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

plsfix.co

361–370 of 423 posts

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

#361
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone. That feels like a good outcome to me. "I know a guy" should not be a reason to get preferential treatment. As much as I'm sure it absolutely sucks to lose an account on most of these services, I'd rather they stay lost for everyone, rather than get reinstated for people who happen to have connections.

The thing is that this preferential treatment should be the default - people should be able to get their accounts looked at, but as always there are hold-ups and moderator shortages and whatnot that drag waiting times closer to infinity. It's not like everyone else is guaranteed to be banned indefinitely - it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself. As long as it's not done at th…

> it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself

I.e. a practice universally frowned upon?

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

#363
I've been looking for something like this.

I was an idiot and my 18 years old reddit account got hacked. Figured it out in a few hours, did a password reset, I change the password but I still get invalid password after.

It's been 9 months now without a reply from support. I wished I'd have paid for reddit gold or something to have an actual legal base to do something.

If anyone from reddit is reading this, it's the same username as here.

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

#364
post #45

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…

Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ...

Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no market incentive for this to be the steady state. All companies only want to pay lip service to competition, but in reality, they do everything in their power to prevent competition and monopolize the market. Product tie-ins, lock-ins, exclusive contracts, etc. For your vision to be a reality there needs to be significant tax on monopolies and no company should be allowed to become a trillion dollar compa…

> There is no market incentive for this to be the steady state. The market incentive is that everyone other than the monopolist will want to take the monopolist's market share. The monopolist, in turn, captures the government and uses "Taxes & Regulations" to ensure that random small businesses can't enter the market and take their market share.

Yes, because money == power, and lobbying is legal. If you had progressive taxation that would essentially prevent any entity from acquiring power to rival the state. The inherent weakness of democracies is that they require constant care and attention. If you look away for a second, there is going to be some corporation trying to re-write the tax code or do away with regulations.

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

#366
And I suppose internal employees can also block accounts for no reason. I smell a market opportunity for a service that blocks accounts of people who are likely to be able and willing to pay $500 to get their accounts unblocked.

...

(I shouldn't have to mention this, but please don't build the torment nexus.)

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the stories i've heard, even if they hired back a support team, they wouldn't be able to bring back a lot of accounts people ask for they just botched a bunch of the deletion/suspension processes, in a way that made them unrecoverable

Interesting. I can still login, my content is still there etc (none of the images are though) so I hoped it'll still be possible. Given that almost all the people I followed etc have left, there probably wouldn't be much left, but I had that account for ~15 years before it was nuked.

I am in the same exact situation.

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

#368
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Raising complaints internally always has value in any organization. At a minimum, it highlights the fact that people outside the organization think your colleagues are doing a shit job. The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is…

I'm not saying there's no value in raising complaints internally. I'm saying that the proposed method of having somebody uninformed do it in an all hands meeting based on internet anecdotes has no value. It has no chance of affecting change.

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

#369
post #265
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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…

It should be even more evident that you can't judge whether they're doing a good job by looking at just the numerator. You need to know the denominator as well. Or rather, the denominators.

In a simplified model there are two groups of users {good,bad} and two outcomes {suspended,not suspended}. You're saying that success can be judged by whether there are any people claiming to be good (though you have no idea of whether that's true, they're just claiming that on the internet) ending in the {claims-to-be-good, suspended} bucket.

But actually to judge whether they're doing a good job, you'd need to look at the {good, not suspended}, {bad, suspended} and {bad, not suspended} buckets too.

The first one is a baseline. Obviously if you've got a billion users, all your numbers are going to be 1000x higher than a somebody with a million users just due to the higher number of users. The number of internet complaints will be 1000x higher too. But the actual harm to the average user from the mistakes is the same.

The second bucket are the successes, and they are going to be totally invisible to everyone not working on the problem. Not only to the random HN commenters, but to the random bigco employee too. They literally can't judge the success. The only visibility will be if that number is too low, since it obviously means the third bucket is too high. And that will be visible as the platform being overrun by spam and scams.

Now, I understand that your view is that it must be completely impossible for a possibly good user to lose an account. That's just the kind of thing that people who don't understand the problem space would say at an all hands open mike, and then get ignored because their view is just so detached from reality. It's not even a matter of resources; even if you threw infinite resources at the problem, what you'd end up with is a worse experience in the aggregate.

You'd have scammers reinstated, and continue scamming more people. You'd have accounts be hijacked because the scammers are going to be better at social engineering their way into accounts than the real users will be at social engineering their way to account recovery.

It's all tradeoffs, and absolutist statements about how it's unacceptable for even a single good user to suffer any harm are just as unrealistic as absolutist statements about how even a single piece of spam can't make it through. The best you can do is try to find the best place in the tradeoff space.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no market incentive for this to be the steady state. All companies only want to pay lip service to competition, but in reality, they do everything in their power to prevent competition and monopolize the market. Product tie-ins, lock-ins, exclusive contracts, etc. For your vision to be a reality there needs to be significant tax on monopolies and no company should be allowed to become a trillion dollar compa…

I'm actually shocked no one is arguing with you about your first two sentences. Capitalism will always have one lucky or unscrupulous company after another swallowing the smaller players. you have 5 equal companies producing widgets. One of the companies has their building near a freeway, and one day a fully loaded truck crashes through a railing and impacts their building, causing a fire and lots of damage. Sure, th…

The solution is pretty easy - put caps on various types of growth/income/profit for corporations.
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