Live data from Hacker News

An account was suspended

twitter.com

101–110 of 398 posts

Re: An account was suspended

#101
Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal.

I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.

I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.

Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.

More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.

Re: An account was suspended

#102
The Joe Rogan podcast with Vijaya Gadde, Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool gives the outside world a good look at how Twitter is run. They should have been able to wipe the floor with every concern that was raised. Instead Jack Dorsey comes off looking lost and Vijaya Gadde comes off looking like a bad lawyer.

Re: An account was suspended

#105
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 tried to get into contact with anybody about a banned account?

Just some weeks ago Discord decided to ban my 6 year old account out of nowhere. I didn't used Discord for 4 weeks, since I was on vacation. Also I am pretty sure, that it wasn't hacked, because I used MFA and no other account was affected.

I tried to contact the support, but only got a template response, that they don't talk about reasons and my account data will also be deleted in 14 days. I tried to contact them again, but they simply blocked my mail after that.

I didn't do any suspicious on discord ever. So I really had no clue why this happened. While talking with friends and coworker I've heard similar stories. And everybody of us changed their hardware multiple times beforehand (for example to test a specific component or for overclocking). Gotta love automatic banning systems...

Re: An account was suspended

#106

Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal. I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud.…

> Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high).

Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when I asked them to remove the old wrong account, they were very nice confirming that they will do that. But instead they deleted my new account, with only the old account remaining. When complaining about that they ignored it, so I just deleted my old account also, and am a happy non-Amazon customer since.

Re: An account was suspended

#108

I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson, and I'm not necessarily on Twitter's side here, but this to me seems more like a case of Ben whining about "Spam is when someone else sends it". From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is t…

My $.02, he's raging not about losing something that he wants, but instead about the double-standard. If this account posting links is getting banned, why is it that Twitter seems so hell bent on leaving all the fake Elon accounts that are spamming people to get free crypto?

Re: An account was suspended

#109
Separating data from UI solves all the concentration problem with social media, as well as making markets much more competitive (good for consumers).

I suspect eventually this idea will catch on, and it will be perceived as monopolistic, at a certain scale, to couple data and UI, thus creating an unbreakable network effect. YouTube, Twitter etc

Re: An account was suspended

#110

I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson, and I'm not necessarily on Twitter's side here, but this to me seems more like a case of Ben whining about "Spam is when someone else sends it". From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is t…

> new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. > In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is that Ben liked the content it was tweeting about.

I guess the issue is that these conditions alone are now enough to warrant a ban 'on a technical level', when a few years accounts like that existed with no issue. Spam's a huge issue on Twitter, no doubt, but it seems like things are getting worse and it's fair to ask for some accountability.

Post reply on HN