alt Hacker NewsI said it before and I'll say it again, for opportunities open to the entire world on the internet, adding monetary friction is the only way to filter out serious people from bad actors doing spray-and-pray hoping they make some money or get that job through weaponizing AI bots and sucking all the air in the room.
So many problems can be solved that way, including customer support. Instead of having to post a sob story on Twitter and HN when the AI at BigCo bans my account for no reason, why not charge me $100 for access to human support that is empowered to triage and escalate genuine issues? Then, issue a refund if the problem is on their end.
I don't understand why this isn't a thing.
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$100 for someone in SV isn’t much. $100 USD for someone in Africa, India, some parts of Asia could be a week or even months salary.
You could probably adjust the cost per region, but then you open yourself up to spam bots again because it’s trivial to spoof one’s location.
My guess is there is no easy way to deal with chargebacks and they would probably be bad.
It would almost need to be analog. Fill out this form and drop it in the mail with 10 bucks inside.
It’s hard to forecast this. Support calls occur chaotically. So staffing to support them is difficult to do in a way that keeps a steady margin.
I wonder if transaction costs get in the way. Someone has to pay the payment provider in both directions.
Then who arbitrates the inevitable dispute over whose end the problem was?
$100 is way too much. Maybe $5 to get people to spend 30 seconds on google to solve the easy problems instead of calling. But I wonder if even that would be enough to significantly incentivize claiming everything is intended behavior / user error just for another revenue stream.