines would compete on comfort and service, but that's impossible when travelers go to Expedia and overwhelmingly pick the flight with the lowest price.

I personally don't pay rock bottom for insurance, and I have an agent I can call and talk to without any intervening voice menus. A human in a local office answers the phone.

[bmitc]

You pay health insurance out of pocket? I was referring to my medical insurance provided by my company.

I in general try to speak with my wallet, so to speak, but it’s like posting into the ocean. And with some things, like mail and shipping services, there are no options.

[quanticle]

    Capitalism responded to market forces and the needs of the customer.

Did it? When? I can't name a single era when "capitalism" (a fuzzy term) actually responded to consumer demands in the way that the parent poster described. Whether it's railroad robber barons screwing over farmers, Ford selling cars with an unacceptable risk of catching fire, or Google arbitrarily deleting people's entire digital identities, large corporations have always treated their customers as a collection of statistical artifacts (to quote another poster elsewhere in this thread).

[SturgeonsLaw]

That's all semantics, we can't say "Capitalism is when the system does good things, and Corporatism is when it does bad things", the difference is not meaningful since Capitalism leads to/is Corporatism.

[tarboreus]

Disagree. A robust anti-trust environment would alleviate 90% of these issues. What we are in now (in the US) is an environment of corporate political capture, which is not inevitable, as a similar situation was demonstrably reversed in the early 20th century by strong anti-trust legislation and enforcement.

The companies get away with this because they have massive market power, and they have used the wealth generated by that power to capture our political system.

[xboxnolifes]

Capitalism also tends toward the mean at the expense of the edge cases.