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Tinder just permabanned me or the problem with big tech
- Invictus0 5y agoA typical complaint about getting banned with a thin veneer of "big tech bad" to make it seem worthwhile to the reader.
- Wronnay 5y agoA typical complaint would be if he had done something wrong, but he send 0 messages, got no likes - so what could he have done wrong? I had similar experiences with Tinder - I think their support team just bans people when they don't want to deal with them - without checking the account at all.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoHe says he did nothing wrong anyway. They all do. Maybe he is telling the truth but it's hard to know.
- himinlomax 5y agoThe problem is not whether he did something bad or not -- there's no way to know, and he may not admit it if he did. What the problem is is that he got banned without being told why.
- pelasaco 5y ago"Everyone in here is innocent" says Morgan Freeman’s character Red, a convicted murderer, in The Shawshank Redemption.
- lou1306 5y agoOff the top of my head, there are at least two plausible explanations: * Some user reported his account as "fake" or otherwise "inappropriate" * The algorithm thought he faked his position Neither one requires any intentional wrongdoing. It is what it is.
- pelasaco 5y agothe third explanation is: he was already banned before signing to all those services.
- pc86 5y agoHe didn't post screenshots of his profile so we have no idea what's on there, it's completely possible (likely, even) that his profile text did violate the TOS. Instant perma-ban might be a bit harsh but we have no reason to believe one side over the other and no evidence pointing either way.
- nomdep 5y agoA naive customer support intern must have thought his last name “le fou” was fake because in English might sound like “le fuck”
- djrockstar1 5y agoYeah all the insight in this article comes down to the sentence "The big tech does not mind having a few false positives." the next paragraph about people trying to please the algorithm is such drivel since companies rarely mention what their algorithms look for and people rarely go out of their way to please an algorithm (unless they have some level of insight into the algorithm and it affects their income, generally).
- JasonFruit 5y agoAnecdotally, I find myself thinking about what might make my accounts look like I'm up to something, and avoid it. Also anecdotally, I've seen others on HN talk about doing the same. People may not know what the algorithm is, but they can make some reasonable guesses at what it might take into account.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Veen 5y agoThe "big tech bad" complaints seem valid to me. Big tech companies are willing to accept a certain number of false positives, and that sucks for the people who are caught up in them. Algorithm-influenced decision-making is likely to lead people to change their behaviour to please the algorithm—one obvious example is the oceans of shitty content that we all have to wade through to find useful information because Google's algorithm has led to changes in publisher and writer behaviour. Both of these are, at best, a cause for concern.
- Invictus0 5y agoSure, and yet your comment alone contains more substance on the topic than the entire article.
- jrumbut 5y agoThe thing for me is keeping his money. If he signed up, and for whatever reason they decided they didn't want his business so they gave him a refund, I wouldn't love it but it wouldn't upset me much either. But they can't decide they want the money but don't want to provide a service. I'm surprised to see comments defending this.
- xiphias2 5y agoJust call credit card center for a refund and get a burner number…not a big deal. Regarding banks: get some Bitcoin just in case, as it can be much worse when banks ban you.
- hnbad 5y agoIf you have to worry about banks banning you, you maybe shouldn't be in a position where you need to take financial advice from HN comments and you're likely better off with cash than an unstable asset that you can't easily eliminate without involving a bank.
- mschuster91 5y ago> If you have to worry about banks banning you Banks ban you for joke comments in bank transfers or anything that alludes to drugs, sex work or gambling. Or for transferring remittances to your parents in a way some algorithm deemed to be "structuring" or "money laundering for terrorists". PayPal bans you for whatever the fuck their AI decided on a whim. I've been on HN for over eight and a half years now and help requests or complaint blog posts are routine here. One thing that's common is support staff that is either unreachable (Google) or doesn't have any freedom to reverse AI-caused bans / only is allowed to post canned responses (everyone else). The only way to get issues with big tech resolved these days is to raise a stink here on HN, even Twitter shitstorms seem to fly under the radar more and more.
- teh_klev 5y ago> Banks ban you for joke comments in bank transfers or anything that alludes to drugs, sex work or gambling Surely it must be possible to exercise a wee bit of self control and not be an edgelord in every aspect of one's life?
- mschuster91 5y agoBanks should not be allowed to automatically ban people without a human in the loop ffs.
- pavlov 5y agoGetting banned from Tinder is like getting banned from a bar. Just go somewhere else.
- vmception 5y agoOther bars don’t have Swipe Night I jest but has anyone used Tinder recently? They have interactive choose your own adventure movies now, and then match you with people that made similar choices, instant ice breaker! But actually a decently fun episodic game with moderately high production value. I’m surprised because Tinder was like the worst of all the mobile-first dating apps from my recollection.
- JasonFruit 5y agoThe author makes that point, but follows up with a more important one: this is what you can expect from "the algorithm", whether it's Tinder, Facebook, your email service, or your bank. A few false positives are acceptable collateral damage, and it can be a serious inconvenience or worse. Tinder, he's out 12 bucks, but we've all heard of people with thousands of dollars in Paypal limbo for years.
- throwaway90090 5y agoSo don't have your livelihood or material comfort depend on greedy and uncaring megacorps? Evergreen xkcd: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
- JasonFruit 5y agoThat's probably a good idea. If you want social media, go to the local mom and pop social medium in town here. Their artisanal activity feed is the best! More seriously, at this point the options are: - ethically-challenged social media full of relatives and friends - unintuitive federated platform with no family but plenty of otherkin furfriends - being left out of conversation and events you care about I can't say to most people that choice 1 is excluded without being written off as unrealistic.
- 5y ago
- najqh 5y agoYou were already shadowbanned permanently, that's why you had 0 likes. There is no difference between that and having no account at all since you cannot interact with any broads. By removing your account, they did you a favour in a sense. Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
- vmception 5y agoThis is the correct answer. Rotate idents. Use a phone emulator if there is a hardware ban. Occasionally a VOIP phone number might work for account authentication, occasionally not though. But people really forget that is an option to just walk to the nearest phone store and come out with a $20 sim for the month. Useful for way more than just trying to hook up on a dating app you got banned on.
- 3np 5y ago> Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that. People keep saying this without realizing a lot of people practically can’t these days. In an increasing number of countries, getting an SMS/phone-capable SIM can not be done without KYC/ID verification. Where I live, for example, you even need to be a resident; all prepaids are data-only. And before you tell me to find a homeless drug-addict and make them get one for me, it’s not that easy and no one should have to do that in the first place. Same restrictions apply for SkypeIn and similar VoIP services (which BtW come in a separate prefix that most of these services blacklist anyway). There’s a reason why those dodgy “receive anyonymous SMS” sites all only provide the same handful of countries.
- najqh 5y agoOkay? So do ID verification. Tinder won't see your ID. They don't know you are the same person.
- vidarh 5y agoExactly. Some places, like the UK you can just order a bunch of SIMs from Amazon. Though who knows if they'll ban you again if you keep signing up from the same wifi and/or if their app fingerprints the same phone. But worst case is throaway cheap phones and pay as you go.
- cnlal 5y agoWhy do people use a service that has a written history of all your embarrassing hookups in the first place? In the past, intelligence agencies used to devote time and money to get such compromising information. Now people give it out for free.
- TrueDuality 5y agoIt also used to be a social stigma which is why it had blackmail value. That's no longer the case in a lot of western countries.
- hansel_der 5y agostill, the dataset of "who screwed whom, when, for how long" seems valuable for enriching other social graphs. it's not that of a stigma nowadays, but i could be again, and certainly is if you are becoming a person of interest.
- bradlys 5y agoMaybe a slight interest for now but in the future? No one will care. Todays generation is far more sex positive than previous - even if they’re getting laid way less than previous ones due to dating apps.
- vmception 5y agofor an additional avenue of more hookups, you answered your own question
- Proven 5y ago
- stathibus 5y agoIt definitely does seem possible to me to violate terms of service without any likes or matches. We don't know what was on their profile.
- josephcsible 5y agoWhat happened to innocent until proven guilty?
- Kiro 5y agoThat has never been the case and shouldn't be the case. It's not a court and I don't need any reason or justification to ban someone from my app.
- stathibus 5y agoIt's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law Are you suggesting that private companies should have to take their users to court before disabling accounts
- josephcsible 5y agoI'm suggesting that HN commenters shouldn't automatically side with Big Tech just because the ban victim doesn't have proof of innocence.
- stathibus 5y agoRaising doubt is not "siding with big tech"
- Lucent 5y agoIt's against ToS for your profile to include other means to contact you, like other online profiles. That's my guess.
- danillonunes 5y ago
- throwaway90090 5y agoI know "don't use social networks made by evil megacorps that make money by trampling all over your privacy and making you addicted" is the kind of advice everyone sagely nods at but no one heeds. But it especially applies to dating apps. Like the proverbial sausages, once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole.
- vmception 5y ago> once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole. I love gaming the algorithm to meet hotter* people than I would meet using the apps the most intuitive way. *It's not subjective, there are profiles that attract way more attention and would either: never be shown to you, or you never shown to them.
- alias_neo 5y agoI've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves? If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
- tata71 5y agoYes, Tinder swiping is bracketed by implied desirable ness of the profile. They even tell you when you're "doing well".
- decafninja 5y agoCurious what the algorithm would be to measure "desireableness". Computer vision on the photos (i.e. measure facial symmetry?) plus the number of other people who have expressed interest in you?
- bpolovko 5y agoTinder is a sucky way to meet people anyway, when more people realize it and stop using it, that is when the change will come. P.S: Kyiv not Kiev
- staticelf 5y ago> Kyiv (Ukrainian: Київ)[a] or Kiev[b] is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. From Wikipedia ;)
- bpolovko 5y agoRead this if you could, this will give you more context: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-kiev-why-spelling-matters-in-ukraines-quest-for-an-independent-identity/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...
- staticelf 5y agoI have a gut feeling that Americans care more about this than Ukrainians themselves. I am no fan of russia and using the "incorrect" spelling kiev instead of kyiv doesn't imply that IMO.
- bpolovko 5y agoGut feeling is not the best thing to rely on in these situations, because there is a chance of jumping into a prejudice. It all depends on a large number of factors which you have to understand before making any conclusions I will not go proactively into explaining why, but I will be happy to provide you with some resources if you are interested to dive in deeper into this topic
- staticelf 5y agoInto what topic? I have no problems using Kyiv if that's what Ukranians want. I do not require any other explanation or further discussion. I am just no that politically correct that I care either way.
- staticelf 5y agoA couple of years ago Tinder only hid the profile pics with CSS in their web client so I installed a custom css to get the functionality you had to pay for free. Unfortunately, as I recently got single again I discovered that this wasn't possible anymore. To be more on topic, Tinder is a very american company. I haven't had personal issues with the company but I think their new features of weird matching from some shitty interactive videos is a sign of classic over-engineering. It seems like the app is "done". Maybe they should focus on creating something else than add useless features that no one seems to use ( at least where I am from ).
- giantg2 5y agoThis is basically the paradigm of any monopolistic or near monopolistic system. You can screw over a small minority without provoking a real response so long as you are appeasing or distracting the majority. Big tech, traditional companies, and even government.
- newyankee 5y agoMoreover Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match. The most lucrative customers for matchmaking sites are the most desperate. Even with a lot of competition due to network effects most of the people would always be driven to the most popular sites.
- Nextgrid 5y agoBanning a paying user seems counterproductive though?
- josephcsible 5y agoTinder didn't stop charging him when they banned him.
- NumberCruncher 5y ago> Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match An evil data scientist would put almost exclusively users on your screen who you are interested in but they are not interested in you to boost your spendings and would mix a small portion of good bidirectional matches just to make his purpose less obvious. Fortunately evil data scientists does not exist... I mean I definitely wasn't paid to do anything like that. Never.
- jliptzin 5y agoThey don’t even have to be doing that on purpose, if one just optimizes the revenue per user metric he’s effectively doing the same thing even if not on purpose.
- newyankee 5y agoFWIW I seldom got any likes on Tinder in USA. I would consider myself in the top 10% of my own country in height and looks but not the same in USA. I realized that US women do not consider me attractive at least based on limited data that a Tinder card shows.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoFWIW if you're not paying then you're not being shown to anyone outside of maybe the first 24 hours.
- mrep 5y agoI cannot say for tinder, but I just opened bumble for the first time in weeks and apparently I have 50+ likes.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoTindr is known to be particularly bad. idk about Bumble.
- sebastianconcpt 5y agoBecause Tinder is a woman's menu of fuck buddies and for that they aim at the top fraction of 1%. It's unreal but is where their fantasy is taking them.
- standardUser 5y agoTweak your profile, try other apps, and accept that the funnel is going to be massive.
- newyankee 5y agoI did something different. Moved back to my country, had an 'arranged' marriage and am content now. Work remotely and happy with it too. Funnier issue is that a lot of women of my race in USA did not want to date a first generation immigrant.I do not want to generalize and do social commentary but I hope we hear more comments from many sides of the story. Matchmaking is always going to be Darwinian in the extreme sense but the sense of low confidence it created in me when in USA was quite high.
- DaveSchmindel 5y agoWhere's your Tinder bio in this article? I can't imagine creating a new account and publishing something obscene on any social platform today without being flagged or worse.
- mschuster91 5y ago> but a few days ago I came to a new country That one is the key. Likely some analytics service (Facebook?) has his phone associated with country A (his country of origin), and Tinder sees the registration coming in from country B (new country). That mismatch then triggered some anti-fraud signalling.
- 3np 5y agoThat would be my guess as well. People who frequently travel/change residences or have bases in more than one place seem to get banned or blocked by all kinds of services. Regardless of the intentions of the people designing these systems, I’d argue this is textbook systemic discrimination; you face issues only due to being different enough in the “wrong” way.
- tsimionescu 5y agoI very much doubt a dating service would have this problem, as many people use dating services while traveling even if they wouldn't at home (either because of cheating or just knowing the scene better at home).
- schnitzelstoat 5y agoWhile this is true, romance scammers also often try to obscure/spoof their true location - so I can see why it'd be something the Tinder algos would be sensitive to
- 3np 5y agoJust speaking from experience and anecdotes from others. I’m not arguing it makes business-sense. As the OP is arguing, the false positives are probably a small enough percentage of users that companies haven’t found it worthwhile to prioritize. And even if it is, it can be hard to tell from readily available data who’s a false positive in the first place when you don’t have a proper customer support organization.
- raverbashing 5y agoThis sounds super weird, unless this person had photos with forbidden content on it. But anyway, creating a new profile is not so hard (given the number of catfish still on the platform)
- hvdijk 5y agoFrom Tinder's ToS: > Tinder may terminate your account at any time without notice if it believes that you have violated this Agreement. Upon such termination, you will not be entitled to any refund for purchases. > For residents of the Republic of Korea, except in the case [...], we will without delay notify you of the reason for taking the relevant step. They openly say in advance that they'll ban users who they think violated their terms, regardless of whether they actually did, keep their money, and never tell them why, except in South Korea where they already know that crap doesn't fly. It's only a matter of time till that gets thrown out by more courts in more countries. Until then, it seems foolish to give them any money.
- DrammBA 5y agoI would definitely try to file a charge back with my bank, they sometimes exercise their own discretion on egregious cases like this and might be worth a shot.
- jordemort 5y agoIn this case it's probably billed through the relevant app store, so you'd be starting a fight with either Google or Apple there, which could end up going even more badly than the interaction with Tinder did.
- xiphias2 5y agoWith Paypal and Herz it was quite easy for me: i filed a request, Herz didn't answer, I elevated to paypal to make the decision, Herz didn't care to answer and I got back my money. I guess it's the dame for Tinder, they don't care enough to manually review the chargebacks.
- bjustin 5y agoContacting Apple would likely lead to a refund. No need to go to the trouble of doing a chargeback. This is one of the reasons developers don't like Apple's IAP policies: developers have no control over whether Apple decides to give a refund (or not).
- lanevorockz 5y agoCertainly it's Big Tech that knows who should you mate with. Never questions our overlords please.
- hetspookjee 5y agoGiven the constant commodization of data science, I wonder how long it will take till there is a dating app that really knows you well, while keeping privacy in tact. And matches people with the goal to actually match properly. Tinder, and every dating app I know out there, is directly incentivized to _not_ match properly, but rather to keep you on the app as long as possible. As long as the bottom line is directly influenced by the amount of unmatched users, the dating app will not work with you, but rather against you.
- vladvasiliu 5y agoI think you've answered your own question: probably never. Because whatever company would apply said commoditized data science would have the same incentives as Tinder and the rest. So except for some "open source" or otherwise "community-driven" effort, I don't think we'll ever see it. The issue with setting this up in your garage is that for such an app to work, you need to have many users. And to have many users, you have to spend cash on marketing, etc. So you have to be able to get that cash back somehow, and then some, for your efforts.
- mongol 5y agoImagine if a company had this business idea: If you get married to someone we introduce to you, you pay us 10000 USD. Else you pay us nothing. Would not that raise the bar?
- dragonwriter 5y agoIt would really encourage people not looking for marriage to use the app for dating, since their use would be free. It would, of course, also result in the site taking steps to eliminate them, maybe even tolerating false positives. In the end would it produce good results? Dunno. (Also would add legal complications most dating sites, regardless of model, don't deal with because of the Statute of Frauds in relation to contracts in consideration of marriage.)
- bfelbo 5y agoSome of the modern Indian dating apps seem to follow this approach and do quite well. It’s likely more accepted there because of the tradition of arranged marriages. Western audiences might find it strange.
- bena 5y agoThis feels very "yadda yadda yadda" to me. I suspect there's a reason. I suspect someone knows. And I suspect there's bits of this story that's being left off.
- polote 5y agoIt has always been like that on Tinder. My phone number can't create a new account for example (never receive the confirmation code). That's called shadowban in the case of OP. Bumble started doing the same practices a year ago (which makes sense as they have the same founder) But they are not 100% wrong, Tinder is not here to make people meet each other. They are here to make money and people don't pay because they get more matches, they pay because they are frustrated. Tinder needs a way to keep girls active on the platform, and for that to works they have to prevent boys to have a negative behavior. That's why they shadowban guys easily, as soon as they detect non standard behavior they shadowban, people keep seeing profile and keep paying. Girls don't see those profiles and have a better experience overall and stays longer, which makes guys stays longer because FOMO of matching the one. This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now. EDIT: And FYI if you want to exit shadowban on Tinder, it is pretty well documented on r/SwipeHelper, you need to change: phone, phone number, Facebook account, Credit card, pictures and don't login from the same IP
- sbst32 5y ago>> That's called shadowban in the case of OP. Bumble started doing the same practices a year ago (which makes sense as they have the same founder) Not arguing with the point you're making, but Bumble and Tinder founders are definitely not the same.
- polote 5y agoThe founder of Bumble is one of the founders of Tinder. But others founders of Tinder are not founders of Bumble, this is true. Also we could argue that Bumble has two founders, but this is insignificant anyway
- Narretz 5y agoMaybe they confused Bumble with all the other apps / services that are under the Match branch: Tinder, Match.com, plentyoffish, OkCupid ...
- 5y ago
- jefftk 5y agoThis is presented as a problem with "big tech", but I don't think most people would consider Tinder (Match Group) to be big tech? Instead, this kind of problem where you get flagged with no explanation or recourse seems to be common to consumer tech of all but the smallest scale. It's just very expensive to provide high quality individual support.
- jbverschoor 5y ago37B is quite big. "big data" is just an excel file, so I think this would qualify
- jefftk 5y ago> "big data" is just an excel file You know that's a joke, right?
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago> This is presented as a problem with "big tech", but I don't think most people would consider Tinder (Match Group) to be big tech? I think you don't recognize the scale of Match Group. They make two billion per year, they have 2000 staff, and they own basically every dating site.
- hansel_der 5y agomaybe making money with a product that you cannot support ought to be regulated. i too grew up with oss-licences that tell me i'm on my own and thats kind ok, but i don't want to live in a world were commercial products are labeled "not fit for any purpose. use at your own risk"
- fault1 5y agoMatch is a small part of IAC, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_(company)
- native_samples 5y agoScale/expense is a reasonable excuse when the services are free. Not when you're paying. It's a "Big Tech" problem. Lots of people have experienced getting randomly banned from services with no obvious cause, and no way to get any resolution. I'm banned from AirBNB for example. No clue why and there was nothing that could have triggered it, because I hadn't used the service for like over six months when the ban happened, there were no disputes or other problems with hosts and my last host review had been glowing. They didn't even tell me it'd occurred, but they had been sending emails thanking me for being a part of the "community" just weeks before. Then I tried to log in, got a verification screen, entered the code and was told the account was terminated. Filed an appeal, got no useful response and that was the end of it. If it was a free service I'd understand, but I've paid good money to AirBNB over the years. If you pay you expect to be treated like a customer, not an enemy, but SV tech firms have all copied the culture of Facebook/Twitter/Google. They seem to forget that when people give money they expect some sort of customer relationship as a consequence.
- JamesLeonis 5y agoMy 2¢; OP should do a charge-back. If anything bots don't do chargebacks. While you have no recourse in free services, you do when you pay with a credit card. Likewise the CC will still charge Tinder the processing fee of 1%-3%, so every chargeback is not only revenue lost but also a cost. Unfortunately all that advice is void if OP used a debit card.
- Nextgrid 5y agoCard disputes are mediated by the card networks and will absolutely work on debit cards - in this case it’s a clear example of paying for a product and not receiving it so it should be an open & shut case. Chargebacks on credit cards may have more protection granted by the banks or the law, but the basic level of disputing a transaction is available even to debit cards.
- vxNsr 5y agoPretty sure you can still do a chargeback with a debit card if the purchase was made “on credit” as all online purchases are. But wanted to add another thing, chargebacks are for cases of fraud, so the cc network actually charges the retailer a not insignificant fee for each chargeback, it’s why BigTech will shutdown your account if you do a chargeback, bec 9/10 times if it’s on your account you did mean to spend that money you just forgot about it. If you didn’t you better be ready to prove it and still burn the account that you chargeback on (i.e. lose your gmail account bec someone compromised your account and bought stuff on android)
- generalEvie 5y agoWhile attempting a chargeback can be good advice, be very wary if you paid for the service via Google / Apple.
- t-writescode 5y agoif paid via Apple, ask Apple directly. I've gotten subscriptions refunded for Match.com's dark patterns, for example.
- mazugrin2 5y agoMaybe don't refer to women as "girls"? Unless you are seeking romance with girls. Either way, I'm suspicious already and can see why a service intended to match adults with other adults (i.e., not girls) would be creeped out by you.
- vmception 5y ago"my boys" "out with the boys" "guys" the only time I heard people want 'girls' less infantilized was in professional contexts, this is not a professional context and is an equivalent colloquialism across genders. unit test passed.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoHave you heard of "cultural differences"? Author is from Kiev. Now, I'm not Ukrainian, but in Polish refering to "women" as "dziewczyna" not "kobieta" in romantic setting would not be any weird.
- ravenstine 5y agoThat's not particularly unique to Ukrainian culture by any stretch of the imagination. Popular global culture, particularly western culture, typically shares that canard.
- renewiltord 5y agoIt’s common colloquial language. You wouldn’t call your coworkers “girls” in a meeting. But you could reasonably say you’re dating “this girl I met while hiking the Appalachian Trail” and it’s normative.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
- dablweb 5y agoJust head over to reveddit.com and look at a few controversial subreddits without the shadow-banning. It's truly terrifying to see the true scale of censorship and ghost-banning in big tech right now.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> terrifying to see the true scale Not as terrifying as the number of people who defend it.
- vmception 5y agohm that extensions shows a high percentage of my of my comments are shadowbanned or less visible due to the parent being moderated out but this is supposed to match the incognito browser experience and I can still see all my comments in incognito which means everyone else can questionable.
- unethical_ban 5y agoOh man, I have been banned and shadowbanned from a ton of subs! Outright banned from SandersForPresident, politics, WhitePeopleTwitter, BlackPeopleTwitter, LateStageCapitalism, pics, mildlyinfuriating, and several others. For some, I was calling out the echo-chamber of the whole place, those are the politics ones. Oh, and calling out a troll account. I got banned from a number of subs for making comments documenting the bot-like behavior of karma farming accounts. Accounts with millions of karma, reposting low-quality content as if it's organic. And it looks like I just got banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts for calling out a troll for their behavior. reddit really is a pathetic place for anything other than hobby subs with about 150k members or less. --- EDIT: I used reveddit and saw just how much of the posts I make are invisible. Not just by getting shadowbanned by hack mods on popular subs, but by other comments and submissions getting deleted for one reason or another. It's absolutely absurd.
- rubyist5eva 5y agoTinder is cancer, who cares.
- commandlinefan 5y agoAs OP says - "It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application or a messenger that you use on a daily basis"?
- hnbad 5y agoHow do we know they didn't violate the terms of service or community guidelines? It's entirely possible to do so simply by uploading photos and filling out your profile. Since they provide neither, it's impossible to tell whether the decision is justified or not. There are plenty of things I can think of that they could have done that would have required zero interactions but been in violation of the community guidelines[0]. Also I have no idea who this person is, their about page is empty and Google results are ambiguous at best, so I have no reason to trust their account of what happened. The point about big tech seems tangential and isn't exactly a novel insight. As for this: "Of course, they cannot name you the reason as this could be later used against them and their proprietary algorithm. How could they?" This is not a problem with "big tech" but with lack of transparency and is a consumer protection issue. The GDPR for example requires automated rulings to offer the option to appeal and have the ruling be reviewed by a human. It would be trivial to change the law so consumers would have the right to be told which part of the ToS they allegedly violated if a contract is terminated over a ToS violation. But there is nothing about this problem that is unique to "big tech". [0]: https://policies.tinder.com/community-guidelines/intl/en https://policies.tinder.com/community-guidelines/intl/en
- thomastjeffery 5y agoIt doesn't matter, because we know they weren't given a reason. They might have broken a rule without realizing it, but no one is even willing to say what one.
- taurusnoises 5y ago> "In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do." This is literally the day-to-day of anyone trying to leverage their profile on any social media account. Endlessly chasing after the algorithm, trying to" hack it" by keeping up to date on its moods and preferences. As someone who used to roll that way, I can attest. The future has been around for years now.
- tsimionescu 5y agoIt's also the day to day of living in society, except social norms are more democratically established.
- maratc 5y agoBig Tech has nothing to do with it, as the tech is spreading everywhere, and to the governments as well. I was filling out a government form for a relative of mine to get on a plane (Covid-19 regulations). After filling out all the relevant details, I got the negative answer "BOARDING DENIED" because "You are not in compliance with all the regulations". It never said _which_ regulation of these "all" we weren't in compliance with, exactly. It took me hours to get to an intelligent person in the ministry hotline, if we skip the "try again" and "try from another PC" and "you've tried too many times and so are banned" guys. After some convincing, they agreed to fill out the form for us. It turned out the system expects TWO vaccination dates, not one, to give its permission, although never says so clearly. With Tinder, you can move to another platform, but when the government tech decides whether or not you're allowed to board the plane, they usually monopolize that.
- 999900000999 5y agoBy far the best part is they didn't automatically cancel his subscription. What a horrible company, if you've banned my account that's fine but cancel the subscription and refund my money. If y'all haven't looked at it yet, read up on the FCC's filing against Match. They knowingly prompt up tons of fake profiles, to get you engaged. Horrifically this has lead to romance scams being the number one source of fraud in the US. I had one particularly scary experience and after that I don't use any dating apps. But it's worked out very well, I did have to move to a new city too, but I've been able to meet so many amazing girls in real life. I'm also in a much better place emotionally, if you're staring at your phone constantly waiting for box to message you, that's not good for your mind. Your mind. It makes everything 10 times of stressful, for fraction of the benefit. When I actually meet someone, It was always someone who is in their mid-20s to 30s without a job. In real life, everyone I've gone out with has had a decent job, due to another scary experience I don't go out with people who aren't working.
- svalee 5y agoYeah, they specifically mention that at the bottom of the screen[1] when they ban you [1] https://paulefou.com/cancel.jpg https://paulefou.com/cancel.jpg
- callamdelaney 5y agoNot if they shadow ban you which seems to happen quite often. They'll happily accept your money in this instance - it sounds like in the article above this is what happened.
- _fat_santa 5y agoHmm, say they did shadow ban him but continued to charge him. Wouldn't they be open to fraud in this case? You could make the case that you paid for services that were not rendered.
- munk-a 5y ago
- overcast 5y agoThis exact thing happened to me, one day my long (years) standing account was just banned, and I had recently created a subscription. No repeal, nothing. What I ended up doing, was changing my subscription to a HIGHER tier, which refunds you the difference of the lower tier. Then CANCELLING the now new higher tier, which refunds you the new subscription amount. All through iOS subscription management. Seriously fuck Tinder.
- Justsignedup 5y agoWhat this is: - no due process - no way to reverse their decision - no way to appeal their decision they are judge, jury, and executioner And this is fine, unless you are a company providing a what would now be considered a critical service to the public (even if for pay).
- bigwheeler 5y agoI just lost my IG account after having it for literally a decade. Short story: I thought my engagement was low, so I manually went through my not-very-large follower list (2400 or so) in the IG app, identified about 100 accounts that I thought were bots (accounts that were following 6000+ people), and then went to each one and removed them as a follower. I made it about 40 in when suddenly I got meaningless errors, logged out, and that was it. My account no longer exists. All of the avenues to contact Instagram are meaningless and don’t lead anywhere. There are no actual humans anywhere that review these things. No one cares when their crap algorithm screws up and deletes your 1000 photos and memories and all the interactions you had with your friends. The irony is I got kicked out for doing something that should be their job.
- canadaduane 5y agoI was banned for trying to create a 2nd account for my business.
- 88840-8855 5y agoThat is great. Why would you have a "business" account on tinder?
- orthoxerox 5y agoProstitution?
- jwong_ 5y agoGrandparent mentions IG, so assuming they created a business IG account.
- vidarh 5y agoThe irony is last time I used Tinder it was clear they're totally unable or unwilling to deal with all the women using Tinder for "business".
- srmarm 5y agoSomething to do with where he'd travelled I would guess. I lost an account a few years ago at the same time I was geospoofing on my phone for something totally unrelated. I guess it flagged on Tinder's side and that was that account gone. Fortunately I didn't think there was any soulmate lost as a result but I could see that being painful if I'd been talking to someone for a while. On the other hand Tinder is going to be a huge target for romance scammers and other dodgy types and people on it are vulnerable so they've got to have a robust defence mechanism. It's the lack of recourse to fair adjudication that is the problem - online dating is one of the most common ways of meeting a partner these days and the many platforms are owned by a couple of companies so getting blacklisted by Tinder could also see you barred from Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and PlentyOfFish - quite serious stuff if you're looking for a partner especially in the current climate.
- yosito 5y agoThis happened to me because I uploaded a picture holding a pepper from my garden that Tinder's AI flagged as phallic. To a human being, it was no more phallic than any other pepper and definitely not sexualized. Tinder refused to manually review the photo so I was banned with no recourse.
- toastal 5y agoThis reminds me of my ban from Gumtree. I had issues making a post because I was using uMatrix which blocks (the malicious) reCAPTCHA that they use to block spam posts. With no errors about the missing reCAPTCHA script on the screen and just redirecting me to the submission after what seemed like a sever error, I just tried to resubmit my listing 3 times in a row. I got banned. I emailed them along the lines of "hey, I'm not a bot and I looked into it and it seems there's an issue with reCAPTCHA and error reporting". I got a response that for asking about ban and asking about reCAPTCHA, I was going to have my account, email address, and IP banned. What a joke.
- cnst 5y agoSo, basically, a reverse discrimination against people who know what's going on? The same thing happens with corporate VPNs. I guess it only makes sense that Apartment.com doesn't want your business if you're making a bank at one of the larger companies who are big enough to require a VPN service!
- kongolongo 5y agoThis is the better world though. Would you rather have a dating app with no users or so many that they can't possibly fully investigate every false-positive?
- specialist 5y agoThe problem is lack of fair and impartial judicial review. Every one has a fundamental right to appeal, to have their day in court.
- helen___keller 5y agoBig tech would be if your ban from tinder causes you to lose access to your email, your productivity tools, and your income. If getting banned without good justification is the problem, the problem is with all tech services
- zionic 5y ago>Big tech would be if your ban from tinder causes you to lose access to your email, your productivity tools, and your income. Who you meet can radically change the trajectory of your life though, and if 99% of your demographic meets new people via tinder being banned can absolutely have an outsized impact on your life. In my case I met someone normal, got married, had a child, and built a house in an area I never would have discovered had I not met them. I sometimes think how different my life would be if either of us hadn't checked our phones that night.
- helen___keller 5y agoTech is literally the infrastructure of the 21st century. Of course it matters and has a huge impact, I’m saying that this is true for much of the tech industry and doesn’t require the “big tech” qualifier.
- ravenstine 5y agoThis is pretty disturbing considering how necessary dating apps are today. Let's say you get banned from Tinder and consequently Bumble. What do you do now? You can create fake accounts, but they'll eventually find you. Coffee Meets Bagel? Plenty of Fish? Match.com? Don't make me laugh. It's already bad enough that women find it strange that a guy doesn't have an Instagram account (this has been my experience 90% of the time), but at least as someone who is dating you can work your way around that. But if you get shut out of even 1 of the few main dating apps, you've lost a massive pool of dates and potential life partners. Unless something has changed since my foray into that scene, these days those apps are pretty much a requirement for getting any meaning amount of dates. I can't help but feel bad for the younger generations of today. I was fortunate to come of age during the tail end of where it was still largely acceptable to meet and approach women IRL while online dating was kind of a sideshow. Today, what were once the best places to meet other young single people, are not only where it's become unacceptable to meet new people at bars and clubs or meetups but they also are the places with the most COVID-masking (yes, this DOES affect attraction and being able to read the other person). For most young guys and girls, you're probably stuck with Tinder and Bumble unless you are a 9 or above. The other day I got permabanned from Nextdoor, not because I did anything wrong, but because I didn't use my real name. Of course the name that I used is the name that I use in real life and as a professional. I logged in one day to find that I had absolutely no access to my account. There was no read-only access to my messages, my activity, settings, or anything. Just a page that said I'd been banned for not using my real name but that I could contact their customer service or whatever. Imagine if that happens to you on Tinder right as you're about to ask someone on a date, or to your Wells Fargo account as you just got a paycheck and are ready to make that big purchase.
- mbg721 5y agoIs this what dating is really like?? It sounds completely alien and scary to me; I met my now-wife when we were in college, by talking and having meals together and stuff like that. And we're not ancient, we're in our 30s. There must still be ways to form meaningful relationships without being entirely at the mercy of the app gods,
- 5y ago
- elzbardico 5y agoOnce had a bank that decided that I had met a annual limit of foreign exchange swift orders and because of that I couldn’t receive my salary from the foreign company I worked for. Sent then my contract, links to my face and name on the company’s about page and they simply decided I was probably some kind of terrorist or drug trafficker or whatever. Thankfully was able to transfer the order to another bank and later sue the first bank and win
- 1cvmask 5y agoBumble banned Sharon Stone and then backtracked when they realized who she was. https://www.nme.com/news/film/sharon-stones-bumble-dating-profile-has-finally-been-restored-2607744 https://www.nme.com/news/film/sharon-stones-bumble-dating-pr...
- globular-toast 5y agoIs it because she used "that shot" as her profile pic?
- lordnacho 5y agoThis is the kind of thing you need an ombudsman for. Screwing over a small proportion of people, but still a lot of people, in a way that they can't reasonably pursue by themselves.
- sarasasa28 5y agoI have a story to share too: I talked a considerable time with a girl from another country and was about to travel to visit her. Then, I started having mixed feelings, wasn't sure about everything, decided to stop, told her and she got angry (well, until that moment I understood her quite well). A while later I tried to use Tinder again, and my account was banned. I don't really remember how I discovered it, if she told me, or a representative told me, but the thing was: She report me as I had verbally abused her, mistreated her and shada shada, because she was angry I dumped her. So they closed my account without even checking our conversations at least (there was no insults or nothing at all)
- Mezzie 5y agoAny time someone else has control of your content or you need them, they can get rid of you. It's not limited to Big Tech; I was 12 when COPPA went into effect and I lost everything online because I hadn't lied when I signed up (because it was perfectly legal for an elementary school kid to have things like an email address and web hosting). All my contacts/friends, all my work that wasn't stored locally (which was a fair amount), etc. Similarly to things like Tinder bans, there WAS an option in law for me to keep my accounts, but it would have required effort on behalf of the companies, so they just deleted everything. Any centralization, policy, or algorithms that work based on an assumption of default/normal behavior will punish outliers (unless this is accounted for). This guy obviously was one such outlier for Tinder. > In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do. Assuming people understand the algorithms; there's an incentive on the part of companies to keep them opaque. It will be more akin to a religion where people GUESS which actions anger the algorithm and companies and get very mad when others don't agree. Which is worse.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoOnce a tech company has greater than, say, 60% market share, it probably makes sense for society to give the company an ‘I won’ sticker and start treating them some what like a utility.
- HumanReadable 5y agoI got permabanned when I tried logging in from my phone with oss android installed. In Tinder's defense I imagine my phone's system might have looked similar to that of spammers leading to a false-positive, so I don't mind the ban itself. What I do mind was that their official stance is that they don't reverse bans for any reason. Creating a new account is against their terms of service, so in theory I am locked out of one of the primary ways my generation finds partners. In the country I live, the competitors don't have user bases nearly large enough to compete so Tinder is effectively a monopoly. With Tinder's enormous market-power comes great responsibility, and they have in my eyes failed to live up to it.
- vidarh 5y agoBuying a throwaway phone is the standard workaround to a Tinder ban.
- HumanReadable 5y agoIt was not difficult to get around the ban, but I wanted to point out that doing so is not allowed. Having broken no terms-of-service, I can be banned with no means of recourse. That is extremely problematic even if it is possible to cheat the system.
- vidarh 5y agoAbsolutely agree it's a problem. If anything that it's so easily worked around by those causing genuine problems also makes it less justified.
- kodah 5y agoTinder and Bumble are the same form of awful and from the same founder. These apps are designed to exploit men. There are a fewer number of women on them and plenty of men, as a result they design features like boost, super likes, and premium subscriptions that you must pay for every month. There are studies and data that show that even normally attractive men with good profiles will go unswiped while women will get hundreds[1][2]. You then have to deal with a dating scene where you are knowingly competing with other men for a woman's attention while having very little in the form of options. The irony behind a TOS like this is it's designed to prevent bad behavior, but the entire underlying system generates more bad behavior. This is not to even mention the number of OnlyFans, prostitution, and people lying about their sexual orientation that users will need to sift through. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/riwo34/finally_got_my_swipe_data_weeks_after_i_deleted/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/riwo34/finally_got_... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/p3aeqq/dont_assume_that_your_match_ratio_is_a_reflection/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/p3aeqq/dont_assume_...
- arbitrage 5y agoI'll let you in on a secret ... women's experiences on Tinder aren't that great, either.
- t-writescode 5y agoThis. Men see a ghost town of responses and think no one of value is here. Women see a town full of roaches and think no one of value is here. Same result: no one of value found (some exceptions apply)
- kodah 5y agoWhat I said doesn't invalidate women's experiences. I was highlighting that men have to pay for said shitty experience, and the system is designed that way intentionally. The heavy TOS is because men and women act out because of that shitty system. It's a cycle.
- 5y ago
- BingoAhoy 5y ago"Big tech permabanned me and doesn't mind false positives" Isn't this often the case with humans minus the algorithm making the decision? Many times of the few times I've been in trouble, with HR, the law, or whatever authority you realize doing things that seem bad but aren't actually bad is almost as dangerous as doing something actually harmful because turns out humans aren't very good judges of ambiguous cases in low information environments. Even when not ambiguous humans by and large don't have a good grasp of what is or isn't moral. And they typically show a large lack of empathic ability for how their actions will effect others.
- PoignardAzur 5y agoYeah, I'd say "whether humans are involved" isn't actually a good metric for whether abuse detection is fair / avoids screwing you over. A better proxy would be "how much the company spends per user to detect false positives". Whether it's human oversight for each case, or engineering time spent fine-tuning algorithms to exclude known false positives, the more the company spends, the less it's going to screw you over. (In practice, companies want to spend very little, which is why you get underpaid Mechanical-Turk workers and slapped-together detection systems.)
- amima 5y agoFalse positives are indeed a major problem with bigtech. Just got into the situation myself when I was traveling to France and wanted to order some food with Deliveroo. Their antifraud systems banned me without any option to prove my legitimacy. Needless to say I just normally wanted to order something to eat, and I later used Uber Eats without any problems. Permanent ban without procedure to correct antifraud false positive (most likely due to my bank card issued outside of France).
- amima 5y agoAlso, worth mentioning that I was banned after I have contacted the support because my orders were being rejected (this was my initial problem and the reason I contacted the support). It was the support team who banned me. This is a problem of its own: legitimate users should not be discouraged to contact the support.
- joelbondurant0 5y ago[flagged]
- hammock 5y agoNote to readers: OP says "permabanned" but he really means "shadowbanned"/"hellbanned." Cc @dang
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 5y agoDo a chargeback with your credit card provider, at least you can twist the knife back a bit.
- authed 5y agoAll major companies are like this. I.E.: Google Accounts, Reddit, etc... I am in the process of finding alternate non-reddit sources to match my reddit subs... and moving out of Google.
- siliconc0w 5y agoIMO, if your market share is bigger than ${some number}, you shouldn't be able to deny service without a documented reason, it should have some sort of time-to-live (i.e 1 year), and there should be an appeals process. In a functioning marketplace, companies would be naturally incentivized to care about customers but that stops working in uncompetitive industries (which currently describes most of the economy).
- shadowgovt 5y agoThis rule would functionally kill small Internet service provision and build the biggest moat around the incumbent providers that has ever been handed to them. ... which may, indeed, be the right solution.
- mysecretaccount 5y agoAs long as ${some number} is large enough it will not impact "small ISP" at all.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThat's the thing about being an Internet startup... You never know when you're going to explode and suddenly jump from a ten-thousand-user service to a milliion-user service. So supporting this would require a company to take all manner of new precautions that companies currently don't (circuit-breaker on the new account creation system? But then your growth stalls and your potential customers go to a competitor instead, and you don't blow up into a YouTube or a Twitter like YouTube and Twitter did).
- pdpi 5y agoOr the simpler solution: Once your revenue goes over the threshold, you have a period of 6/12 months to go into compliance, or something similar.
- selfhoster11 5y agoIf you're suddenly a million-user service, you should easily have enough revenue to implement the regulations during a grace period.
- shadowgovt 5y ago> It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application That's literally how loan applications work now: banks compute all the information they can glean on you to determine a risk index. Do something the algorithm has considered risky and you get charged more for the same amount of money another person can get. And the algorithm considers it "risky" to not use banks; if you have no history of having owned a credit card, for instance, the bank trusts you less than a person who has carried all manner of debt for years (but paid it down consistently).
- k__ 5y agoI'm banned from Tinder for years now, because I once uploaded a meme. They said images that don't show me are against the terms of service.
- klyrs 5y agoCurious what OP may have done "wrong", I read a bit of the Tinder TOS and found this juicy nugget: > YOU UNDERSTAND THAT TINDER DOES NOT CONDUCT CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ON ITS MEMBERS OR OTHERWISE INQUIRE INTO THE BACKGROUND OF ITS MEMBERS. TINDER MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE CONDUCT OR COMPATIBILITY OF MEMBERS. TINDER RESERVES THE RIGHT TO CONDUCT – AND YOU AUTHORIZE TINDER TO CONDUCT – ANY CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK OR OTHER SCREENINGS (SUCH AS SEX OFFENDER REGISTER SEARCHES) AT ANY TIME USING AVAILABLE PUBLIC RECORDS OBTAINED BY IT OR WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF A CONSUMER REPORTING AGENCY, AND YOU AGREE THAT ANY INFORMATION YOU PROVIDE MAY BE USED FOR THAT PURPOSE. 1. You understand that Tinder does not perform background checks. 2. Everything you provide to Tinder and everything Tinder can find out about you may be used to perform a background check at Tinder's whim. Classic. But, my guess is that he was ruled to be "spamming" because he sent evidence of liking a (probably fake) user more than once in an attempt to test if the app was working.
- fencepost 5y agoThat combination seems not unreasonable - basically saying that you should have no expectation that they've performed a background check [and incurred costs] but that they reserve the right to perform them on any user at their own discretion should they decide to incur those costs.
- stevemadere 5y agoThis is approximately half the plot of Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil"
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoThis is actually wonderful (for him). Tinder is terrible. There's not enough space for a real profile (that nobody reads anyway) so everyone just goes based on pictures and humorous quips, leading to everyone becoming a stereotype. There's definitely no more than 6 different kinds of profiles on Tinder. Go make friends in person and meet dates through normal social interactions. Sounds crazy but it has an impressive track record.
- LeicaLatte 5y agoThis was unique to PayPal in the previous decade since we were one of the few(only) tech platforms dealing with money then. Kinda fun to see other monetized tech platforms failing in spectacular ways. :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thomastjeffery 5y agoMy biggest frustration with tinder is that paying to get rid of arbitrary limitations like limited swipes doesn't really help you. The only way unlimited swipes fixes the numbers game of dating is if everyone gets them.
- nearmuse 5y agoThis sounds very behooving of a dating app: it preemptively gives 0 chances to the "iffy guy" and rejects them so the dating person doesn't have to. I am still not sure to what extent the problem is with this social norm vs. with how it is being "reflected" by Tinder.
- dqpb 5y agoWell, well, well. Let's recap some popular HN opinions that have surfaced lately: What Problem Blockchains Solve mrjin: centralized organizations are there for reasons, and block chain resolved none of them The Web3 Fraud endisneigh: In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger Stephen Diehl: Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
- bastardoperator 5y agoWhy did this person set up a new tinder account? "That is something that never happened to me before" How if you're a first time user? Sounds like they already had a tinder account at some point. This is clickbait at best...
- oh_sigh 5y agoYup, I wonder if tinder noticed multiple accounts associated with the facebook/phone # he provided. I'd suspect they would proactively prevent you from creating a new account, but I've never used the service so perhaps you put in your facebook after the account is created or something, and that is when they got the multiple account signal? Or if he has a completely different name associated with his facebook account.
- AzzieElbab 5y agoMaking a blind guess for the 1st day ban, did author use someone else's photos?
- DantesKite 5y agoThere’s a service called DoNotPay that helps file legal requests to unban you. They’re obviously not miracle workers, but I’m curious whether litigation would slow them down.
- nodesocket 5y agoI am almost certain that Bumble shadow banned me as well (mostly over my past political and public spotlight). Switched to hinge, much better platform. I am very very bearish on Bumble, lots of fake profiles and shenanigans going on at Bumble.
- jablongo 5y agoIt's worth pointing out that there is an explanation for this set of responses from tinder that makes complete sense and is relatively non-dystopian: Someone submitted a complaint about the author from his past usage of tinder, maybe even one specifically designed to get him banned. Tinder would never disclose the cause in that case in order to protect the identity of the complainant, nor should they be expected to. But in either case they should not have continued to charge him...
- Mandatum 5y agoI was just banned by EA/DICE for cheating, hacking or exploiting in Battlefield 2042. I'm not sure which, as I did none of those things (or if I did, I wasn't aware of it - but I expect it's unlikely that you can accidentally break those rules). After asking support for more information, they listed the same reasons that were originally emailed to me - cheating, hacking or exploiting the game. No further information given. Luckily I bought it on Amazon so I'll be refunding through them, and I expect my Origin account to be banned as a result - however it sucks to deal with these hardline policies with zero transparency when you're on the wrong side of the algorithm. EDIT: After reading more about false-positive bans, it seems these days having the wrong driver installed (as some hacks pretend to be software that communicates through that "bad" driver) or running peripheral scripts (like mouse macros) can cause a ban. I wasn't using macros and I don't have peripherals capable of running them (eg Logitech G series).
- max48 5y agoI also learned the hard with PUBG that you need to use a separate steam account for these types of multiplayer games. They refuse to share with you why you got ban or reverse it and they keep the money. I got my refund through Paypal and the warning Steam support gave me hinted that I'd lose my account if I did that a second time. regarding your edit, IMO they shouldn't be allowed to permaban your account for a bad driver without first warning you that you need to update it. Even if they use a fake reason for it, turning off windows update shouldn't be a bannable offense.
- trembonator 5y ago
- sysOpOpPERAND 5y agothe crazy thing is that most people meet online these days and since tinder and hinge are owned by the same media umbrella company and are the most popular dating apps, if you get banned from both its like your are nearly banned from the dating pool. stay with me, while i realize this sounds ridiculous, things have drastically changed in the dating world. especially with covid-19 adding that extra layer of caution making "cold approaches" nearly obsolete
- jollybean 5y agoWe need some regulation here please.
- overgard 5y agoI know its only 12$ but I hope this guy aggressively tries to get it back. The only way we get support departments is if these fuckups become expensive.
- ge96 5y agoUnrelated side note: Friend of mine was about to marry this girl and as soon as she got her green card she dipped. Another friend of mine met some girl on Duo, bringing her to the states like hmm... do I tell him? Oh well. Tinder is brutal though, not something I did great on.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- esnowrackley 5y ago> It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application... It's happened with people's banks (or "banks"). Earlier this year the fintech middleman Chime began closing accounts without notice or giving customers whose accounts they closed access to their funds.[0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-app-has-been-closing-accounts-not-returning-money/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-ap...
- KETpXDDzR 5y ago> In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do. That's the real "Terminator" of today. It's not time-travelling killer robots (yet?). It's letting algorithms deciding the fate of humans. That's especially problematic if the developers of those algorithms don't even understand them (yes, I'm looking at you, neutral networks). Tinder is one thing, but imagine some algorithm identifies you as a terrorist. E.g., via cameras at every airport. My favorite example is a couple that ordered a steam cooker and a backpack online. Some days later some federal agents knocked at their door. Apparently, these two items raise flags in their algorithms.
- a0-prw 5y agoThose dating apps are fucking awful. Go meet real people in real life.