> As an aside, I am curious the motivation for customers to staff huge company support forums
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).
For a minor explanation, support is just prohibitively expensive no matter what you do, and quite frankly the only people actually capable of support is going to be the devs who made the product for various bugs/issues, and that is just a handful of people, some of whom have left the company even.
Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.
Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.
I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.
A lot of people have forgotten that you can actually call companies and they do/will assist.
Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.
I believed, until you said PayPal support was helpful. PayPal support is what I envision the DMV in Soviet Russia was like.
The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.
That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...
I generally hate Paypal and will happily shit on them at any opportunity for all kinds of great reasons (cough, blatant theft of client funds for completely arbitrary reasons), I also don't trust them with anything but the as-temporary-as-possible storage of the least possible amount of payment funds when I have no other choice. However, weirdly, on the few occasions in which I've had to contact their customer support, they've been surprisingly friendly and helpful so far. But maybe I've just been lucky.
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).