Ask HN: Have you ever been banned for flagging too many free scam pianos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever been banned for flagging too many free scam pianos?

3 pointsjuliusdavies4 comments

There is a very serious fake piano scam epidemic on Facebook Marketplace.

For the last week I flag the listings and sellers. They are easy to spot: they are always grand pianos, tend to be Yamahas and Steinways, and the seller always joined Facebook in 2023. I tend to flag between 20 to 100 of these fake scam pianos per day.

Today I could no longer flag them!

"Your account is restricted right now."

"You have been temporarily blocked from performing this action."

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Yes I've been banned from other platforms for doing similar things. There are certain posts that are just obviously fake and when you contact them it's clear that they are totally fake. The old adage was the squeaky wheel gets the grease but in the modern internet age the squeaky wheel just gets cut off because these platforms have no interest in actually eliminating fake posts or scams.

You have to realize that they profit at least in some way by having these posts and more of them the better. It makes their platforms seem like it's bigger than it is, drives revenue for them. So their effort in cleaning up bots and scam accounts and other things is only to the level where those things drive legitimate users away. So if that threshold is not met yet they don't care and they would rather have you not report anything because someone likely has to review that. Then you get flagged not because the quality of your reports is wrong but because they're tired of hearing from you.

This is exactly why we cannot have nice things. Because these platforms are not about giving us nice things they're about giving us the minimally necessary thing to keep our eyeballs on them.

This is why phone companies don't really do anything about SMS spam - they make money from it. If they wanted to do anything about it, they would.

If someone with some experience would take a few moments to describe a "persona" and a behavior that would only take someone a few minutes every day to find and report a small random collection of these scams AND that this would almost certainly NOT result in getting restricted or banned for doing this this... then this might result in a modest collection of people willing to contribute a little effort to try to help combat a bit of fraud and spam on the net. In my case, I don't spend time on Facebook so this may need to adjust the described the behavior. This idea might even be more widely applied. If it could be even partly automated that might be even better.

I believe I've at least been shadow-ignored for excessive flagging on various platforms. As another poster said, the flag option is mostly there more as a placebo rather than because they really want attention called to something, at least for post sites.

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