Comment by gdulli

Comment by gdulli 5 days ago

24 replies

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There used to be a contract that a business had something to lose by providing bad service, that customers would leave and seek better service elsewhere.

I believe the most important and least discussed phenomenon of modern consumer culture is that consumers have passed a threshold of passive and docile behavior such that businesses no longer fear losing customers. Partly because the customers have shown willingness to eat shit, partly because there's a new understanding that all businesses will adopt the same customer-hostile behaviors (AI customer service in this case) so consumers don't have significant choice anyway.

jermaustin1 5 days ago

It's not so much the willingness to eat shit, but that no matter the service I use, I will have to eat shit, so who's shit tastes least bad for the benefits.

A lot of VoIP/SMS providers exist, but compared to Twilio, they are just DIY API and SIP providers, which might be what we as developers want, but not what a business "needs".

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  • Nextgrid 5 days ago

    Out of curiosity, what do you actually need out of a VoIP/SMS provider beyond "send and receive SIP" and "send and receive SMS"?

    I'll give you that SIP is quite complex to deal with (aka the existing tooling around it is shit - the least shit is SipSorcery in C# but requires quite a bit of low-level code to get anywhere), but SMS is trivial as it maps nicely to HTTP's request/response paradigm. Just write whatever logic you want in a PHP/etc script, drop it on shared hosting, and enjoy better uptime (your shared hosting provider doesn't have the budget to keep paying techbros to constantly mess with the system, so it will be more stable).

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  • reactordev 5 days ago

    It’s this. You went to a buffet but all they have is shit pie.

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  • idontwantthis 4 days ago

    "Commode-ification" - when everything is shit, so it doesn't matter what you choose.

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  • cyanydeez 5 days ago

    The conspiracy of service degradation: as long as every other provider sucks, the consumer never can expect better.

    Alpha tested with lightbulbs but is now a clear strategy taught to MBAs

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ivape 5 days ago

It's interesting that you bring that up because I was just thinking about this concept in an undeveloped form. Egregious salesmanship is to sell an inferior or poor product while bolstering the overall brand reputation. How could that even be possible? With lies. You're absolutely right, the salesman in our world is in his purest and most demonic form.

With Brand management specifically, they specialize in servicing an ornate roof on a house so as to distract from the rest of the house. The ornate roof can be seen from miles away, and so it is the greatest ad you can buy in terms of reach.

I think I was thinking about this because of all the AI startup ads I've been seeing on Youtube. You wouldn't ever know how unworthy their product is based on how much branding and marketing they do. But that is the dance they do, the managing of the delta between product quality and brand quality, the management being the logistics of veiling that delta (not actually closing it).

Taking down a brand means to be diligent and aggressive in exposing that delta. Seems like common sense, but I'd urge you to consider it as more a "classical" formalization of what it is and what needs to be done. There is a terrible phenomenon within the human experience that results in humans trying to lie to each other for money.

It's the classical Theory on Being a Piece of Shit.

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  • chankstein38 5 days ago

    Amen! This touches on my biggest frustration. Product marketing doesn't market anymore. For so many products you can't find any specific information unless you go look at reddit or reviews or something. Half the time you can't even see a real picture of the item in a room or serving its purpose because listings are so filled with photoshopped garbage. They want you to spend sometimes hundreds or thousands on something without even being told an accurate set of dimensions or ever seeing it actually in use.

    It's really disgusting. The problem is sometimes you need these things. We were recently shopping for an oven and it was like that. Lots of photoshopped images, it says "5 burner" but doesn't actually mention the 5th burner is just a warming burner except if you can see the one picture where the dial looks different from the others.

    It's just ok for corporations to scam people now it seems. I don't know what to do about it but I'm very sick of dealing with it.

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azemetre 5 days ago

This is mostly due to not trust busting enough in society. If there were actual competitive markets, not monopolies/oligarchies/monopsonies/cartels, the business world would be completely different.

Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.

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  • falcor84 5 days ago

    I tend to disagree. While there are definitely monopolies/oligopoly for every domain, I'm actually constantly impressed with the very long tail of other providers available in that area.

    Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.

    I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.

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    • azemetre 5 days ago

      Legislation can help in a variety of ways, like taxing digital goods to provide work grants for open source developers. The federal government could create a public payment processor.

      There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.

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      • helicone 4 days ago

        the government doesn't do much except wage war, arrest people, spy on them, and push paper around. everything else is done by contractors, and they're outsourcing an increasing amount of those things they actually do. why would this bottom-bidder contractor or work grant open source developer do a better job than twillio or stripe?

        there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.

        if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.

        edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget

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    • andrei_says_ 4 days ago

      What are some alternatives to twilio?

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      • joecool1029 4 days ago

        Depends on what you need but for SMS bandwidth.com was great. They always knew their shit when we spoke to them. They were just not interested in really small accounts. We quickly realized twilio was worst of the major options and built on Nexmo as alternate (which was fine until vonage bought them and didn't really understand the products or market, maybe it's better under ericsson ownership now, don't know left the space).

        When I get text spam it almost always originated from twlio or formerly their subsidiary zipwhip.

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  • helicone 4 days ago

    looking at their wikipedia page they raised $100M decades ago to make that company. it doesn't seem like a good bet to raise money like that just to compete with an already well-known name in the space. maybe you could do it cheaper today, but what's the point? it's probably higher EV to just build something new in a different space and own that market.

    i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.

    but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.

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stronglikedan 5 days ago

> There used to be a contract

That was before crony capitalism became rampant.

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  • Refreeze5224 5 days ago

    It was back when militant labor presented an actual threat to the owning class. Now they know they can act with impunity, and they do.

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