| Reading between the lines, it sounds like there is outsourcing of Flickr customer support to (presumably lower paid) third-party (or possibly off-shored) These sentences from the post, in particular, caught my attention: "Not only do you have the patience of a saint (imagine getting asked the same 3 questions, 50 times a day, every day)" " You literally can't buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can." Sounds like these were Tier-1 support people (or worse, Tier 2/3 support people doing Tier-1 jobs) For a company in Yahoo's position, In-house Tier-1 support is a luxury they can't afford. And, while I don't mean to sound insensitive - a well educated/technical team can come up to speed pretty quickly - within a period of a few weeks, on Tier-1 issues. You work hard to hold onto your Engineering-Support (the people that are familiar with the code base) - but the "Same 3 questions, 50 times a day" skill set can be bought/outsourced. You can't help but empathize with the people being let go - it sucks to be Riffed. But, if the rumors that I'm hearing from inside Y! are accurate - this is just the first in a big string of layoff notices we'll be hearing about in the next several weeks from Sunnyvale. |
* a Bayesian filter based moderation engine. Requires loads of resources, political clout to convince the product owner of that system to allocate resources to your own property, and a long lead time to train the filters. Not much scope to adjust the filters
* A "customer complaint" mechanism (flag this comment type links), that go to a customer service centre (in the Phillipines, I think), and they endeavour to look at complaints, and potentially do something within 24 to 48 hours.
Editors on typical Yahoo properties are reminded that they themselves are not allowed to delete or remove comments from the site since that exposes Yahoo to accusations of censorship. Although, a number of editors and engineers quietly ignore that decree and try to clean up their properties individually.
Neither of these options are workable. I've not seen a successful case study of the filter approach, and we've all seen what happens with the 24/48 hour response time of the first party support - the trolls and the spam stay around, and only get cleaned out (if they ever are) way after the topicality of the thread has finished. Yahoo News continues to suffer horribly with these methods.
Out of all Yahoo properties, only Flickr seem to have had a handle on community moderation. They were the leading light on that during my time at Yahoo.
Yahoo simply does not understand the nature of community and believes that moderation can just be automatically applied. It's not an organisation geared towards providing a human face. Flickr has always been the exception here, showing the value that can be achieved by human empowered community nurturing. Sadly, no more.