My experience with Feedback Hub has taken its weirdest turn yet—somebody at Microsoft edited a critical comment that I made earlier this week to simply read “hello there”, still under my name. The comment was not unreasonable, off-topic or anything I’d be ashamed of saying in public. At the end of day it doesn’t even matter—asking a big corp to make changes to their software is unlikely to yield results at the best of times. It’s simply very odd.

Before I elaborate let me share a little background. Feedback Hub, if you have managed to avoid it so far, is a perpetually-unfinished desktop app pre-installed on Windows. It’s a barebones forum where you can post bug reports or feature suggestions, vote for your favourites and add comments to them. Your activity is associated with your Microsoft account but you have very little ability to track your own actions. For example there is no way to review your past comments without paging through the discussion on each question ten at a time.

Although primitive, it does mostly work and Microsoft promotes this as the main way to get in their ear if you have any problems. Microsoft reps, Microsoft-associated subreddits and so on encourage you to use this tool to make reports. They claim to pay close attention to it even if they’re not responding to everything. This may be true at least in some product groups, although reading around online there is not a strong perception that users are being listened to. I’m a developer—I understand that most software has a backlog a mile long—so I’m prepared to cut Microsoft a little slack, having zillions of users who probably