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An account was suspended

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191–200 of 398 posts

Re: An account was suspended

#191
post #180

Ben's account is already un-suspended, but only because he has a major presence and large audience (I would be shocked if people at Twitter didn't see this minutes into it happening or if Ben didn't have some direct line to various high up employees there). For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.

Sounds like how complaints about Stripe magically get personal attention from company insiders, but only after being publicized to HN.

to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.

Re: An account was suspended

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. My account got suspended a few years ago. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. Twitter for me was a huge time sink, even though I followed really interesting people talking about things I was really interesting. But once I got a forced detox, I realised I just gained back hours a week to do other things. Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.

At this point in time I think I am comfortable saying the web is more detrimental to humans than Television ever was.

The web was great back when it was mostly read-only. You could comment and share, but only via email, so only to people you likely knew. Yes, I remember chain mails from 1997, but those were rare, maybe 2x a year. You probably saw that many dumb posts in the last 5 minutes of scrolling Twitter/FB/IG.

Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.

Re: An account was suspended

#193

He goes into detail: > It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me! -- https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583063313948499969 And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.

I'm confused about what he means. "After careful review" means that a human double checked it right?

"After careful review" *implies* a human checked it. His beef is that it's quite unlikely a human actually reviewed it.

Re: An account was suspended

#194

Using the web and it's services really feels more and more like tedious work which is simply not worth it anymore. I don't want to sound like some old grunt (not even 30 yet), but every modern service uses some kind of automatic banning system and everything you invested can be gone in seconds. To spice things up, all these services also stopped providing any kind of support regarding these kind of problems. Ever tri…

I agree, it's a huge problem. Generally for services that are "free" - I highly recommend finding alternatives for anything you consider important, either paying for it or running it yourself. FastMail works wonderfully for me, and I self-host Mastodon for myself and Synapse(Matrix) for communicating with my family.

I don't ever want to be trapped in a Kafka-esque trial by corporate automation!

Re: An account was suspended

#195
post #179

As a longtime Twitter user, I personally feel that the Twitter spam problem is vastly overstated. I'm not talking about the total amount of spam, I'm talking about its effect on individual users. I occasionally get spam replies, but not very often. I just block the account, problem solved. I don't feel it affects my overall Twitter experience much. In fact, I'm vastly more annoyed by real humans who reply to me with…

There is a lot of spam you don't see that affects you: bot rings that push topics in trending and lastest tweets that end up in your time line for example. Or voting bots that reinforce the outrage culture. Scam bots that prey on weak users in popular accounts (read any elo musk tweet responses for a sample). And bot oushing empty publication to hashtags that makes parsing it with a python script terrible.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't make the experience worst.

Re: An account was suspended

#196
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like how complaints about Stripe magically get personal attention from company insiders, but only after being publicized to HN.

to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.

But Stripe should provide timelier service than Twitter precisely because there is real money on the line.

If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.

Re: An account was suspended

#197
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my Amazon account deleted. I have old credit card linked to AWS with billing address in one city of Ukraine. Few weeks later after city been occupied I got message from Amazon that my account is locked due to sanctions. They give me ability to comply by removing offending credit card. But I can't do this because account is locked. I've got zero human response only broken scripts from support that I need to logi…

I’ve stopped using Amazon after AWS started political censorship. Actually, saves you a lot of money: much less impulse buying. It appears a lot of my impulse buying was caused by my trust in Amazon return policy :)

> It appears a lot of my impulse buying was caused by my trust in Amazon return policy :)

Better to get it cheaper and less counterfeit/crappy the first time. Since delivery time from Amazon for non-Prime people has slowed to a crawl, it's a good motivator to discover best-in-class ecommerce sites rather than the mediocre-at-everything-but-sometimes-the-mediocre-thing-arrives-the-same-day-you-order-it site.

Sites that aren't paying the price of Amazon marketing, or charging an Amazon premium, so usually the prices are better. You might find that you usually use Amazon 95% of the time for just a few classes of product, and you're better served buying those from three other sites and leaving the last 5% of spontaneous purchases for which you don't have a good source with Amazon.

Re: An account was suspended

#198
Automated banning is becoming absurd. I have recently been banned from Deezer cause I have used Revolut card for payment. And they had it flagged, while Revolut probably recycles the card numbers.

If you are in EU you have legal grounds for objection in Art. 22 of GDPR. Where it is stated "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

I have not exercised this but out of revolt returned to my offline music collection for the time being.

Re: An account was suspended

#199
I posted this example a month ago: https://twitter.com/willsasso. A verified account of a Canadian actor with 150k followers that got hacked and started to post crypto spam: https://twitter.com/WillSasso/status/1573830892367257603. It's still live, these posts are still up, and even the hacker can't believe it: https://twitter.com/WillSasso/status/1574065661751468034.

Re: An account was suspended

#200

He goes into detail: > It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me! -- https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583063313948499969 And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.

Looking at the account, I don't see why it would be a lie in this case, or why the account shouldn't have been suspended after manual review. It posted 75 tweets in 26 minutes, self-admittedly "from multiple locations around the world.". All of those tweets link to an external website.

It's spam, so the account got suspended for posting spam. The fact that it was posted by Ben Thompson doesn't change the fact that it's spam. We can complain about automated moderation processes that make obvious mistakes all day, because it keeps happening, but this case doesn't look like an example of it.

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