Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of a lot less forgivable for a product you pay actual money to use.
The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.
FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist.
When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist.
The button isn't there.
Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
> It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight.
It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned.
Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen.
PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes.
Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal.
Nice if it were that easy. But for business accounts you want to delete one (or more) licenses. Look at the form 2/3 of the way down and ask if this makes sense.
There should be integration tests for documentation.
Maybe some machine learning could be applied to that?
Maybe I should set that up on some cloud service.
Let me check the documentation for how to do that...
That's biting off way too much. You have to realize the scope of the actual problem "making humans understand something they previously do not understand". If you can do that you might as well apply it to fixing education instead.
One of the things sandstorm.io does which makes a lot of sense, is that they regularly commit changes to their docs within the PRs that change the actual software. It's not integration tested, mind you, but the general practice means they do a pretty good job keeping their docs updated.
The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.