For those of us old enough, there was a time when the Internet seemed like magic. The 1990s and early 2000s were full of innovation and surprise and maybe most importantly, almost endless investment capital. This allowed the Internet to expand at a crazy fast rate and develop into every niche it could spread into. It was an amazing time, and memory now has faded as to what the world was like before then.
Today, the Internet does not seem like magic, unless you include hexes and evil spells. For those of us that work in it, there’s definitely a sense that the Internet is breaking in thousands of tiny ways, and every week is another new surprise to be fixed or worked around or just a plain old ending of the process. It’s been that way for a few years, but 2024 was definitely powerful in this sense. A lot of this is due to the gathering tightness of revenue in the Internet world, which leads to the scaling back of effort (and assumed responsibility). You see this in the biggest players, such as Google and Amazon, to the critical infrastructure providers, such as hosting and connectivity companies, all the way to the smallest players in the environment.
Reality has set in across the board. What was once overreach in scale are now gaps in the synapses. The Internet is, in many ways, in a decaying state.
Where you see this most are the areas where humans are needed, and that is why the clamor for AI was so loud this year. For example: customer support. If you’ve ever run into a problem where documentation fails to deliver a fix for your problem with an entity that has cut back on customer support, you are probably already nodding your head in agreement. If you need customer support on the Internet right now, you know it is a budget cut target in a LOT of places. We see it with software companies and web hosting companies, both in the quantity of time provided for it and the quality of experience providing it. We see it with online subscription services, with computer software providers, it’s a very common issue out there.
And that has become a much more critical problem now, because of the scaling back of effort. There are so many issues these days where “a problem” could be caused from multiple sources. It could be the software, it could be the hosting, it could be other software actually interfering with the first software, it could be the network of the viewer/recipient, it could be their software… troubleshooting alone is difficult these days. You can dig and dig, find out the potential issue, request some help from whatever provider could be involved, and… crickets. Or the support effort is a repeat of what you already found in the documentation, or it is a point to another component of the puzzle that ISN’T THEM, or it is just shuffling of papers with no real results. You find yourself left in the gap intentionally created by vendors with their very limited customer support. Good customer service is increasingly rare on the Internet.
One way to try to leverage better customer service is to quit relying on free services. Customer service is just a cost to them, and a cost that doesn’t generate directly attributable revenue from the requester. When you are relying on something, be the customer, do not be just the user. We need to fund customer service better.
Secondly, if you pay decent money for something online and the customer service is subpar – be vocal about it. Complain specifically about how it is substandard. And if that doesn’t make a difference, vote with your feet. Move away from the vendor. Accepting poor customer service just insures that the entire online environment is guaranteed it as a business practice going forward. Poor customer service is a business decision – it is not an accident or a symptom of something. It is a prioritized decision by the vendor, and we have reached time for it to be seen as a costly business decision for internet service vendors that practice it.
And that means we – the customers of these wide and various services – have to be willing to pay for customer service in the first place. It is a vicious cycle we have set up on the Internet – the expectation of free or cheap service due to the funding provided by investment (which frankly is sometimes quite mindless), which eventually means the investors want their money back so prices go up and expenditures are cut (such as customer service), and when done on a macro scale leaves all sorts of previously supported connections of function (which is exactly what the Internet is) with substantial gaps of no or very little quality support or maintenance. Until the cycle is broken on both the customer and the provider side, this will just continue to increase.
In other words: 2025 is not going to be better in this arena, and likely to be worse. And if somebody tells you AI is going to fix it, well, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Money, leading to effort, is the solution.