Hacker News Reader

Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

> At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked.

Seems like they're following Google's strategy. Presumably, ad profit from each individual user is low enough that it's cheaper to accept false positives in their anti-abuse mechanism than it is to provide a functioning appeal process. Maybe if the user manages to go viral on Twitter or HN with their story they could get it reversed. Going viral with stories of false-positive bans is the primary way to restore a Google account, it probably works for Reddit too. Normal people have to suck eggs.

At least losing a Reddit account is less life-disrupting for most people than losing their Google account.

View on HN

It's the strategy of all the major social players.

Several months ago I followed a new cardistry (look it up) personality on Instagram. I scrolled through and "liked" one or two dozen of their performance clips, out of the hundreds that they've posted. My Instagram account was blocked, for "manipulation" or some verbiage like that. Basically, the algorithm thought that I was a bot hired to inflate that person's numbers.

The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it. I did this, but never got any kind of response. My Instagram account that I had for 5-10 years is just gone.

Turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I created a new account attached to the same phone and email address (somehow THIS isn't detected as abuse?). But I just lost interest in the app, and life seems to be better now for having done so. If Reddit ever nukes me, then it would be the kick in the ass that I need to stop wasting time on that toxic site as well.

Delete your email address from your profile. That got my ten year account banned.

Sounds like something someone who's going to sell their account would do.

"Using encryption, sounds like something a criminal would do." Yes, that is what this sounds like.

iI have another idea why Reddit does not like VPN. They cannot monetize your data as easily.

I was answering the unasked question of why Reddit would care if someone removed the email address associated with their account.

Using a proxy or VPN also sounds like things a spammer would do, and this is also why Reddit would care and autoban these accounts. But the point of this thread is that, these anti-spam mechanisms always cause collateral damages (like some of us in this thread) and the experience can get really frustrating when that happens.

I deleted it after verification because I wanted to remain anon. Thirteen years ago.

>The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it.

Do they also ask you to put a shoe on your head?

No … Instagram is a .com domain so you don’t need to head-shoe (at least, not in the US …)

wait... does any domain registrar ask that user's prove themselves with the shoe on head method?

I believe it's just a reference to 4chan, where asking someone to post a shoe-on-head for verification was a meme, being a .org domain.

I recently learned about the kik strategy for handling child porn via Darknet Diaries[1]. If you can't actually tell anyone at kik about child porn, kik can't know about it and if nobody at kik knows about it then they're apparently not required to do anything about it.

[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

This is astonishingly illegal.

What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit."

Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.

Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things like this so that checks the safe harbor requirement apparently.

But... all the people they claim to have on their "Safety Board" haven't worked for kik for years and all efforts to contact anyone on twitter or anywhere fail. Even DMCA takedowns of revenge porn were being ignored now. It seems to be a dead platform that nevertheless gets app updates uploaded so something is still going on somewhere by someone.

Basically the only option they were discussing was getting the app removed from Google and Apple stores and they compared the situation to Parler where the app was pulled for failing to moderate. And yet kik seems to get a pass somehow. It's a very disturbing and frustrating episode.

This would be easy to prosecute, assuming the allegations are true. They don’t have a working DMCA contact, so they lose safe harbor. They could have the lawyer testify that her client’s underage nudes and related dmca takedowns were never removed, despite court order to take them down. That’s obviously not a special case, so they could spot check a few dozen prior cases, and show non-compliance for those too.

Of course, doing that would cut off a stream of easy pedophile convictions. The prosecutor’s office might like the status quo. It certainly helps increase their metrics.

one mild problem is that kik is from canada

the fbi's real world response would be "let us introduce you to some canadian officers, and we're going to help, but it's actually up to them"

still, as the former owner of an ISP, i've had to do this, and they're actually quite professional and reasonable about it

Makes you wonder if it's deliberately kept up to allow easy transmission of that kind of material... giving CSAM traffickers ample rope to hang themselves, as it were.

Is Google banning accounts just for vpn usage?

why wouldn't they? modern browsers constantly snitch on all sorts of things, including IP addresses (I say 'snitch' because so few people outside the industry are aware of even this basic fact/practice), so it's not unlikely they would have some automated banning tool. and the banned google accounts we hear about when some knowledge worker on here goes viral have fallen victim to those tools/systems.

I don't know about VPNs specifically, but stories of Google handing out automated, unappealable permabans are rampant. There's one on the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201

Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com