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Comment by throwaway82652 | Hacker News Reader

>We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions

No, I'm sorry, this is a horrible, horrible idea. As long as these companies are targeted by automated spambots, they need automated systems to counteract and remove spam accounts. That's just the reality of the internet arms race in the last 20 years. If you make them manually review everything, you hand a victory over to the spammers and degrade service quality for everyone.

>and have a proper appeals process.

This is a much better idea. Do this and require them to have a functioning customer service department.

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Fully agreed - I wasn't suggesting they review every manual decision, but do it as part of a proper appeals process. Google, for instance, is likely seeing abuse on a scale where they have to have automated bans - for everyone's benefit! - and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that as long as you can escalate to a real human.

Edited the comment to reflect this - thanks!

I worked on an abuse prevention system in the past and know the challenges very well, except my company actually put in the effort to respond to every appeal and compensate affected customers for their troubles.

Yes, humans are expensive, and spammers will try to game the appeals process, too - but it's simply a cost of doing business.

All good points.

> Yes, humans are expensive, and spammers will try to game the appeals process, too - but it's simply a cost of doing business.

Another Hacker News commentator¹ had a good suggestion for this problem:

> 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.

If users paid some up-front fee for the appeal, similar to the above, regular users would have the opportunity to appeal an automated ban (if the appeal was done properly). On the other hand, spammers and other malicious actors would have to pay money for the opportunity to attempt to game the system.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855836

Why not make it hard to create a Google account? Why is that not on the list of potential solutions? If you have bad actors that can make hundreds or thousands of bogus accounts in an automated way, it means the account creation process is too easy. Any legit user who actually wants a Google account already has one and those who don't but actually need one will jump through the necessary hoops. Google isn't a startup anymore.

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