Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

Anyone who thinks this is the functioning of a "normal" internet is mistaken. This is a symptom of a decades-in-the-making problem. It strongly appears those in charge of legislation are not technically minded and have no idea "how" the internet works. Or they do and they have data-sharing agreements with all the 'big tech' software and are okay to "appear" to legislate but cannot actually change anything substantial in fear of retaliation (losing access to all that juicy data they collect). Imagine the power Google wields in this scenario, to me they are more scary than any drug cartel boss. I genuinely can't see how this isn't akin to a Coup d'état of the internet as a means of transmitting information. We cannot shut down these tentacles because of how deeply ingrained they are (remember when FB's SDK was having issues? Hundreds of third parties apps just broke).

Google should have been regulated years ago, instead, they have been allowed to snap up every smaller company to solidify their position in the market and ensure they and only they are allowed positions of power, control and authority.

If Google dislikes you (or their baseless algorithms that are detached from reality) then you are toast. How long before Google's algorithm results in an actual human death? Doesn't seem totally far fetched and entirely plausible.

Yet, you let this happen, or rather, it seems this isn't concerning enough for it to warrant a massive protest, after all, Big Tech controls protest online and can just shut it down. Amazon seems to have been mightily effective at stopping any "union" movement, so we know the censor machines are fine tuned and ready to fire at any moment.

We need to be talking about this daily, in needs to be front and center for weeks and weeks, and we need to demand accountability. We are ruled and governed not by elected officials but by faceless, nameless and non-human machines. They do not Think. They do not Talk. They do not care.

Yet this thread will disappear in a few short hours, and this will be just another episode of the weekly "Google's systems are out of control and one developer got caught out, too bad I hope they are okay".

This is happening to thousands of others undoubtedly that do not make hackernews or have the resources/energy to fix it.

We should demand better.

A secret set of rules, a single party that is the judge, jury and executioner, an opaque resolution process that involves backchannels rather than merit, and no oversight ? Is that really something to accept as inevitable ?

Alas, there goes my post (currently at -3).

Although I didn't elaborate about the libel, I do believe there is a strong separation between a "malicious site" and a "site that has malicious content".

If someone encoded an image in an HN post encoded as base64, that could be definitely malicious content. But that would not make HN a malicious site. No reasonable person would argue that. I would argue that claiming it was a malicious site is the heart of this libel.

Now, as a converse, we've seen sites that are just textspam with links that are all .exe or .com or likewise. They have no legitimate purpose other than getting higher scores in search engines. And their content is full of malware of all sorts. This would be an example of a malicious site.

On top of that, nobody mentioned about my call to email the webmaster/abuse/admin contacts at a domain. Even an email and then 1h later would provide some sort of "whoops we didn't catch that" buffer. A legitimate site will respond quickly to warnings of malware or hacked site.

Of course, we all on HN know about the ills of contacting Google for issues like this. Unless you have a Social Media Escalation (aka: this type of post), you pretty much guaranteed will have no recourse. That is a whole another level of problem, especially if they control (they do!) the browsers of millions of people. Where are the checks and balances? There are none.

And we also come to the issue of secret charges, secret evidence, secret judges, secret punishments, and no appeals. The common saw here is "We dont want to tell bad people what they're doing bad". This doesn't fly with our government, and shouldn't fly with mega companies (read: monopolies or oligopolies). If I'm doing something wrong, I should be shown what I'm doing wrong, and a window of time to remediate. (And I'd argue that once something's detected, then enhanced scanning could be done.)

Yeah, just provide like logs what specifically got you taken down or something. Anything.

> We never allow anything other than video and image files either.

I would have thought this would be an excellent way to not host malware.