A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

Sure there are assholes out there, but I think that banning people for a first offense is also an asshole move. People are banned more frequently by moderators and bots/scripts now, and even manually, by people who have their own in-grained bias.

The modern process of banning people is often arbitrary, and usually after years of work within an ecosystem or platform that is often also tied into many other things like authentication in other sites and apps. A ban can devastate a person's reputation or business, it should not just be considered as "It's their platform, they can do whatever they want" when the platform involves a very public social aspect of operations.

We should consider banning people differently than we used to. Proper provision of support for platform users also should regularly be mandatory in cases like this... It's not fair to just tell a banned user they can fill out forms and wait for a response when their reputation, time invested, and business goals suffers in silence.

Take for example that Wal Mart allows food trucks to set up in a massive (Wal Mart Owned) warehouse to sell their goods... A vendor parks inside and sets up their truck... The vendor can have one single argument with a warehouse manager, a customer, or even make a mistake in advertising, and if they are banned from the Wal Mart warehouse (by today's standards... figuratively of course) the vendor's truck, all of their possessions left within the warehouse get revoked by Wal Mart, and the vendor must go and rebuild their business somewhere else. This also allows competitors and nefarious managers to capitalize upon the vendor's reclaimed possessions within the Wal Mart warehouse from that point forward.

The only way to ensure that people's money and time investments within a workspace are stable is to have rule transparency, proper and easy user support, and maybe even a "3 strike" rule. None of those things are happening on platforms right now, and it's creating very disgruntled users.

That being said though, the "dense" comment is not the best way to go about getting a positive resolution to a technical support problem.

Of course that doesn't prevent the image being tweeted, but it does mean they can punish the person who made the tweet, which might be enough of a deterrent in most cases.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/p319oj/if_...

Do you think people should be banned for being snippy in a customer satisfaction survey too? Product reviews? A human reads it. A human that should know well enough that they’re not the subject of any negativity therein.

The idea that this is a CS rep’s petty revenge is as much of an unsubstantiated fantasy as “they’ll tell the cook to spit in your burger”. It’s far more likely that either the human reviewer(s) is doing a poor job, or there’s something else broken about the appeal process, considering all the other comments referencing nonsensical failed appeals with no evidence of “rudeness”. Like false positives in appeals going uncounted because the appeal decision is itself taken as the source of truth, and reps being incentivized to churn through appeals quick to save on labor costs.

Social karma style scores are trumped by giant clusters of spambots building up a huge collective karma and then infiltrating existing networks at the edges by phishing or buying existing accounts/keys. Also, some people turn nutjob and then you need a way to go back and revoke all your permanently-recorded cryptographically signed likes and follows because anything less would allow censorship. Not to mention the cost of re-running pagerank over the entire internet population on every client for every new (un)like/follow. People who abandon their keys leave permanent positive karma sitting around for exploitation. If karma is only positive then pure abusers have no negative signal and can coast on these abandoned karma edges. If you allow negative signals (publicly signed "block"s, "this is spam" judgements, etc) then spammers have a new weapon to kill off every other high-karma key with negative edges to reduce its spam-fighting effectiveness. Don't forget that this kind of battle will also be waged by otherwise highly-rational political actors whose survival depends on curating high karma keys and cliques to bolster then.

What works is human moderation in highly functional online communities. Read the excellent posts by dang here about his ethos and practices. Human communities are too complex for algorithms or models to manage, at least so far.