I am in India. And was not looking for tech support but you take on what to make of this. I never ask for tech support from a community which is not meant for this.
Without a doubt, some people have issues, but I don't think you can gage the overall reliability of a product based solely on a support forum. No one is going there just to post that their system is running properly.
Possibly because complaining on hacker news and calling people incompetent on threads they have no reason to personally follow isn't an optimal strategy for receiving tech support.
I'm going to be honest with you: I've been on the receiving end of many bad tech support forums.
The worst one is Apple's. There's a reason why they're so famous for their snobby customer service: they don't need to put in any effort because they know most people are going to throw their hands up and buy a new computer instead of trying to fix whatever issue they have.
But I also can't stand Microsoft's forums, because there's always at least one guy who chimes in with a condescending tone, like he thinks he knows more than you do about your problem. And then there's Google, which doesn't even have a real forum at all—just an unresponsive help page that sends you back and forth between different sections until you give up out of sheer frustration.
That's such a strange rule to have for a tech instance. Is there really no better reason for it than that people want to bitch about things without actually wanting a suggestion on how to solve their issues?
Thanks for your reply - I didn't understand. I do now.
I won't bother to ask questions about technical matters here again, nor to ask if people I respect are having the same problems, nor to try to raise awareness of possible issues with the technology that many of us use every day.
Nor will I talk about questions of how to investigate whether recent Windows updates have code specifically to destabilise Chrome, or other things that I would've thought of interest to the HN community.
No, instead I'll watch the countless discussions of whether it's the idea or the execution, more discussion of whether it's better to go to school/college/university or to go straight into business, or yet another submission of some other much loved favorite.
Never mind that I've tried several technical forums and they are all bloody useless. Never mind that this was, I thought, somewhere that people with similar interests occasionally helped each other.
It's a little bit their fault. They host forums but appear not to tend to them. There's endless trash there from external "experts" that rarely engage with the specific problem and have no particular advice beyond sfc /scannow.
Good troubleshooting advice can be found but good gravy is it hard to dig up.
I did worry that people might feel I was trying to get free tech support. It's not really a problem I need to fix - I bought another adapter. I posted because though the behaviour seemed illogical to me I figured that there were people who could make sense of it.
But good lord, sometimes trying to get technical help on the Internet turns into this rabbithole of people who are specifically looking for ways not to be helpful. "Did you really want that?" "Did you consider alternatives?" "What you really have is an XY problem."
And? In this hypothetical situation where they “aren’t around”, I don’t think that people searching for answers to tech support issues are high on their list of concerns, and - probably - almost certainly those of the forum members.
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