Umm, no? Absolutely not. If you lie to someone in conducting a business transaction, that is textbook fraud. You can tell them "sorry, I can't share that information about our business process to protect trade secrets". You absolutely cannot say "we do it this way" when you don't do it this way. It doesn't matter if the output is the same.
You don't know, and don't need to know, what details mattered to your customer. If they're deciding between two different vendors, and you told them one detail of your process that happened to help them decide to go with you, it doesn't matter what that detail was. You defrauded them.
The AI vs human detail of this specific case is an irrelevant distraction. Imagine choosing between two cloud hosting services, one of which says it is powered by solar panels, the other says it's powered by the regular grid. In reality, both are powered by the grid. The customer never specified it, but environmental impact ended up being the deciding factor for them going with the first company. They were just defrauded.
Imagine two companies selling Widget X, which a buyer wants to buy to use as a part in their product. Both companies manufacture Widget X in China, but Company A says they make it in Mexico. A customer decides to order from Company A because one of their executives is Mexican and a bit patriotic. It doesn't matter that that's the only reason and it's frankly not a very good one; they were still defrauded.
If, as the original post claimed, they told their customers they were using AI, and they were in fact having a human hand-typing the summaries, that's fraud. It's insane that anyone would try to defend this.
There are many times a service like that might not be fraud. For example, if you never explicitly said it was an AI, and if every detail of the service remains the same, from the customer's perspective.
The privacy implications alone make the difference between a human sitting in on your meeting and an actual AI enough to call this fraud. Giving it a fancy name doesn't change that.
Hey, I genuinely appreciate that. I thought that this subscription was added under Automattic's watch, but as you say it has been a confusing process so I could very well be wrong.
I've already reached out to your customer service via email including my account info, so if you could use that to get my account upgraded, I would be very grateful. I received a pretty swift response to my first enquiry, but your customer service representative on that occasion pretty much said "lol sucks to be you, maybe you should upgrade?" I considered this an incredibly unacceptable response, and said as much, again pretty quickly (all three initial emails went through within half an hour). It has been days since my second email and I have not received a reply. If you are, as you say, trying to do right by people now, your customer service does not seem to be on the same page as you.
There are also dozens of users in the same situation as me who have spoken up on Pocket Cast's official forums, and elsewhere on social media. It may be worth getting the customer service representatives on your forums on the same page as you, because so far they have been giving the same "lol, just upgrade" type response that I got in email. And getting someone to extend the same offer to users making the complaint on Reddit and other social media.
> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
The link I shared makes it quite clear that "puffery" that nobody is reasonably expected to take literally does not count.
Being told that the app you paid for would be a one-time payment, and then having the service deliberately degraded to try and force you into a subscription model, is clearly not puffery.
They didn't warn us ahead of time that there would be ads. The patch notes didn't even mention the ads! Shifty Jelly used to have legendary patch notes, but it's been a long time since that was true. And since app stores don't actually let you downgrade to a previous version, your comment is simply untrue.
I don't think a trust should be necessary. A plan for longterm sustainability should be.
The streaming video service Nebula, for example, has a lifetime membership. The company was very straightforward with potential customers: this is not their best deal, it's explicitly meant for people who want to help support the company (or who prefer not to have ongoing subscription costs), and they are doing it as an alternative to seeking outside investment money. The money they raise won't go into a trust, but into expanding the business in the same way a company might if it went to seek venture capital.
At the time I signed up for it, it cost roughly 10 years' worth of subscriptions.
They are (or were, at the time they had that slogan) an Australian company. I am an Australian citizen. Under Australian Consumer Law, an advertisement is absolutely legally binding.
You don't know, and don't need to know, what details mattered to your customer. If they're deciding between two different vendors, and you told them one detail of your process that happened to help them decide to go with you, it doesn't matter what that detail was. You defrauded them.
The AI vs human detail of this specific case is an irrelevant distraction. Imagine choosing between two cloud hosting services, one of which says it is powered by solar panels, the other says it's powered by the regular grid. In reality, both are powered by the grid. The customer never specified it, but environmental impact ended up being the deciding factor for them going with the first company. They were just defrauded.
Imagine two companies selling Widget X, which a buyer wants to buy to use as a part in their product. Both companies manufacture Widget X in China, but Company A says they make it in Mexico. A customer decides to order from Company A because one of their executives is Mexican and a bit patriotic. It doesn't matter that that's the only reason and it's frankly not a very good one; they were still defrauded.
If, as the original post claimed, they told their customers they were using AI, and they were in fact having a human hand-typing the summaries, that's fraud. It's insane that anyone would try to defend this.