Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

plsfix.co

151–160 of 423 posts

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#151
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've posted about it a few times, a few years ago my entire Google account was locked out for "fraud" with Google Pay. Lost my email, DNS, GoogleFI (my CELLPHONE) access. Sent them a picture of my license 3 times on a form they make you fill out (which you have to google, they don't tell you anything, you just can't log in). Never received a response. I'd kind of like this for stuff like that. Bypassing horrendous or…

That's terrible! I'm curious if you pay for any Google services, do you get better support? For example, I know people who pay for Youtube Premium just so they don't have to watch ads, or spend a few dollars on GCP for personal projects.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#152

Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.

For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.

Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules.

The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept seems like… performance art protest or something. Building a platform to bribe your way through the opaque customer non-service system of these companies is either low corruption or high art.

100% - I see lots of comments saying things like "Don't you know companies would fire you for this??" which to me sounds a little bit like "Don't you know you shouldn't eat babies??" after reading A Modest Proposal. On the other hand, I guess life does imitate art sometimes...

Yeah, my initial response was: this is wrong on so many levels, and I love that it is out there for public to see

100 art points.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as someone who works for one of these companies, no fucking way would it be worth the risk to me.

Here's my question not to you specifically but the royal you of any bigTech employees reading this forum or similar: why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this…

So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes. They're just gullible enough to believe what they read on the internet, and take action on it.

The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job, and the expertise to predict what the implications of doing the policy changes asked by the complainers would be. Not just how much it'd cost directly, but the second order effects on abuse from making different tradeoffs.

So let's say that you want to give high-touch customer support to billions of free accounts? Not only is it going to be fabulously expensive, but it's going to be abusable as hell. The abusers will quickly learn just what kind of sob story will have the best chance of fooling the humans, and get their accounts falsely unbanned or even use it to hijack the accounts of others. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the customer service reps have no agency. But then you're paying tens or hundreds of millions / year just to have humans execute a script.

And these predictions will be a lot more credible than those from random employees parrotting social media posts and making vague claims about potential brand damage or loss of trust. Ignoring the complaints is going to be a pretty easy choice for an exec.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#156
Perhaps its just me, but I feel like a lot of users are missing the forest for the trees here. Services such as these only pop up when legitimate solutions prove ineffective at addressing the problem.

To me, these services are more indicative of "Big Tech" failing to create effective appeal processes to meet their consumer's demand... While I'm sure there isn't a lot of money in it, it'd be great for Big Tech to examine how they could improve on this front.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#157

This is a clever hack to solve the problem. It’s essentially an underground market for customer support, converting company employees into clandestine customer service reps. Better than nothing, but think about how silly that sounds. Tech companies know customer support doesn’t scale and they don’t have a strong enough incentive to hire customer service people. Automating away these “cost centers” of labor is largely…

It’s not clever at all. It doesn’t solve the core issue, which is identity / ownership verification. You’re conflating clever with “something I’d find personally useful”.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#158
post #18

On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired. On the other: $150 I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. I can’t imagine risking that for what is essentially an hours pay for most tech roles there.

> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help: When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day. A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help…

That two letter tool at meta for profile access?

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#159

Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.

For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.

There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.

Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

#160
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help: When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day. A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help…

> and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation Sounds like they need better controls, there shouldn't be ways to inadvertently access personal data and violate someone's privacy. Particularly not at such a mature company.

I don't work there but I imagine when this happens it's because the employee needs access to the resource for some legit reasons, but accessing it for illegitimate reason is what amounts to the violation. So access controls here would amount to reviewing the reasons for the access.
Post reply on HN