I suspect that a lawsuit-happy society is a good part of it.
Having been on the other side a few times (the one who quietly fixed an error without acknowledgement), there are a number of other factors at work as well:
1. Sometimes, fixing the error is within my power but talking to the customer is not. For example, when I was at Google, I was an engineer - fixing a bug was something I could do merely with a code review, but talking to the outside world was forbidden by company policy, and I didn't even know who the people were that were authorized to speak to the outside world on company behalf.
2. Very often, the error is one of several dozen in a bug queue, and you just want to fix it and move on. Talking to someone - particularly a customer - is a big mental context switch; it means that 5 other people won't get their errors fixed at all.
3. Sometimes the error is a distraction from your normal job duties, you feel like you can do a good deed by taking 5 minutes of your day to tweak a config file, but you don't want it to blow up any larger than that, and usually once a user has your attention they feel free to ask you to fix all their other annoyances. This is a big problem with working on open-source software; I've never yet had a good deed take less than 5x the amount of time I budgeted for it, and usually involve a few people mad at me. (I often find out later that many other people are very appreciative, but the latter never seem to speak up).
I think the fundamental problem is a mismatch between our expectations as human beings, which are shaped by millenia of face-to-face interactions, and the reality of modern society, where we are just a ticket number to a faceless corporation. Internet companies like Google and Facebook have roughly a million users per engineer working on the product; Whatsapp has 50 million. Imagine the scale of insignificance of any one problem; by the numbers, a user of a consumer product is roughly as consequential as a hair on your head. That could be why we get such shitty service from basically every major consumer company out there.
Having been on the other side a few times (the one who quietly fixed an error without acknowledgement), there are a number of other factors at work as well:
1. Sometimes, fixing the error is within my power but talking to the customer is not. For example, when I was at Google, I was an engineer - fixing a bug was something I could do merely with a code review, but talking to the outside world was forbidden by company policy, and I didn't even know who the people were that were authorized to speak to the outside world on company behalf.
2. Very often, the error is one of several dozen in a bug queue, and you just want to fix it and move on. Talking to someone - particularly a customer - is a big mental context switch; it means that 5 other people won't get their errors fixed at all.
3. Sometimes the error is a distraction from your normal job duties, you feel like you can do a good deed by taking 5 minutes of your day to tweak a config file, but you don't want it to blow up any larger than that, and usually once a user has your attention they feel free to ask you to fix all their other annoyances. This is a big problem with working on open-source software; I've never yet had a good deed take less than 5x the amount of time I budgeted for it, and usually involve a few people mad at me. (I often find out later that many other people are very appreciative, but the latter never seem to speak up).
I think the fundamental problem is a mismatch between our expectations as human beings, which are shaped by millenia of face-to-face interactions, and the reality of modern society, where we are just a ticket number to a faceless corporation. Internet companies like Google and Facebook have roughly a million users per engineer working on the product; Whatsapp has 50 million. Imagine the scale of insignificance of any one problem; by the numbers, a user of a consumer product is roughly as consequential as a hair on your head. That could be why we get such shitty service from basically every major consumer company out there.