Ask HN: How do you fight unjust bans from online platforms?

> GP's comment is useful. It is putting the finger in the wound.

This might be useful in regards to learning from this mistake in the future, but is absolutely useless as far as actionable advice "now" goes.

Consider a made up example, in which I go trekking without proper boots and end up spraining an ankle. Then the comment becomes essentially:

  Take a moment to appreciate how bad the idea of not wearing proper boots was in the first place and think about less dangerous ways to traverse terrain.

And yet, I'd still be injured that very moment, suggestions that are relevant in the future are meaningless as far as immediate action goes.

The circumstances are much the same way for people who have had their ad revenue cut off, their channels on video sharing platforms or social media platforms closed and are no longer able to do sponsorships or generate profit in other ways through their content, or people who are unable to use their e-mail accounts or other online identities to even log into other platforms, or just straight up cannot pay for anything because their platform of choice has now blocked them, or possibly is even holding their company's money hostage.

They need to put food (and money) on the table now, they need to get access to the services which have been cut off now (or ASAP), saying that they made the wrong choice in their reliance on those parties is truthful, but also not helpful. Furthermore, even the longer term suggestions won't always be actionable: they most likely won't find many alternatives to something like PayPal or Stripe, they will still use one ad network at the end of the day, they won't be able to host their own e-mail servers and so on.

Some advice that may be of more use in the long term to lessen the impact:

  - use a VPN (or multiple VPNs) to prevent IP address bans, or location restrictions
  - use separate browser instances/containers (or even something like Qubes OS) for various purposes, maybe VMs as an alternative
  - ideally you'd have different devices for purposes like that, for example, some companies have special laptops that are the only ones that can be used to access prod, treat accessing cloud services like that (which might help with fingerprinting, especially if on a separate VLAN as well)
  - have different accounts for different things if you use a single provider for more than one function (e.g. separate account for cloud services, another one for e-mail, another for ads)
  - use different providers for different things, when possible (e.g. one for your domains, one for your e-mails, get your servers in another one and so on)
  - use virtual credit cards whenever possible, or means of payment where you can have multiple accounts for different purposes (e.g. private purchases vs subscription services vs paying for domains and servers and so on, maybe separate accounts for income and expenses)
  - either have multiple different bank accounts or maybe go as far as to have different legal entities be in charge of these accounts (register companies if needed, so the platforms aren't dealing with "you" personally and instead only your company's account might accidentally be banned)

But if you haven't done any of that and still have problems right now, consider:

  - publicly reaching out to representatives of the company on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms where this issue will get visibility, their support is most likely automated and useless otherwise
  - doing that in niche communities like HN can also be good, given that some of their devs/representatives might lurk around (someone also suggested e-mailing people in the org directly)
  - if that doesn't work, name and shame, ideally with a blog post (or a YouTube video if you have a following there) that goes into details and doesn't paint the company in a good light, share it as much as possible
  - if the problem is that the company is being unreasonable (e.g. they refuse to accept your app in their store and claim that you need a way to report content in it, when you clearly do, which you explain to them, but they don't get it), don't complain and just play along, claim that you've done the necessary changes, maybe change the code a bit so the hashes are different and that's that, maybe add one of those pop-up tutorial messages like "See anything objectionable? You can report content here." on the first run.

(none of these are perfect, but they're in most cases better than doing nothing)

> (none of these are perfect, but they're in most cases better than doing nothing)

While they are helpful for avoiding deeper damage, I would summarize them with "Playing with fire without getting burned (probably)", while none of them do what is actually needed in order to fix the situation permanently: "Stop feeding the beast"

This is exactly what I hate about companies. They’re not human and often the “computer says no”. It boils my blood like no other.

Want to talk to someone? Try our help section. Clicked the right links to find a contact form? We’ll reply in 7-10 business days. Didn’t resolve your query? This email was sent from a no-reply email address. Pissed off? Even if you’re not we’ll repeatedly send you an unsolicited feedback request form for the next 3 weeks. Submitted your feedback? Psych! We sunk your time! It’s actually a multi-page form: now spend more time answering questions on inf-1 dimensions that our agent served you.

There has to be a better way. I’m not convinced that software is it.