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

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

#191

Post by ethbr1 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #33
constantcrying wrote: post #23

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.

Agreed. It's based on accepting personal payment to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants. Sounds like low-key bribery to me. I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.

> to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants

If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.

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

#192

Post by ranger207 »

ranger207 wrote: post #187
MerManMaid wrote: post #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 exam…

Before this existed, it's likely that most internal requests are from employees genuinely trying to help people. Sure, it's possible there's some employees already taking money to submit internal forms rather than personally evaluating the applicant's morals, but it's unlikely that it's very widespread. Formalizing the process like this website does makes it much more likely that most submissions to internal forms fo…

Self reply to start a new thread of conversation, the lack of consideration of these factors is incredibly stereotypical of "Valley techbros" and the mismatch in values between people who'd make this kind of site and people who'd find this kind of site awful is why many people outside of Silicon Valley aren't as enthused about tech companies as the tech companies themselves are

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

#193

Post by ethbr1 »

romanhn wrote: post #45
JohnMakin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhe…

'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this.

I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.

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

#194

Post by ethbr1 »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #109
crmd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to imagine how insanely good Google’s customer service would be if no company including them captured more than 5-10% of market share.

Yep, it feels like them being a monopoly effectively kills every incentive for them to try harder. It's reminiscent of bureaucracy in third world countries where you will not get your passport issued or renewed until you grease enough palms of the right people who feel entitled to a certain level of corruption for their respective role.

> until you grease enough palms of the right people who feel entitled to a certain level of corruption for their respective role.

The capitalist way of looking at that would be they maximally decreased the market price of their service, and the bribery is simply accounting for externalities that you weren't paying for in that market price.

Or in other words, bribery is their support-funding model.

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

#195

Post by JoshTriplett »

naasking wrote: post #189
armchairhacker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others pointed out, this is a huge problem in the making. Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the e…

> Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted I don't know why you think people who deserve to be suspended would be reinstated. You act as if these people have no agency or discretion as to what accounts to reinstate.

Because there's a monetary incentive.

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

#196

Post by ethbr1 »

jannyfer wrote: post #141
maxrmk wrote: 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.

Plot twist: this is a honeypot marketplace designed to catch employees selling access like this.

If the site's smart, they'd simply verify by challenge/correlation.

Spin up a random account, get it banned, then ask an anonymous "employee" to get it unbanned.

If it is? Verification by result.

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

#197

Post by dylan604 »

bagels wrote: post #175
dylan604 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Raise what as a serious problem? People taking bribes to get people unbanned? People getting banned?

Companies make decisions that ultimately affect their users in a negative manner including when the company's decision is a mistake. Not having a real method of correcting the mistake is a huge sign to me that says company is not someone that I want to do business with at all. I understand mistakes happen, but claiming absolute immunity and acting like no mistake was made is the absolute worst customer service position to take.

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

#198

Post by bragr »

This is commercial bribery in most places.

>California Code, Penal Code - PEN § 641.3

>(a) Any employee who solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept money or any thing of value from a person other than his or her employer, other than in trust for the employer, corruptly and without the knowledge or consent of the employer, in return for using or agreeing to use his or her position for the benefit of that other person, and any person who offers or gives an employee money or any thing of value under those circumstances, is guilty of commercial bribery.

>(b) This section does not apply where the amount of money or monetary worth of the thing of value is two hundred fifty dollars ($250) or less.

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

#199

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

The description_text that is supposed to only be visible to verified tech workers is exposed publicly in the response to one of the 'msearch' requests if you inspect the network requests using your browser's developer tools.

I'm not familiar with the details of the bubble.io platform that this seems to be based on, but from a very casual look, it looks terrifying from a security viewpoint. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more data leaks.

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

#200

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

bragr wrote: post #198

This is commercial bribery in most places. >California Code, Penal Code - PEN § 641.3 >(a) Any employee who solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept money or any thing of value from a person other than his or her employer, other than in trust for the employer, corruptly and without the knowledge or consent of the employer, in return for using or agreeing to use his or her position for the benefit of that other person,…

Sounds like the law already provides a convenient solution (in the form of a "<=250" constraint on the bid field).
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