Threads.net Can Go to Hell | Hacker News Reader

Threads.net Can Go to Hell

lapcatsoftware.com

80 pointsfrizlab60 comments

Instagram banned my business account today because they say I'm not a real person. I'm not trying to be. Nothing in my account said I was a real person. All the personal information in my account is real, though. I tried to appeal it which involves uploading a selfie. I've now learned this was my fatal mistake. You are not supposed to appeal it, that simply auto-perma-bans you. You're supposed to fill out a form which took me an hour to find about 27 levels deep on Meta's site. Which I can no longer fill out because I am perma-banned.

The point of this is: I also lost my Threads account.

If you lose your Instagram account, you lose your Threads account too.

I guess I should be lucky (?) that my Facebook account still works.

If you're stuck in the same situation as the author, DO NOT hit that Appeal button. It is a trick. It will not get your account unlocked, it will do the opposite and will get you perma-banned.

Here are links to help you:

https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/contact/165256783828...

https://help.instagram.com/contact/606967319425038

https://www.reddit.com/r/InstagramDisabledHelp/

https://twitter.com/disabledinsta

My account is lost forever. Don't let yours suffer the same fate.

It's really hurt my mental health having my account banned, as it does with many others. I'm sure there have been many suicides from people losing their accounts like this. Interacting with my account was one of my main sources of therapy.

I'm sorry to hear that happened and that it's been so stressful for you.

>When I signed up, however, my Instagram account was immediately suspended, before I even had the chance to use it.

If you haven't already made accounts in any major platform many years ago, getting in without giving a massive amount of personal information (up to having to send your very own personal documents, such as your passport) is not as simple as just signing up, and it gets worse if anti-fraud algorithms pick you up, or your device is "off the norm", I've already experienced a few services where signing up via phone application works, but it's impossible through a desktop. This seems like a very overlooked issue that's become somewhat expected, even outside Meta's trigger happy ban policy (remember people getting banned for signing up to use their oculus device?)

I am rooting for Mastodon to become a major platform. There you can just sign up while hardly giving them anything.

The flip side is that spammers too can just sign up quite easily.

Yep. I tried to make a test account on Twitter/X to use the the API integration with, and dear lord it was a nightmare. Loads of captchas, the requirement to use a mobile number to sign up at all, and quite a few other issues I can't remember.

Forget about getting out of the walled garden, even getting in is painful if you're a late adopter or need extra accounts for whatever reason.

Just a phone number!? Lucky you, Instagram wants me to take a selfie with some random code written on a piece of paper.

I had this account for years, but I only used it to get away from "log in to see more posts" whenever I randomly stumbled upon some Instagram link, so yeah, I'm not doing that.

> Instagram wants me to take a selfie with some random code written on a piece of paper.

It's possible they may have wanted that too, eventually. The phone # request came at the beginning of the appeal process.

It's the next step after the phone number. I went through the same process this morning. After you upload the selfie they perma-ban your account so you can no longer get any support whatsoever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254898

The forms don't work for me. One form requires "Your mobile number", and the other form say "Go to Instagram and confirm it's you before requesting a review", which I can't do.

Yeah, their code is a Dumpster fire. I'm not surprised you ended up in some circle of hell like that. I just tried to log into Threads with my banned Instagram account and now both sites just report HTTP Error 429, which I had to look up. (It's client rate limit reached)

This basically goes into "I don't need this shit" territory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm4BOVagU_8

Do not upload that selfie. If you read online you will find it is a trap that perma-bans your account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254898

The funny thing is Product Marketing Managers, to boost sign-up numbers, completely omit this step in certain regions like India, Eastern Europe, etc.

I remember when Instagram started asking for your date of birth in order to use it, which prompted me to take a nice break from it. The next time I checked in, they made it so that you could have a "shadow birthday" tied to your age and the current date. I wonder if that'll affect me in the event I have to go through the kind of ID verification hell I see reported everywhere (including replies to this post).

> I remember when Instagram started asking for your date of birth in order to use it

It still does.

This may be required for compliance - different considerations you have to take with youth when you're a multinational megacorp.

I have a brother that gets a new phone number every year. I used to think he was crazy, now… not so much.

I wonder if behaviour like that doesn’t make you rise up a list of interesting IMEIs that ping at addresses X, Y, and Z, and seem to commute along road A for one year at a time.

Overall interpersonal quality of life will be better if you boycott American media companies, wholesale.

> I would urge everyone to reconsider your reliance on Twitter, and reinvest in decentralized options such as blogs, RSS, and email.

None of these suggestions replace what Twitter offers as a whole. Suggesting blogs, RSS, and email as a replacement really is just another way of saying you don't know understand the domain. Which is fair, considering who the person is.

This is not to say that blogs, RSS, and email can't work for him, you, or me. But then, we aren't trying to solve the same things.

And more importantly, if you want people to use these tools, you first have to accept that they absolutely do not solve for the things Twitter provides. So, if you want to have people use that, make something that does that with blogs, RSS, and email.

> Which is fair, considering who the person is.

What is that supposed to mean?

I used Twitter from 2008-2012 and 2016-2022, ten (nonconsecutive) years. So I think I understand the domain pretty well.

> None of these suggestions replace what Twitter offers as a whole

So? I think it’s clear that the accent here was not on twitter replacement as a whole, but on the decentralized options. And it’s fine to give up some functionality of a service when choosing an alternative. Especially when the reason for the switch is the unbearable user experience.

Sometimes there might not be any alternative, and that’s also fine. I stopped using social networks and youtube years ago and I feel much better than before. It felt like I was missing out something, but this feeling didn’t last long.

> considering who the person is.

What do you mean?

... woo, I almost forgot about Threads!

Interesting. I had a very similar experience.

I had no instagram account, so I set one up to try out threads within the first week of launch. On July 7 I received an email from instagram stating that my account had been suspended for being in violation of community guidelines.

Where my experience differed is that I was able to review and appeal this without entering a mobile number into my instagram account. Very shortly after I submitted a request for review via email, my account was reinstated.

Instagram bans accounts for no reason at all. It’s had some rogue and buggy bots or algorithms banning or deactivating accounts for years. Appeals don’t work.

Unfortunately, this situation doesn’t get a lot better with the fediverse, where one or two admins would decide what they like or dislike and use the ban hammer without any warnings. No appeals process or no responses over other channels. Maybe everybody is better off having their own blogs and websites rather than having (unpaid) accounts on others’ systems (centralized or not).

I hit the same thing trying to sign up for instagram using my fb account. I was kinda put off by it, so I didn't dig in and figure out what was up.

I just remembered that I read a bunch of comments here back when Threads launched about how Twitter was dead and Threads would replace it. A few months later and Threads is effectively dead. Pretty funny in retrospect.

Reddit is dead too.

(Ignore the fact that it's gone from #18 to #17 global ranking over the last three months. [1])

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/

It's showing as #19 for me: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

Oof dead for sure

Maybe not dead, but the opposite of what you suggested

I suggested it increased in popularity over three months and provided the evidence.

There was a separate link provided which said nothing about whether it increased or decreased in popularity over any timeframe.

Hijacking a thread here trying to ask you a php question.

Linked below, you said something reminds you to a old times when you were using arrays to work through database results.

I still do this, building multidimensional arrays of results to later use.

How should/could I be doing it?

I'm self taught but built a decent sized webapp CRM/project management saas and am trying to learn a few new things before starting a new project.

PS, comically, your style of responding made me want to contact you. Reading some of your post history, we have very similar views on a lot of things. Interesting how that works.

Thank you for reading

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413404

I already explained how I personally do it in that comment chain: Doctrine ORM and Symfony. Instead of working directly with raw database data as arrays, you work with classes where all the database columns are defined as typed class properties and let the ORM handle the conversion between the two for you.

If you're starting a new project in PHP, I recommend giving it a try. The SymfonyCasts tutorials are a great way to start (though sadly they're not free).

Why was this flagged?

Why do people call fediverse mastodon? There's other and better Twitter clones that use activitypub, such as pleroma or soapbox...

Where does the author do this? All I see is, "you can find me on the decentralized Mastodon".

I post a lot of photos, particularly of flowers, to mastodon.social because I get very good engagement on them. I know a lot of people using Pixelfed find them, favorite them, and boost them.

Why did you pick those two? Usage-wise mastodon looks 100x larger than pleroma, and I can't get stats on soapbox.

I'll defend that user count isn't all that matters (these aren't venture capital backed businesses), but I'm curious why you prefer those?

[1] https://fediverse.observer/stats

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Because people have heard of mastodon, unlike pleroma or soapbox.

> pleroma or soapbox

Never heard of them until now...

That's the privilege of being 98% of the Twitter-clone fediverse.

A phone number can be a really useful way to verify you are a real person. I don't see why this is an issue.

They require you to have a phone number. I don't get why this is a bad thing for a social media site. They aren't collecting your phone number to sell it. They are collecting it because it an easy way to lower bot, spam, and ban envision accounts. Plus it adds basic security to user accounts. I'm pretty sure every social media site requires a phone number.

> They aren't collecting your phone number to sell it. They are collecting it because it an easy way to lower bot, spam, and ban envision accounts.

Both can be possible.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your...

They can sell it

>They aren't collecting your phone number to sell it.

There's unfortunately quite a number of bad precedents that suggest this can be the case, regardless of the ToS.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/twitter-pays-150...

And nothing of value was lost...

>In more than one way, the users of Threads lose from my non-participation.

Wow, this guy…

This comment violates the HN guidelines, in more than one way. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

(This is the author of the blog post.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com