FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/02/1023801277/your-facebook-account-was-hacked-getting-help-may-take-weeks-or-299

by coloneltcb • 5 years ago

445 335 5 years ago

bee_rider• 5 years ago

Huh. Well, I guess this does shift the individual from product to customer, although it seems like quite a drastic measure to take.

The real moral I guess is, set up 2FA and maybe that trusted recovery person feature, whatever they call it.

mofosyne• 5 years ago

More like product and customer. Not like Facebook has an incentive to treat your data with any more respect if paid or not.

Just like how movie tickets and train tickets don't get any cheaper with advertisement everywhere.

dkonofalski• 5 years ago

Not really, considering that every person who used the trick didn't even open it and returned it immediately after getting their account recovered. Facebook already caught on to this.

bjtitus2• 5 years ago

The real moral is to not build your company without any modicum of user support.

The users who have any clue what 2FA is are not the ones getting their account hacked. They are the 60+ year olds who use Facebook as their only contact with friend and family, unfortunately.

failuser• 5 years ago

Sadly, the moral is that you can build a company without user support. You just need to grow fast past the stage where users can ignore you. Even if you don’t have a FB account you are in danger of imposter creating one for you. A very small percent of customers require support and you can safely ignore them.

zamalek• 5 years ago

You're even more-so the product with a FB device on your head. You're just paying to be tracked in a much more intimate way than before, why else would they now require a FB login?

neither_color2• 5 years ago

Nobody is buying an Oculus headset right now because they've been recalled and won't be available until August 24th.

https://www.oculus.com/quest-2/removable-facial-interface-al...

jeremyis• 5 years ago

This recall is only for the foam face insert. It's removable and probably very inexpensive to make / replace. Oculus is sending free replacements to folks.

I am an avid Quest 2 user since ~October. I play Population:one and _love_ it. It's a team-based Battle Royale. I am just blown away by how much fun and social it is. It's been a godsend during the pandemic.

The Quest 2 is only $300 - I strongly recommend it!

0des• 5 years ago

Does this model require an FB account to be used as intended?

notJim2• 5 years ago

If anyone else is on the fence about the Quest 2, I received on as a gift, and it has totally blown me away. I was previously somewhat skeptical of VR, but it's so fun. FWIW, it also feels a bit _different_ than normal video games, because you're on your feet, moving your body, etc.

neither_color2• 5 years ago

I wasnt knocking on the quest 2, I love mine. You just literally can't buy one retail right now, only second hand like ebay. It's an FYI.

TroisM• 5 years ago

You can find brand new sealed ones on ebay... Just sold one for about $450

themodelplumber• 5 years ago

No info on how this Facebook account takeover is happening? I wish they would provide details...

floatingatoll2• 5 years ago

They didn’t have 2FA, so it’s probably as basic as a password reuse attack.

bjtitus2• 5 years ago

The really shocking thing is the lack of any delay with email changes. I've known several people whose accounts were hacked and properly flagged by Facebook within hours but the hacker was able to change the email address immediately with no waiting period and remove the other addresses so access was impossible.

I tried this on my own account shortly after and, sure enough, there's no waiting period where previous emails remain allowed to reset passwords.

jrm4• 5 years ago

Microsoft saw the concept of touchscreens and bought out "Surface" around 2003ish; and as a result, we didn't get widespread touchscreens until about a decade or so later.

FB buying Oculus feels exactly like that for VR.

MathYouF• 5 years ago

This is more of an alternative statement for anyone interested since your statement didn't give anything concrete.

Oculus is far far ahead of where any VR developers thought it would be in 2021. In January of 2019 the Rift was still running on cables connected to a $2000 laptop and confined to a 5x5ft square play area with 7 foot tall poles holding scanners on each corner,also plugged into the same computer. If you wanted to experience VR, you had to have all those things and set them up.

Now for $300 I can (and have) experience VR on a beach with no Internet or electricity for a couple hours.

The opinion of most VR developers I know is that Facebook have unequivocally advanced VR headset progression more than any other company and better than we couldve ever hoped.

aphroz• 5 years ago

Is doing VR on the beach really a progress though?

jimmySixDOF2• 5 years ago

So right! A lot of it comes down to the availability of Qualcomm's XR2 chip but Oculus has made VR accessable to anyone for half the price of a mobile phone and that is a game changer. Lot of noise lately about the death of VR [1] or PCVR [2] but my money says things in 3D are just about to lift off.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/virtual-reality-rich-white-kid-o...

[2] https://twitter.com/kentbye/status/1421545550407630849?s=19

seumars• 5 years ago

Because Microsoft slowed down the development of tablets? Sorry, I’m not familiar with the story of the Surface

jobigoud• 5 years ago

The original MS product called "surface" was a big table computer with a touch screen costing around $8K.

polyomino• 5 years ago

VR is more widespread than it would have been had FB stayed away and not subsidized it. They make up over 50% of VR hardware on steam now.[1]

[1]https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

Have you used the product and the software and games they've been publishing?

Honestly they're the only players in the industry treating it as more than a hobby and the only viable headset for mass consumers. I think without their pressure Valve would have never bothered with the Index or HL:Alyx.

ilamont• 5 years ago

Before going to extremes, many hacking victims try the usual routes to get customer service but quickly find out it seems impossible to reach someone at Facebook to help fix the problem.

Same story with AI lockouts at Google. Even if you do have access to "someone at Google" good luck getting a clear answer of what happened or how to fix the issue.

SilverRed6• 5 years ago

I think we can appreciate how this is a difficult problem though. Google support would get a torrent of actual hackers contacting them to gain access to someones account. Not restoring access to a few real cases is probably better than giving access over to a hacker.

GitLab recently said that customer support will not help restore access to your account if you lock yourself out unless you have an active subscription to your account and can use your billing details as verification.

How should google support handle this? Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?

busymom02• 5 years ago

Disagree. A company as big as google should have the decency to at least have a human reach out to paying developers before they permanently ban apps which developers use to make a living:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077

weare1383• 5 years ago

Maybe hire some people to handle it? But that would cost them money. That's why companies like Google and Facebook have crap support. The cost of not having it hasn't exceeded the cost of implementing it.

treeman793• 5 years ago

A basic sanity is let the email address on file as of yesterday, and for the past 10 years take the account back.

Utterly insane that this is not possible.

triceratops• 5 years ago

Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?

In Canada the postal service offers this. You can show your ID at any post office and be verified. Sounds pretty convenient.[1]

1. https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/posta...

Toutouxc• 5 years ago

Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?

Not sure if you mean specifically the google+bank case but that's a thing in my country, it's called "bank identity".

I file my taxes and social security forms (and can access my covid tests records) while my bank vouches for my identity, i.e. I have to go through their regular internet banking login + 2FA.

busymom02• 5 years ago

Yep. Even developers with apps which might have gotten wrongly flagged by the artificial unintelligence only get to talk to automated emails unless they can create a big enough shit storm on social media to get a few tech blogs to write about it.

A very recent example was Droid script app on Android:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077

fencepost2• 5 years ago

The utter lack of customer service options at Google is just one of the reasons to avoid EVER having ANYTHING important to your or your business dependent on them. Maybe they lock you out, maybe they discontinue the service, there's nothing you can do to be sure that won't happen.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

Still waiting for the adsense money Google owes me from 13 years ago... they conveniently banned me pretending I was clicking on my own ads... I never did that... and again, they 100% know it's bullshit, they send me a 50€ voucher for ad-word to my physical address, like it was any sort of fair compensation...

onelovetwo• 5 years ago

people who pay for a product get customer service prioritization over those who pay nothing, who woulda thought.

tolbish• 5 years ago

Edit: free version mentioned in TFA

AussieWog93• 5 years ago

It's in the article. (Free) FB users locked out of their accounts are buying Oculus just to get access to FB support.

tomc1985• 5 years ago

everyone pays for Facebook with their data. In fact, people not even on Facebook pay for Facebook with their data

wmf• 5 years ago

I wonder if Portal also works; it's only $100.

shoeshoeshoey• 5 years ago

FB had an internal help system called "Oops". It was meant for employees to get help for friends they knew in real life. It was discontinued not long ago (EDIT: maybe not according to a child comment). There were just too many requests for help.

Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive (Mark, Sheryl) supports it. Even if it affects the bottom line - and there were plenty of examples where large customers could not spend significantly more money with Facebook because of software bugs - they won't do anything about it.

metajack• 5 years ago

I used oops to help someone I knew several months back. It still exists and worked amazingly well.

saltedonion• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate what this system does? Escalates customer support tickets for employees?

mmahemoff• 5 years ago

I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.

jorvi• 5 years ago

It makes me incredibly angry that I have a long-standing issue that I can basically get no support or fix for whilst you are cheering a cordoned-off system on as ‘working amazingly well’.

elzbardico• 5 years ago

This is disturbingly similar to how criminal enterprises operate, without regard for operational expenses, alienating customers. It is like nobody care much about losing easy money.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

I haven’t worked for a company that didn’t leave easy money on the table or waste money because of disorganization, except for the government which just wouldn’t spend any money except employee time.

hangonhn• 5 years ago

That was literally the only way I got help after someone somehow managed to registered one of my email address under a Facebook account I don't control and tried to impersonate me. I don't even know how that was possible since FB does email verification. I tried the normal help system but got nowhere so I reached out to my friends who work at FB. One of them used the internal help system it was resolved within a couple of days. A mutual friend of ours joked that I was really using my "tech privileges" and he was absolutely right. I would have had to deal with a FB account pretending to be me for a while if not for the fact that I live in Silicon Vally and have a lot of friends who work for FB. It really shouldn't have been how that matter was resolved.

jpollock• 5 years ago

Whenever someone's used my email address, I've used password recovery and taken ownership of the account.

It's amazing the number of systems which don't verify email before giving out an account.

I've taken control of:

Disney

DropBox

Redbox

...

samesameyup• 5 years ago

The exact same thing happened to me. No idea how.

I thought all the emails were spam, until one day I realized they seemed pretty legit. I went to FB directly, forgot password, and had to use Google translate until I could switch the interface to English. I tried to delete the account, but got locked out. It took a lot of effort to get FB to delete that account.

My FB friends never once offered oops. How sad.

throwaway0104• 5 years ago

Any new account can use Facebook for 24 hours before email verification becomes required. This is a huge issue for any email address not linked to a Facebook account. Facebook will happily leak the social graph of that address's shadow profile (e.g. in the "suggested friends" list), and let anyone impersonate it, for 24h.

It happened to me. Those 24h were no fun.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

I would be quite curious what would be possible at some companies if things could be considered beyond 3-6 months or if you could even keep the same team for that period.

I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.

happynacho• 5 years ago

Do you know if Twitter has something similar? It would be very helpful.

TheFreim• 5 years ago

YouTube would be nice as well.

notJim2• 5 years ago

Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive

To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

A lot of it seems to also be around review cycles. My company has quarterly goal reviewing.

One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.

etempleton• 5 years ago

It used to be you could get some level of technical support if you were an advertiser, but that is no longer the case. Perhaps if you are spending tens of millions on Facebook Ads per year, but otherwise the only support you get is a revolving door of advertising support specialists that try to convince you to use whatever advertising product is best for Facebook at the moment.

I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything.

I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must.

If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.

Impossible2• 5 years ago

The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.

samename• 5 years ago

Are you saying projects are highly encouraged to be completed within just 6 months?

emdowling• 5 years ago

As of 2022, PSC is shifting to every 12 months not 6 in an effort to better support longer-term projects and thinking. Promotions will still be assessed every 6 months.

User23• 5 years ago

I kind if like the idea of an SDE running an oops as a service side hustle.

throwaway93382• 5 years ago

Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support.

After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).

Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.

But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.

StreamBright• 5 years ago

Sounds like Google and Facebook does not care about their users anymore.

liveoneggs• 5 years ago

care to share some of that business manager support? :)

codezero7• 5 years ago

I suspect once this kind of workaround becomes known it's also a target for hackers - if there's a way around Facebook support to access an account, hackers will use it too.

stacker88882• 5 years ago

As a happy Oculus Quest 2 owner and non-Facebook user, I'd like to thank everyone for potentially destroying the customer support experience for me!

ninkendo• 5 years ago

How do you have a Quest 2 without a FB account?

kfarr• 5 years ago

Only if you use it as a paperweight

weare1383• 5 years ago

I've noticed there's been several suspect comments from Oculus 'owners'.

stacker88882• 5 years ago

They forced me to create an account but don't actively use Facebook.

imwillofficial2• 5 years ago

Does Amazon have anything like Facebooks oops?

travoc• 5 years ago

No. Having your business wiped out by an errant script is just part of the experience.

imwillofficial2• 5 years ago

I think the that process could use some improvement!

delhanty• 5 years ago

"The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said.

Seriously, this sounds super-entitled to me.

Why is this unfair?

Also, the advertising supported-model has so many negative consequences. Pragmatically, FB isn't just going to fade away, so wouldn't it be better if they evolved towards a paid model? (Or at least the option to pay.)

nightfly• 5 years ago

Because Facebook doesn't offer a regular subscription service, and for lots of people Facebook is how they stay in contact with their friends and family. So being SOL because some asshole is trying to steal your account sucks. There's nothing "entitled" about wanting back something you lost because of no fault of your own.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

I think if FB offered a $5 “talk to a human” option or a premium tier for users, then people would be satisfied. But instead there is this clunky hack of buying an Oculus device.

whimsicalism2• 5 years ago

Not economical for any problem that takes more than 15 or so mins to solve.

robertwt7• 5 years ago

Actually I don't remember that I ever get a reply from facebook support.

But yeah not sure how many support request they're getting considering that spam accounts are popping up every day

fallingknife4• 5 years ago

Utility services start off as luxuries, and are private and unregulated. This was true with telephone and electric companies. When these services get to a certain point where there are real consequences for not being able to access the system, they need to have public regulation to ensure access and customer service. ISP internet service has definitely reached this point, and I think that there's a strong argument that Google & FB accounts (particularly for businesses) have reached this point as well.

bigyikes• 5 years ago

I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.

I am sympathetic to the argument though. Getting locked out of your existing Gmail account could be really disastrous. Maybe there should be regulation for email extrication — if you’re going to ban me, you better allow me to update all of my accounts to not use your email service first.

kilobaud• 5 years ago

You seriously dont think email, search, or direct-messaging services sound _anything_ like the telephone or the postal service or the radio?

fallingknife4• 5 years ago

The type of regulation you are suggesting is consistent with what I am talking about. All utility services don't have to have the same exact rules. You can always be banned (even from driving on public roads), but just not without being given a stated reason and the chance to appeal it to an actual human who has to follow some set of consistent rules or due process.

lmm• 5 years ago

I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.

When Twitter was the only way to get updates on my passport application was when these platforms became utilities to me.

d110af5ccf4• 5 years ago

doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view

Imagine trying to run a small business without access to either Facebook, Google, or both. Business owners whose operations have been inadvertently banned have written about it at length; it appears to cause serious issues.

franga20003• 5 years ago

Email absolutely should be a utility and allow you to transfer your email address between providers just like you can your phone number. I understand the technical challenges associated with that due to how DNS and the email protocols work, but I don't particularly care. There should also be a legally required minimal level of customer support for email account issues - if I can't get access to my email for over a week because of an issue on their end or even on mine, there better be a support rep ready to talk to me over the phone and get it sorted.

For all of the things that could ruin me if lost/stolen (government ID, bank accounts, phone number...), I have an automatic last-resort strategy of getting in a car, driving to a place and annoying someone in-person enough to get my problem solved. But email is the only exception.

I've tried looking for providers in my country, but they all went out of business around the time gmail launched. So now my only options are international megacorps with no support for anyone without 100k twitter followers or small companies with offices on the other side of the continent.

g_p• 5 years ago

I don't see a massive difference between a Gmail account and a phone number. One is typically provided by a company, in a competitive marketplace, with rivals available. That one is regulated and has to adhere to portability which lets you continue to make and receive calls using that number indefinitely, without any further payment.

The other is provided by a large company, again in a (semi) competitive marketplace, but is totally unregulated and can kick you out at any time. They don't let you migrate your email address, and you can't send or receive mail to/from it if the company throws you into a Kafka loop.

It strikes me the anomaly is that email service isn't forced to be portable and delivered as a baseline utility, with "send on behalf of" and "forward without looking at or storing" as non commercial, non charged functionality that must be offered indefinitely, so a user can port their mail if they move away from a provider.

When looked at this way, I don't see the difference between mobile service and email - mobile providers don't enjoy a monopoly, but are regulated and need to deliver portability free of charge.

eru7• 5 years ago

Bread! We should definitely regulate bread that way.

It's way more important than Google and Facebook.

dlgeek• 5 years ago

We kind of do, which is really the point. There are all sorts of regulations about making and selling bread to ensure safety and fitness for purpose as well as all sorts of programs such as SNAP, WIC, school lunches, many state programs, etc. all to ensure that everyone has access to bread.

jimrandomh• 5 years ago

There's a bit of a story behind this. Oculus is owned by Facebook, but the Facebook website and the Oculus headsets/software are by different teams working in different states. When Facebook bought Oculus, they decided to get rid of the Oculus-specific account system and use only Facebook accounts. The Facebook account requirement took effect with the launch of the Oculus Quest 2, which launched in October 2020.

October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation/influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website's efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you'd be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren't Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn't use their hardware because of account issues.

So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it's supporting a free website and more like it's supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.

sonofhans• 5 years ago

That’s funny, it’s just too late for me. I just returned two Quest 2s because we couldn’t create Facebook accounts. Ironic. I’ve spent years not even wanting one, and when I do, it was impossible.

MikeUt• 5 years ago

So FB can take over the VR market by over-moderating FB, and making Oculus a requirement to get support. Looks very anti-competitive and illegal.

gruez2• 5 years ago

making Oculus a requirement to get support. Looks very anti-competitive and illegal.

Intent matters a lot in law. Based on gp's description it definitely doesn't sound intentional, so it's probably fine from a legal point of view.

eru7• 5 years ago

Huh? Facebook could even should down the Oculus stuff, if they wanted to.

Facebook making Oculus worse might be bad for customers, but it's great for Oculus' competition, ain't it?

Shorel• 5 years ago

I think both the Valve Index and HP Reverb G2 are better headsets, and also better purchases by not having anything to do with Facebook.

So, no risk of a Facebook monopoly here.

nrp• 5 years ago

Just one point of clarification. We (the Oculus team) were based in Irvine, CA, but we were well under 100 people when we relocated to the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park in 2014. Organizational barriers came and went, but there wasn’t a meaningful physical barrier.

mcblirple• 5 years ago

You ain’t kidding. Getting interviewed by an Oculus computer graphics software person who had never touched SSH in his life was quite an experience coming in as a potential production engineer circa 2015. And, on top of it, he was quite rude about it and held me responsible for not understanding anything I was saying even though he was basically interviewing a lumberjack or a fireman from his perspective, anything but a colleague.

Clearly a barrier that should have been there. He had no business being in the room and didn’t know how load balancing worked, even though he was asking me about it. Four strong hires and one no hire, which I know because the recruiter told me, so I could do the math. Also expressed no desire to fix it, so I sense it was an intentional move.

That was the last time I ever spoke to Facebook though I do appreciate the annual “hey, want to try again? for realsies this time?” email that tells me accept rate hasn’t recovered from the big crater I heard about. I’m glad it worked out the way it did but I wonder how many people got to experience that type of skillset mismatch as your orgs were merged.

fpgaminer• 5 years ago

Side tangent, but ... thank you for Oculus. Seriously.

I recently got a Quest 2, and its been life changing. It's just an incredible product. I used a DK1 and DK2 back when they came out and the Quest 2 is like night and day. Everything is so much better. No screen door, wireless, plug and play, etc. I honestly didn't think VR would get to this point so quickly.

As for the life changing part, it's helping me work around some of my disabilities. Seems to be a common story in the VR space.

I know VR seems like a toy to many, but it really is changing people's lives. And I feel like modern VR started with Oculus.

So, from my heart, thank you.

greenie_beans• 5 years ago

Is this supposed to justify FB’s poor support for hacked accounts? Or are you just telling stories?

It’s a good story, at least.

rincebrain• 5 years ago

To me, it seems more like "this is how this isle of happiness exists despite everything" than "this is why the ocean of sadness exists".

malandrew6• 5 years ago

I pay for a cold calling service that lets me look up emails and phone numbers for many professionals of import. These days customer service gets two shots to get it right before I start calling the personal cell phone numbers of the C-suite, board of directors and everyone with the word director in their title. I'm absolutely over shitty customer service and it's not fair to subject customer service representatives to well deserved vitriol. Well paid execs getting the big bucks and making the decisions to under-invest in customer service and driving down defects? Fair game.

With the last company whose customer service messed up badly, I reached out to the head of e-commerce for the company. I was nice and pleasant and explained the dilemma, but then he tried to pass the buck back to support which did not have the resources to solve the problem to which I replied "You're the head of e-commerce for company X, the buck stops with you. This is your problem to resolve. If you don't take ownership, I'm perfectly capable of escalating this issue myself, first to A, your CEO (personal cell number (xxx) xxx-xxxx and personal email foo@bar.com), then to B (...), C (...), or D (...) on the board of directors, then E, the CEO of the company that owns your company (...), and then F, who is on his board of directors (...) and happens to live 2 miles from me.".

...boom, problem resolved immediately. Not just for me but for other customers. Changes were made to their website within days. When warranted, you just have to go absolutely nuclear and make it clear as day that solving your problem personally is far cheaper than you escalating the the issue to anyone and everyone with power at the company whose customer service is jerking you around.

You have to make the cost of not providing customer service well the first time around so expensive that they don't see any other option than to invest in doing things right the first time.

ChrisKnott• 5 years ago

Is there a techbro version of "Karen" because this is that.

I mean, seriously... buying people's personal contact details??

codezero7• 5 years ago

I’ve run support teams, even ones that are well taken care of, and there is no situation where your approach doesn’t hurt the support team and teach the executive nothing.

I’m happy to go into more detail, and/or offer advice on better approaches if you sincerely want it.

sadok• 5 years ago

What is the name of the cold calling service, for research purposes.

lenkite• 5 years ago

You are getting downvoted, but realistically your approach works. Had to do this myself a couple of times when desperate.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

This is a recognised and effective method after standard approaches have been exausted. It goes by selveral names, though "email executive carpet bomb" is one colourful and memorable term associated with it.

http://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive...

I've used this a few times myself. Again, after going through normal channels.

The mode where multiple executives are contacted (and perhaps a member or two of the press CC'd) is particularly effective as it plays off both internal office politics and the bad public relations spillover dynamic.

Remember too that such approaches aren't entirely self-serving. If you are having a specific issue, it's quite likely that many others are as well.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-contact-executive-customer-ser...

geofft• 5 years ago

Genuine question - why wasn't it cheaper for that company to drop you as a customer?

hippari• 5 years ago

What a convoluted solution to a convoluted problem, they should stick to the separated account thing from the start.

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

At least someone has finally come up with a business model to bring about widespread adoption of VR. The next stage will be to force buyers to actually use VR: occulus/facebook support only availible through the headaet. The final stage will be to randomly changing facebook passwords of anyone who doesnt currenlty have an occulus 4 on thier head.

oauea8• 5 years ago

It's nothing new that Facebook has been destroying their VR platform due to their awful account integration. This part is just hilarious.

esyir2• 5 years ago

Reports of their death are as usual overstated. Even looking at the steam hardware survey shows this, with quest 2s eating up almost all the market share.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

I disagree. I bought a Rift S before Facebook spit out their new requirements. I really had doubts as to what the ownership of Facebook would mean, but I was naive enough to still buy it.

I don't even care about the money so I won't sell it and probably will just throw it away. This killed this VR generation for me.

Technically it is awesome, would recommend everyone to try it at some point. But maybe spend a bit more for Valve or other hardware. There is lock-in too, but they don't make money with user data and have the superior environment.

The Quest series makes the cables go away and that is a big plus. While you can use the Steam VR while the Oculus environment is open, you will never get rid of the Facebook baggage. Hardware is indeed great, but hardware isn't everything.

exporectomy• 5 years ago

"The very first concern, after realizing that I was getting hacked, is that these folks might be able to gain access to my business's bank account,"

How can that be possible? Surely either the bank incorrectly trusts the hacker in which case it's the bank's error and they'll refund any stolen money, or the customer gave Facebook his secret bank credentials but that seems pretty weird and unlikely.

At least that's how it is in my country. Banks have simple obvious rules that you have to follow and then you're never on the hook for stolen money. Basically don't give your PIN number or password to anyone. You don't need to worry about all the complicated vulnerabilities that you do with websites which don't take responsibility for their security.

treeman793• 5 years ago

Wife’s account was hacked. 15 years old, thousands of photos. As in she got an email saying new login. I told her to go to app and change password. Nope. They had changed the email and phone number associated with it. That was that. Spent entire day on it and all we could get was the to have account locked. Completely impossible to talk to anyone. Nearly got the occulas to try and back door it.

I have backups of many but not all.

Lots of tears. Turns out almost all of her friends have lost their original accounts.

taurath• 5 years ago

Can’t we just scan a can of Mountain Dew and sing a slogan or something, this seems extreme

Yhippa• 5 years ago

Please drink a verification can

w-ll• 5 years ago

It's not coincidence that Baja Blast is back.

unixhero• 5 years ago

Haha

AppleCandy• 5 years ago

Need a Cuke with my FriendFace...

hutzlibu2• 5 years ago

I suppose this is referencing something, non US people do not get?

dageshi• 5 years ago

https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF

4chan post

ignoramous• 5 years ago

this seems extreme

This video would verify Tom Cruise: https://youtu.be/iyiOVUbsPcM

dang• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28044775.

cush• 5 years ago

Hmm. Turns out consumers are willing to pay money for goods and services. Who would have thought?

torgian• 5 years ago

The real travesty is that you have to have an account to use the headset.

Causality13• 5 years ago

Yes, and nearly everyone called it the moment Facebook bought Oculus. That any journalists at the time actually gave credence to Facebook's claims Oculus would remain independent is incredibly shameful.

As for me, my Rift sits unused in a box. The Oculus desktop software may be the worst piece of shit I've ever used and I can't lay eyes on it without wishing ill upon its developers.

FreakyT• 5 years ago

The OG Rift is still pretty great -- unlike the newer products, it doesn't require a Facebook account, and you can use it with SteamVR if you want and not really even bother with the Oculus software.

ynx2• 5 years ago

This is a horrible, rude, and insanely demeaning take.

Formerly one of those developers, finally got fed up with the beast and left. I continue to do VR dev.

1. The internals were actually some of the most robust software I've ever seen.

2. People who worked on it originally were some of the best devs I've ever seen across multiple companies

3. They uniformly got burnt out by incredible harassment from people who hated facebook transferring their hate to people who cared about games or VR - or, ironically, wanted to transition away from the facebook teams...because facebook.

4. Don't ascribe to developers what was clearly forced commandments from deeply flawed leadership decisions.

Those people doing the forcing in #4 are the first in line for blame. Not the developers. Maybe a little sprinkling of people similar to you.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 5 years ago

As the owner of a second-hand Rift that I've refused to update to avoid any Facebook account requirement, I have to agree. The hardware is pretty good, albeit a bit out of date now, but the Oculus software is garbage.

I have to manually use task manager to kill all its processes and the service when I'm done with it or it will constantly wake up, cause 2 of my monitors to momentarily blank while it does something, and prevent my computer from sleeping.

On start it always asks me to confirm the storage location, and then complains that it isn't available anyway.

The library keeps forgetting that I have Beat Saber and I'm forced to launch it through Steam instead.

The only game I actually "purchased" in the Oculus store, Sensor Bounds ($0 tool), is considered to be uninstalled and can't be downloaded due to above mentioned "storage location" issue.

Again, I have intentionally avoided updating this since Facebook instituted the account requirement so it might be better now.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Maybe... Although, if people didn't buy them then it wouldn't be a travesty.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

They don't really have any competitors in the market space Quest targets though.

mgraczyk• 5 years ago

People like to criticize ML, but my worst experience with Facebook was caused by a truly fucked up rule based system that banned my startup's Instagram account because the account operator changed the email address too quickly after merging it with a Facebook ads account. No machine learning, no probabilities, just "if (event that is usually sketchy) { ban with no appeal }"

Even as a Facebook employee, there was nothing I could do to help (I joined Facebook after leaving this startup, but still wanted to help because I founded it). Even determining the cause of the ban could have cost me my job (for good reason, don't want corruption and bribery, etc).

I understand the need to be cautious, but based on my analysis at the time the false positive rate was over 5% for this particular rule (based on later reactivations). Seemed way to high considering my startup had spent over 50K on FB ads in the connected account.

NoblePublius• 5 years ago

If the moral of the story is that you only get customer service when you are an actual customer, I say, yeah, duh.

W-Stool• 5 years ago

I honestly do not understand why any sentient person would have anything to do with Facebook at this point, VR headsets or not. It is just an awful company, period.

type_Ben_struct• 5 years ago

It is, but because the majority of people are unaware (or simply don’t care) then it can be hard to avoid. During lockdown I deleted all of my accounts on Facebook owned products, including WhatsApp, but I began to feel increasingly isolated.

Now life is more “normal”, it’s very difficult to meet someone in a bar/club and tell them you don’t have Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp without sounding dodgy. Sad reality I’ve found as a 25 year old single man in London.

newsyyswen• 5 years ago

Chin up, mate. In the US, I'm starting to hear a lot more "I wish I did that", and a lot less "that's weird what are you hiding?"

People are starting to come around as they and their family members start to have more acutely negative experiences with social media.

asadlionpk2• 5 years ago

If fb didn't exist tomorrow, I wouldn't have a way to contact my family and friends. It would be panic.

I also LOVE my quest 2. FB isn't perfect but hating it is getting boring now.

philote• 5 years ago

Genuinely curious, how is Facebook the only way you have to contact friends and family? Do you not have their email addresses or phone numbers? Or even physical addresses? What if you get locked out of your Facebook account?

okareaman• 5 years ago

Facebook should send a highly secure second password for safe keeping when an established (ie not new) account requests it. This password can be entered in emergencies like this to deactivate the account until proper ownership can be established.

Robotbeat• 5 years ago

Maybe this is good? The start of FB going from completely ad-driven to partially a for-pay service?

(I mean... the Quest 2 is probably being sold at a loss with the idea that it'll help make money from ads... but also, the game store, which is not as icky as their privacy-destroying ad business.)

bww• 5 years ago

He plans to return the unopened device, and while he's glad the strategy worked, he doesn't think it's fair. "The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said.

I think this guy just figured out the “customer” part of “customer service”. This, I think, illustrates the issue with Facebook well.

rkagerer• 5 years ago

One completely different business unit incentivizing customers of another? Antitrust implications?

monkpit• 5 years ago

I have stopped receiving messenger notifications whenever I have the Facebook app open. Like no unread bubble or anything. It has caused me to stop using the Facebook app almost completely (which, honestly, is probably a good thing).

But, the inner QA in me wants to file a ticket and hunt down a fix. It bugs me in the back of my mind. I’ve tried searching for a fix, but nobody seems to have the same exact issue. I’ve tried uninstalling both apps and reinstalling in various orders to no avail.

I wish I could just call or chat with support and get a meaningful conversation going with someone who could actually help (as opposed to reading from a script).

Sounds like I need to buy an Oculus.

aasasd• 5 years ago

Finally some use for VR.

croes• 5 years ago

Maybe because headset owners are actually customers instead of users. FBs other customers pay for ads.

ehsankia2• 5 years ago

I understand the struggle of trying to provide free support to billions of users, but more companies should provide a "pay a fee for real customer support" kinda hot line. Whatever price is costs to provide said support, honestly, many would be happy to pay for it.

Google sorta does this through Google One, it's 2-3$ a month and you also get some extra storage space. It's not perfect but you actually get to talk to a real human being.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't Facebook just offer paid subscriptions with premium support and extra goodies to everyone interested?

beezischillin3• 5 years ago

They would have to offer a service up to some standard.

beezischillin3• 5 years ago

Ironically enough I made a new Facebook account for my Quest2 because I was worried that should they ban my actual Facebook account, I would lose all my purchases... I don't care if it's against the TOS, I'm more likely to lose my main account at this point anyway.

okokwhatever• 5 years ago

Guys, I love Life Hacks created by common people so much! There's hope in humanity.

saos• 5 years ago

Morgan said the episode has made him realize just how embedded Facebook is in his life.

Yes and the reason you should delete.

quaesitor• 5 years ago

Why is this on the front page when my submission of the same thing from 40 days ago got completely buried?

Just curious.

Cybotron5000• 5 years ago

I _love_ my Mockulus Qwest no. 9. I’ve taken to wearing it to bed so I get to earn Zuckbucks whilst I sleep! [P.S. Palmer Eldritch is a genie, Suckerberg’s man boobs are the digital reincarnation of those of Augustus Caesar, and Peter Teak is a modern Medici (and all-round handsome rake)!]

tacocataco• 5 years ago

I don't really follow VR tech, were the people who already owned a occulus given a refund since their headset was useless without a Facebook account?

FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization

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