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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft have a better solution, or at least one of their departments does. You pay for support questions and if it turns out it’s actually Microsoft’s fault they refund you the fee. It’s great and most of the time I never had to pay. When I did it was still money well spent as I got good support.

There have been a few occasions where I would gladly have paid Google/Twitter/Apple to answer my questions.

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Honest question, why on earth would you ever have a question for twitter so important that you'd consider paying them to answer it?

If they ban your account and you don’t know why

Also, to prevent an automated ban (or at least immediate manual review).

There's a Twitter account that has our company name, but it hasn't been used for a decade, and has only one Tweet. I'd love to pay Twitter to talk to them, so we can take over the account. Maybe they have a process for this anyways? I don't know. All I know is this account gets tagged all the time by people trying to tag our company.

Find your way to your local Twitter ad rep. They may be able to facilitate transfer of an inactive handle. It obviously helps if you are buying or intend to buy ads on Twitter.

Plenty of people use Twitter for commercial purposes.

It's also a big part of many people's social lives these days (like it or not).

The algorithm banned our first company account. Nothing could get them to respond, including the appeal form.

We want to switch now to professional and can’t despite fulfilling all the criteria they tell you need.

I would like to see legislation forcing detailed explanations of bans though.

You can sue them, which is the normal recourse for disagreements between companies. Usually that starts with a letter requesting documents from your lawyers to theirs

“Just sue Twitter” is one of the more head-scratching comments I’ve read lately.

People sue big companies over bullshit all the time, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I called a lawyer and they threatened my bank with litigation a year ago, and the bank remedied their mistake (this is a company on par with Twitter).

It's more head scratching to me that people think it's going to be easier to pass legislation than to go through the existing legal channels when a company's policies are causing damages. You sue them.

I can't imagine committing bandwidth to sue a major tech company. We didn't have a lawyer on retainer or something at my old company, we were a very small operation. I'm not saying it isn't an option at all, but it's not like going down the street to pick up some milk. It also just strikes me as silly we should have to sue a company to correct a relatively simple error they could fix if they'd just pay a modicum of attention/responded to us.

Lawyers are how you get them to pay attention and respond to you when companies do shitty things and you don't have recourse. It's really not that expensive or difficult to send a letter to their counsel and get a reply.

Every business needs some kind of legal advice, they don't have to be on retainer. You probably did have one or more lawyers that your leadership was in contact with for particulars. Every business I've worked at has dealt with legal bullshit at some point (even the 3-4 person startups!).

Sure. I think I gave the wrong impression above, I just think for a lot of people it’s very daunting - and I definitely don’t think we should have to sue major companies to get basic service/responses. But I get what I want and what the reality is don’t always align haha

Not explanations. We need due process.

A few months ago I was banned from Twitter for sharing a meme that literally said "I fucking love outer space." [0] That was it. Just an image with some text on it. For some reason this angered some algorithm and 10+ years of tweets and interactions were gone. It was heartbreaking. For a lot of people I followed that was my only real way of engaging with them.

The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from Twitter. I tried opening a support ticket and got no response. DAYS later, I got an automated email about what I needed to do, but the instructions didn't even work. Eventually I was able to get my account back about a week after that by going through some cumbersome verification process.

All for sharing a dumb space meme.

In that moment, if I could pay $10 to talk to an actual human being who could resolve my problem or at least tell me what I needed to do, even if it was via web-chat, I would gladly have done so.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/746515-space

Hmm, I know how you feel. Got banned on some subreddit for some stupid post. 10 years of comments linked to that account. Will never be able to post in there any more, and there is zero appeals process. The moderators themselves are just silent, no response to my appeal at all. The response from the admins I got to my ticket on an ‘unjust ban’ was basically ‘tough luck, subreddit moderators can do whatever they want’.

Living in a liberal democracy has made me so used to the system working mostly fairly that these interactions with a ‘fiefdom’ introduce some sort of cognitive dissonance.

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