4 ms·
A typical complaint about getting banned with a thin veneer of "big tech bad" to make it seem worthwhile to the reader.
by Invictus0 5y ago
A 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.