Anti-competitive practices masquerading as security is a dangerous pattern | Hacker News Reader

Anti-competitive practices masquerading as security is a dangerous pattern

blog.alinelerner.com

94 pointscnst14 comments

All companies worth above a trillion should be treated like public agencies. There’s no reason they should have this kind of unchecked power, especially with all the OTHER ways in which they’re anti competitive ALREADY. Including simply existing. Let’s not pretend that their huge cash reserves and ability to copy others is “fair competition”.

I just don't think it's practical to treat a social media site like a public agency. I sympathize greatly with the author reading this story, but anyone who's moderated a public website can tell you it would be completely impossible if your most combative users could escalate to the government and demand you prove why you should be allowed to ban them.

It's fine to think this will never happen to you because you're not important enough, or not controversial enough, or have the most mainstream ideas that would guarantee that you won't be a target…

Until it does happen…

The situation here is also a bit different from moderating "a public website".

Noone's saying that everyone should have the right to have their presence and reach amplified.

But these bans on LinkedIn and GitHub apply to the entire account and the entire identity of the user, meaning, you could now be precluded from doing the most basic things compared to all of your peers.

LinkedIn ban precludes you from connecting to employers at in-person events unlike every other attendee. GitHub precludes you from working at any startup that uses GitHub in their workflow.

Plus, as the example shows, causing any sort of disruption isn't even a prerequisite to getting banned by these services.

It probably isn't practical but you could do things like limit how much of the company is owned by one person and make sure that there are not special voting shares.

It's not the issue of share ownership, it's the issue of size and lack of process ownership, about everyone passing the buck and noone being personally responsible for these failures.

It's about the employees having an inverse incentive, to take actions just for the sake of it.

It's actually exactly about this attitude that somehow noone has the right to be on the platform, which, in turn, makes it easy to justify these forms of deplatforming and censorship, and the resulting self-censorship, too.

(Opinions my own, obviously.)

I don't think that's necessarily true.

I think large providers would like to say that, but at the scales of cash involved, I think the burden of saying "no we can't be held accountable for what we do, get lost" should be much higher.

If a significant fraction of people are relying on their personal networks to find jobs, even if they're not working in a job where presenting a public face is a key component, then being cut out of large-scale social networking is no longer divorced from your professional life, it's a necessary service.

This blog post reads to be self aggrandizing and that the author is very entitled. It’s not a government service - habeaus corpus / expectation of fairness do not apply here, full stop. Maybe they should but that’s a very different discussion.

The author seems like they’re repeatedly dunking on LinkedIn for their own vested self interest of promoting their product, and as a result, someone revoked their account. It seems like a pretty obvious TOS violation to shit on the brand of the company’s platform you’re using and although the author couldn’t find a term of service that they’re violating, I’m sure there’s something in there. It’s not a grand mystery - someone at LinkedIn noticed their posting and thought it was wrong for someone to use their platform to shit on the LinkedIn brand.

Golden rule of using a platform - you don’t own what is in there. If you ever threaten the platform even in the slightest way, then they will remove you without a second thought. Again maybe this is unfair but it’s not like this persons rights are being violated.

Finally the way it’s written seems to assume malicious / stupid intent constantly. To me, the people making these systems are potentially colleagues of mine and I do not want to disparage them unless I am totally sure they are doing something reprehensible. It’s disrespectful to smear a whole system just because you don’t like an individual moderation action.

Would you be okay if LinkedIn and GitHub banned your account without any explanation? Or are you of the opinion that it's not a possibility because you follow all of their ToS to the letter at all times? Do you admit that you'll never provide any objective feedback about these companies since that may (or even should?) violate their ToS in your opinion?

It's interesting that you immediately assume that she's actually disparaging LinkedIn in any way, without any such proof being available. Providing any critical opinions whatsoever, about the company as a whole, is now disparaging the individual employees of the company? Why are you disparaging the author of the essay? What if she's your colleague, too?

You might want to check your biases if your first instinct is to immediately assume anyone who's been wronged in any way by any bigtech platform is immediately an entitled person by having an issue with such an action, and is doing nothing more than disparaging the colleagues of yours.

How can you be sure that the person who's been deplatformed is not a colleague of yours, too?

Why is it okay to disparage private individuals in private capacities (and to deny them their livelihood in these cases of LinkedIn and GitHub bans), but not okay to provide less than ideal feedback about monopolistic multibillion-dollar companies?

> Would you be okay if LinkedIn and GitHub banned your account without any explanation?

If I was doing something like shitting on the brand and advertising my competition product with the platform then I would not be totally surprised. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

> Or are you of the opinion that it's not a possibility because you follow all of their ToS to the letter at all times?

Yes. Platforms literally have the right to ban you for any reason without giving an explanation. If you don’t like that then you should lobby the government. I do think it would be better for society if there were certain laws platforms had to follow! But do I trust the government to get those laws right? Not yet. Maybe in 10 years.

>Do you admit that you'll never provide any objective feedback about these companies since that may (or even should?) violate their ToS in your opinion?

WTF ? You can definitely provide objective feedback to LinkedIn in the form of like feature requests lmao. But when you insult their product and then sell your own product that’s not objective feedback. You’re obviously self invested. Your goal isn’t to improve LinkedIn, it’s to sell your own product.

Which is ok! LinkedIn is a platform with many issues that there absolutely should be startups that try to fix them. But don’t pretend it’s like a massive tragic conspiracy when your account gets banned. You were simply poking a bear and the bear swiped at you.

> Why are you disparaging the author of the essay? What if she's your colleague, too?

I am being critical - I don’t think it’s the same as calling people who work at a company stupid or malicious. I never claim the author is stupid, just blind sided by their own hubris maybe. I believe they’re very smart and I’m sure they’re good at their job.

> How can you be sure that the person who's been deplatformed is not a colleague of yours, too?

I’m not sure of that. I tried to be fair in my critique. Maybe I got a bit spicy but it’s the internet.

> Why is it okay to disparage private individuals in private capacities (and to deny them their livelihood in these cases of LinkedIn and GitHub bans), but not okay to provide less than ideal feedback about monopolistic multibillion-dollar companies?

It’s ok to provide feedback of platforms. Just if you do it and you get banned don’t be surprised. Getting banned from a platform doesn’t meant you did something that “wasn’t ok.” It just means the platform decided to do it. Providing critical feedback of a platform while promoting your own competing product is not surprising to get a ban.

If it wasn't security they'd just pick a different pretext. "Oh you violated some comma in the 1k page eula, we gotta ban you now, can't set a precedent of allowing violations ya know" or some crap like that.

Security, safety, liability, risk, equity, inclusion, god, any word or concept that it is not socially unacceptable to consider anything other than an unalloyed good WILL be used in this way.

Note that the former employee of her company was still left permabanned even after producing the ID, per the post.

So I can totally understand why she wouldn't play those games!

To be frank, it would seem that producing an ID in such a situation, is pointless from the user's POV. It seems like it's simply abused by the vendor to institute and enforce a permanent ban.

Aline describes her experience in 2023 of getting permabanned from LinkedIn for several days, until finding a human contract through one of the investors in her startup.

Possible reason for the ban is her content makes mention of LinkedIn in a way that wasn't expressly approved by LinkedIn, and it all happened only after she took their offer to pay $500 to promote the post.

TIL FB isn't the only network to be asking for government-issued IDs all of a sudden.

This is the problem with becoming reliant on large monopolistic companies. Due to business interests, they become enshittified, and have no incentive to provide you any value.

Social media apps are incentivized to turn you into a zombie who spends every waking second scrolling.

Dating apps are incentivized to keep you single and using their app forever.

You don't need LinkedIn if you get a good job.

If you aren't mindful about this, you will be treated as the compliant commodity you are.

But the truth is you don't need them. The best jobs aren't on LinkedIn, the best friendships or party invites aren't on instagram or facebook, the best romantic partners are not on dating apps, etc.

Doing things in real life pays a massive dividend now, and fewer people than ever before are doing it, because the barriers to the enshittified life are minimal, and the costs are downstream.

There is some truth to your comment but surrendering the interewebs to the enshiftifiers is a recipe for defeat, and I mean, really painful, destructive defeat.

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