YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Apple is killing its Support Community forum next week

27 points saikatsg 51 minutes ago 15 comments

garciasn 23 minutes ago | parent

Maybe when it started back in the late 90s it was a bastion of great information; however, I have never found a single answer that was worthwhile on there when landing from a search engine query.

If anything, this is likely flooding LLMs with incomplete/invalid/useless information and it's just time they deprecated it in favor of something more modern and useful.

drbscl 22 minutes ago | parent

A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved

doctorpangloss 6 minutes ago | parent

They someone fix one thing and break another in Home every release. And iMessages.... what a piece of shit.

vandenthieren 2 minutes ago | parent

Which reflects badly on Apple. Closing a forum with such embarrassing entries is cheaper than fixing anything. Apple has become a ludicrous shit show.

sho 19 minutes ago | parent

Good. It's useless - completely, utterly useless except as some sort of anthropological meta-study of the many and varied ways tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places, the weirdos who apparently hang out there purporting to help them (and almost never doing so, except by accident) all downstream of a mega-corporation's Web 2.0 fever dream of not having to pay anything for customer support.

Now that I type all that out, I hope it's not completely deleted. Leave it to science.

BLKNSLVR 4 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like it was a failed service from the start and they've only just now realized it's still there, now polluting AI answers - not hallucinated after all, borne from the worthless apple support forum.

toast0 3 minutes ago | parent

> tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places,

Shouldn't the vendor support community forums be the right place to get help for problems with a product?

I agree that they don't seem very effective. But where are they supposed to go?

spiderfarmer 14 minutes ago | parent

This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.

Zenul_Abidin 12 minutes ago | parent

You could never get an actual engineer to reply on those threads anyway. Whenever I had issues with my iPhone, I always find links to this forum and get disappointed.

underseacables 8 minutes ago | parent

This. It was always some customer service person, and generally referenced other documents that were not helpful.

But I think this is indicative of Apple, and other large companies: they don't really want to deal with the customer. I do give Apple credit that their phone support is pretty good, but most companies would rather you give up then actually speak to someone and get help.

https://imgur.com/a/PhA5iT3

colesantiago 7 minutes ago | parent

I could never get my issue resolved by an Apple Engineer via the support forums anyway.

So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.

jordemort 10 minutes ago | parent

oh no, where will I go to have some Apple enthusiast give a confidently wrong answer to my technical question now?

just kidding, the Genius Bar is still open

kjellsbells 9 minutes ago | parent

good, can we kill the Microsoft one now? not every problem needs a new hardware driver and an sfc /scannow but that's what the community seems to have settled on for the last 15 years

rootsudo 8 minutes ago | parent

Sign of the times, but like the google forums, it's all "contact google support" / "contact apple support" with little insight outside of apple administrative policies.

mort96 2 minutes ago | parent

There's also a ton of "fixes" which don't work.

My most annoying long-term peeve with macOS is how long it takes to switch spaces with the touchpad gesture. It takes like 1.5 seconds from the gesture starts until a window on the target space gains focus. It was bad on 60Hz laptops but it's much worse on their ProMotion laptops.

There are lots and lots of support forum threads about this issue. Almost all of them have at least one person saying it can be fixed by turning on Reduce Motion in settings. It can't. Reduce Motion turns it from a 1.5 second slide animation to a 1.5 second cross-fade animation. I don't think the people suggesting fixes there even make an attempt at understanding the issue or trying out their proposed fix.