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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

#311

Post by devman0 »

ricktdotorg wrote: post #283
kelnos wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I think it should be evident by the number of cases we see posted about on HN alone that they are not doing a good job. Or, I guess maybe they're doing a good job based on the metrics they were given, but I wouldn't consider it a good job in the sense of living in…

i 100% agree with you. i too rage against the insane, bewildering, almost unimaginable scale of anti-customer-service behavior that we seemingly must succumb to, as customers. i am not sure if there is anything we can do.

Are you really a customer if you are not paying for the service though?

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

#313

Post by JohnMakin »

immibis wrote: post #205
JohnMakin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.

Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.

It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it.

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.

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

#315

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

dylan604 wrote: post #261
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue? That is exactly what happened to my coworker. She bought a Pixel phone from the Google Store and it got lost in shipping. Shipment tracking showed it arriving at the carrier's hub and never leaving for a month. She called customer service and the first tier workers followed a script that was essential…

> She called customer service of which party in this problem? seems like contacting the carrier would have been more productive. contacting Googs about a delayed package seems like the wrong direction to follow. i realize this verges on victim blaming, but just trying to suggest other methods of problem solving.

Legally the customer has no relationship with the carrier.

They did not choose how the package would be shipped, which carrier would be used, or pay the carrier to ship it.

All of those decisions and the payment to the carrier were made by the seller (Google), not the customer. Thus Google had all responsibility in ensuring the shipment reached the customer.

If Google had failed to pay the carrier the correct shipping cost, or had packed the box poorly such that the item was damaged in transit, would it be the customer's fault?

Similarly, if the carrier mishandled the package and it was lost or arrived damaged, would it be the customer's fault?

The customer deals with the seller whom they paid, not with third-parties. If the seller took the money they ensure the customer gets what they paid for or they lose reputation and go out of business.

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

#316

Post by johnnyanmac »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #220
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…

Because when you're dealing with a billion users, a one-in-a-million mistake still screws a thousand users, and everyone realizes that getting the rate of mistakes anywhere near that low is impossible. At the same time, you're dealing with actual bad actors that genuinely need to be banned, and there is a lot of this abuse. Mistakes will happen. You can't stop banning users. The bad actors will file appeals (in some…

>it's obvious to everyone involved that "just having a highly skilled human review every case" is completely impractical (not just "too expensive for the company to want to pay for it").

It's not obvious to me. These are trillion dollar companies and it's not like the appeals process doesn't take weeks to begin with (too long, but I digress). On top of all that you gotta keep in mind that some influencers are literally making the company money. To have them take weeks over a false negative is unaccetptable.

So yeah, get a proper review team, make sure they know the actual message that got them banned instead of needing to scour an account, give them a proper minute to review and decide.

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

#318

Post by johnnyanmac »

bagels wrote: post #293
dylan604 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 positi…

Meta has 6 billion or so customers. Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time. There are processes to correct problems there. It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced.

>Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time.

sometimes would be a good first step.

> It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced.

well we're screwed then. of course shareholders don't understand the need for moderation, nor keeping a satisfied userbase.

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

#319

Post by ryandrake »

armchairhacker wrote: post #84
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.

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…

I guess it depends on what percentage of account suspensions are due to actual bad behavior on the part of the user and what percentage are false positives. My wild guess is the vast majority of account suspensions at a BigTech company are false positives of an overly-aggressive algorithm, so having an insider reactivate accounts is going to be a net-positive, even if a few actual bad accounts are reactivated.

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

#320

Post by johnnyanmac »

ranger207 wrote: post #192
ranger207 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>the mismatch in values between people who'd make this kind of site and people who'd find this kind of site awful

enemy of my enemy is a friend. If I cared enough to properly appeal a bad ban, I care less about the ethics of how I get unbanned and more about just getting unbanned.

You're already convinced the company that banned you is unfair and uncaring. Why would you care about exploiting the weaknesses?

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