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@ Miguel Afonso Caetano
2025-02-23 12:42:14
"HP's enshittificatory impulses run wild. They hunt relentlessly for ways to make things worse for their customers in order to make things better for themselves. Last week, they came up with a humdinger, even by their own standards. They announced that people who called their customer service line would be subject to mandatory 15-minute waits, even if there was a rep who was free to talk with them:
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During this mandatory 15-minute wait, customers would be bombarded with a recorded voice demanding that they solve their problems by consulting HP's website and its awful chatbots. In a competitive market, businesses can contain their customer service costs by making better products. In a monopolistic market like the printer racket, companies can deliberately introduce maddening antifeatures to their products, and then fob off the customers who reach such a peak of frustrated rage that they resort to calling a customer support number on chatbot that will use its spicy autocomplete to hallucinate nonexistent drivers and imaginary troubleshooting steps.
When I saw this, I thought, whelp, that's HP all right. Shameless.
But they're not entirely shameless. Within a day of Paul Kunert breaking the story in The Register, HP had reversed its policy, citing "feedback" (a corporate euphemism that means "fury"):
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This is a rare win for the forces of disenhittification and it deserves recognition. It turns out that in these Mangionean times, companies can actually be bullied into comporting themselves with marginally less sleaze and cruelty."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen
#HP #Enshittification #AI #Chatbots