Patreon mistakenly shut down successfully funded project Armory3D | Hacker News Reader

Patreon mistakenly shut down successfully funded project Armory3D

armory3d.org

> ... whether it was something I (unknowingly) did or if it was a mistake.

> I realized Patreon has every right to do this.

While true. I don't suspect that I would have had this much restraint. I applaud the author for resisting what must have been the urge to make a statement against Patreon, I can't help but to think it should be stronger about who as at fault here.

> (Update: Patreon notified me that my email has been unblocked and I can start a new page from scratch. Apparently it was a mistake. Armory will continue to be funded on this page to stay safe.)

At least they are voting with their wallet and not just going back to the platform. This is an awful response by Patreon. I can't believe this don't have a way to restore backers and content. They really need to make a whole new page from scratch? What the heck?

Best practice is first you suspend, give a chance for the person to respond, then you terminate after 30 / 60 / 90 days. Full deletion immediately seems like a bad software design choice.

This reminds me of the old (?) days of Paypal freezing accounts with no recourse. I could understand if someone considered this theft. Theft of future earnings in this case (past earnings in the case of Paypal).

Am I alone in thinking companies that handle money should be held to a higher standard?

It seems lately I see an article like this about once a week - "an algorithm did it" and 1 person's livelihood in shambles, with said person needing to prove they're real/not a criminal/not violating policies/not fired/ etc.

Just off the top of my head - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645

We need to think critically about how to propel legislative action requiring every company/organization using machine learning to have a human-in-the-loop that can override the mistake. It doesn't matter how good an algorithm is - thanks to the nature of probability and a large enough sample size, it will always make a mistake. The onus to correct that mistake should not fall to the victim.

Currently, if, say, one's Google's account is suspended because of a mistake, there seems to be no recourse for a victim except to stir up a large enough PR scandal. In essence - a "guilty until proven innocent" approach. Our courts don't work that way and neither should the closure of our accounts (which are, increasingly, our livelihoods).

This is the danger of the "law is just code" mindset of companies interacting with customers/clients. In the rush to automate and process-ize interactions with "mere humans" under a Great Algorithm, they forget that effective law and processes relies not on kafkaesque bureaucracies following flowcharts blindly, but by ensuring that human judgment is kept in the loop.

Beware the rise of the techno-bureaucracy, as it is only a low-dimensional lossy encoding of what we actually want.

I guess Patreon has reached that size and clout where it can accidentally crush whole lives via careless mistakes.

With size often comes excessive automation, which could be the cause: something being flagged by an algorithm and dealt with by another algorithm before a human can actually see what's happening.

I have to be honest, "an algorithm did it" is a pretty poor excuse, and it gets harder and harder to swallow. People need to take responsibility for the algorithms they create and they need to be ready to step in when they fail.

Indeed. If a human is going to be affected, a human needs to sign off on it.

Patreon's response was basically "Ups, we have removed all your funding but you start over again".. the fuck

Wow that is REALLY fucked up. Does this mean they don't have back ups or restore points? Super concerning if they get hacked...

Why is everyone expressing so much restraint? It is insanely difficult to get your entrepreneurial projects funded. This guy needs to get a lawyer!

Given how much hype blockchain projects attract, I'd dare say that it's about time we had distributed and uncensorable crowd funding platforms.

See: ICOs. They come with their own set of problems.

"Update: Patreon notified me that my email has been unblocked and I can start a new page from scratch. Apparently it was a mistake."

Is anyone else really worried about both the technical state of Patreon and the lackluster motivation to fix their own fuckups reading the above quote?

Wow, that's kind of unacceptable.

...I realized Patreon has every right to do this.

Maybe Patreon shouldn’t have that right?

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