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Forbes Lists Top Corporate Hate Web Sites
windowpain writes "You've seen them. Maybe you've made one, like Walmart-blows.com or Paypalsucks.com. Now Forbes.com has a 'Special Report' devoted to what it considers the best of them. 'The following nine sites--there were ten, but one went unexpectedly dark during the editing of this story--are the crème de la crème of online rage. Note that we substantially cleaned up some of the posts, editing out odd capitulation schemes, iffy grammar and plain incoherence. Apparently blinding anger does not go hand in hand with dotting your i's and crossing your t's.' Maybe this will become an annual thing like the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500." (I wonder what a capitulation scheme is.)
I like the way this was PR handled from UPS for the website UnitedPackageSmashers.com:
Company Says:
"We do know of the site. Because we live in a free society, people have the right to their opinion, and we recognize that people will use the Internet to voice their opinion. We believe that customers can get much more valuable and accurate information from our site."
Thats much better than a legal notice claiming a violation of some act, and gives them a leg up in my book. On a side note I wonder how forbes has/would handle something like forbessucks.com.
I once worked in the shipping/logistics business and while that may have shocked and disappointed you, it's standard practice. Even a broken CRT must first be delivered before a claim can be filed on it. Sounds bizzare? Why should it? Distribution hubs aren't the portion of a large organization like UPS to handle damage, they just move the stuff, unless as happened at one of our hubs, the cartons themselves are damaged. (Someone lowered a fork on top of a pallet of Sun servers, rookies, sheesh.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Someone had that name a few years ago, looks like it's down now. They're still bastards.
What law against concealed weapons? I know many individuals who exercise their right to lawfully carry a concealed firearm.
Obvoiusly, you've never have a gov't job.
-Valiss
...we were expected to be suprised, but it's not suprising.
Just an example from the Paypal part of the report:
Company Says: "We believe that people have a right to express their opinion. PayPal welcomes constructive criticism from members to help us continue to improve our service through our community discussion boards, chat rooms and Voices program. The problem with complaint sites is that the issues reported are sometimes out-of-date and have long since been resolved. Other times, customers may write complaints on the sites without trying to get their issues resolved through our customer service channels first. As a result, we can't confirm the accuracy of the information on these third-party sites. And we've found that they are not interested in providing a balanced view." (emphasis added)
Why can't they confirm the accuracy of the information?
Sure, they might not know if Customer Service Person A really hung up on a customer, but certainly they can look into some of these issues. Unless they're the one company in the world that doesn't monitor customer service calls. They have access to this information.
Why do they expect the site to be fair and balanced? When I complain to a company, I'm not being fair and balanced. I'm advocating for myself against the company. Yes, I want to reach an equitable solution, but these sites have a lot of people who weren't able to reach that equitable solution.
That's a problem for any company and you'd think they'd actually listen. (Yeah, I know.)
I realize there's a lot of bull on those websites. But at the same time, there are also patterns of problems. No company is perfect, and here is a chance for those problems to get past the customer service filter (who are the problem a certain percentage of the time).
What I don't get is why in the world any company wouldn't say something like "Yes, we're aware of those websites and in fact take their concerns into consideration", even if they don't really mean it. They just write those people off as "Never gonna be customers so skrew it: those people are stupid", but apparently don't realize that those people used to be customers, and other current customers will eventually leave them as well.
That's because you (and I) have thousands of Dell PCs. You're not under the same service contract, or even talking to the same service personnel, as a home user.
"Agreed. I'm surprised that their "forced illegal door search" policy hasn't resulted in a shooting, or at least a firearm being drawn."
Fry's electronics has the same policy, in both cases I just hold up my hand and say "no thank you" as I walk out the door when they try to look in my bags.
If they want to stop me they can, but then i can sue for false imprisonment.
I refuse to be treated like a criminal for shopping at someone's store (even though they do just by trying to stop me at the door).
Right, because there is no difference between non-commercial copying for personal use, which wasn't even illegal in the original Copyright Act, and shamelessly profiting from someone else's work without so much as giving them credit, and defrauding your customers in the process. None whatsoever.
Slashdot's hatred is too hard to pinpoint.
I know what you mean. It's almost as if Slashdot isn't just one person but a whole bunch of different people saying different things. Weird.
Dude, you just perfectly illustrated his point. Even down to the shrill tone.
And you did it without a hint of irony, too.
Hmm, I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that you would do nothing of the sort. Talking shit on an internet forum is very easy, walking the walk is harder. If you really were such a badass, you would have no need to sit behind a keyboard and try to prove it.
Maybe in your fascist police state, but not in some of ours'. There are states out here in the "fly over" zone which have a fairly low idiot population where things like the Bill of Rights is still regarded with reverence.
Before you spout off about guns being bad, take note that the crime rate in states without concealed carry permits have much much more crime per capita.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I wanted a domain name that expressed my distaste for suck.com. If I registered com-sucks.com, I could have the subdomain suck.com-sucks.com.
Actually, com-sucks.com would be a good one to register for all the hate-sites. There are so many companies that suck, why pay $15 for each one?
The enemies of Democracy are
One things for sure: if you're boycotting Best Buy, then that makes it a safer place for me!
Look through my post history. I'll give you a while. I can wait.
See that? That's me regularly posting comments that are pro-Microsoft and (shock, horror!) getting modded up for them. (Or at least not getting modded down.)
Is there a "party line" on slashdot? Yes, absolutly, 100%. However, if you post intelligent, relevant commentary, it doesn't matter if you go against the grain now and then. The moderation / metamod system on slashdot is very well done and works as it should far more often than not.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Now, if we can do anything more for-- What? You say we can? And all it will cost is our social security system?
For what it's worth, Leo, I tend to seek out your posts in a thread and read them, because I find them interesting and generally well thought out. Plus, despite my lack of interest in Apple, your extremely detailed and technical knowledge of the company and its technology impresses me. I feel like you frequently teach me new things.
But it doesn't surprise me that many of your posts are modded down for "not toeing the party line", as it were.
The examples I'm sure we're both thinking of: you're as rabidly pro-IP as many Slashdotters are rabidly anti-IP, and post frequently to that effect; you're extremely pro-Apple, but to the exclusion of other, competing technologies (in other words, you're prone to insulting other OSs and their users).
Now, your opinions are generally well thought out, even though I don't particularly agree with some of them. The thing that gets you modded down, I think, is your delivery. You come across as having a chip on your shoulder.
Sometimes it also seems as though you not so privately think of yourself as being much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of people on here.
Now, for what it's worth, my impression of you from your posts is that you do have a chip on your shoulder of some sort, and that you are much smarter and better informed than the vast majority of the people on here.
However, what you no doubt think of as calling an idiot an idiot (goodness knows its a sacred hacker tradition) often comes off as offensive and belittling, and this is what I think has people modding you as Troll every so often (despite your clearly not being one).
Essentially, it's the delivery that matters.
Now, you're probably thinking that you shouldn't need to sugar coat your opinions just because they're unpopular here, and in a perfect world, you'd be right. But while we geeks pride ourselves on our lack of social graces, the truth of the matter is that the Slashdot community, despite its inherently geeky nature, is a community like any other, with its own set of norms. And like most communities, it is mostly made up of leaders and followers, and you're expressing opinions that go against the grain.
So you have two options, really. You can post whatever you want, and bugger the moderators. Frankly, someone as lucid and intelligent as yourself will probably always have karma that is good enough to be able to burn it with an occasional Troll or Flamebait mismoderation. Of course, this path (the one I see you've taken so far) has the side effect of pushing some of your posts below the thresholds of heathens that don't read at -1, thus lessening their impact. But you can be as cutting and arrogant as you want to be.
The other possibility is to act as though the people you're talking to aren't sheep, but actually are capable of making their own opinions, and are entitled to them. You can say exactly the same thing, but you'll need to establish, at least in the sous-texte of your post, that you are not actually all that different from them. In a sense, you're pushing to win them to your side.
It would be a perfect world if moderators actually moderated based on the insight of the post, how informative it is, etc, but as you've noticed, they don't; they usually just mod things up that they agree with. So you need to make it sound as though you basically agree with them, or at least think they are reasonably intelligent folks, but are just trying to show them a different way of framing the problem in question.
Because let's face it: if you meet someone rabidly anti-IP, your rabidly pro-IP stance isn't going to win them over. If you meet someone that hates Apple and thinks they're the next evil overlord, telling them "It ain't so and you're a retard" isn't going to win them over.
If you don't care about winning them over, then you're not having a discussion, you're just jacking off on Slashdot.
So you might want to rethink your angle, a bit
Slashdot doesn't suck, but just like the internet, the signal to noise ration has been degrading ever since johnny everyman joined.
Plus the anti-Bush, anti-America, Anti-God, Anti-Microsoft, anti-slashdot-moderator, anti-conservative attitude is getting very tiring.
So where's the new slashdot? The one that hasn't sunk to the lowest common denominator yet?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.