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Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions (plsfix.co)
444 points by jpdpeters 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 398 comments
I used to work for Facebook and Google and constantly got asked questions like "Hey, my Instagram account got blocked for no reason. Could you help me get it back?". I'd say yes, it would take me 10 min to fill out an internal form and 1 week later the account was back.

Even years after leaving, I still get these requests. So I built a marketplace for them. Let me know what you think!




This is commercial bribery in most places.

>California Code, Penal Code - PEN § 641.3

>(a) Any employee who solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept money or any thing of value from a person other than his or her employer, other than in trust for the employer, corruptly and without the knowledge or consent of the employer, in return for using or agreeing to use his or her position for the benefit of that other person, and any person who offers or gives an employee money or any thing of value under those circumstances, is guilty of commercial bribery.

>(b) This section does not apply where the amount of money or monetary worth of the thing of value is two hundred fifty dollars ($250) or less.


Sounds like the law already provides a convenient solution (in the form of a "<=250" constraint on the bid field).


Value != price. There is a long legal tradition of the difference, and judges tend to not look favorably on such tactics.

Even if the price is less than 250, I don’t think it’s hard to argue that a long-extant social account with many followers is worth far more


"money or thing of value" here seems to refer to the bribe (in cases where the bribe is non-monetary), not the benefit that the briber got from the bribe.

> gives an employee money or any thing of value


I agree with this take, the law is clearly exempting stuff like slipping a small bribe to the maître d' to get a seat at a booked restaurant for instance.


Even still, you could argue for a sub-$5 per-account value based on what the going rate is on the black market for stolen accounts. Some platforms it's in the $1-2 range.


, reach != revenue


Tell me you’re not literate in law without telling me you’re not literate in law.


Is bribery a bad thing if there is no other recourse? That's the real issue here. If Big Tech companies cared, they would have some sort of customer support. They don't, and so the market is forming its own solution.


Nevermind the bribery aspect, I would not put my internal reputation in jeopardy for some random account of a stranger on the web


As long as it's less than $250 per instance that sounds fine...?


As in "not illegal, but still gonna get you fired?"


Sounds like they long left Facebook. Only danger is Meta realizing that these request all come from one source and blacklisting them. That said, Meta must received tens of thousands of appeals, so it'd be easy to lay low.

But yes, I have no clue what employee inside would agree to work on this for an extended period.


Internal requests are very likely not in the tens of thousands - they're probably processed entirely separately. It'd be easy to spot one employee constantly filing these requests for random people.


I assumed these were people using internal Customer Service tools. It would be pretty hard to spot the activity that way - if their job involves using those tools


They'll just submit a request themselves so another employee reinstates them.


Lighten up ya dingbats!


Weird, so wait, are campaign donations capped at $250?


How is that bribery?


It's true. Bribery is for super pacs with much higher caps. Or was it, pacs have caps but super pacs don't? I forget how those work.

Point is, when you go to a meeting with especially wealthy donors that fund your campaign through super pacs, then ensure the dialog from those meetings is never made public, I think its reasonable to assume some form of bribery has occurred, if not strictly within the legal definition.


Superpacs have no caps due to 1A.


due to SCOTUS*

"1A" describes rights of people, not businesses or organizations, and doesn't mention anything about money


If you post "locked out of my account on *" almost anywhere on social media, a bunch of bots flood you with advice on who to contact to be reinstated.

From my perspective, lockouts seem to be an unchecked extortion ring run by social media employees and/or on platforms to make money... Social Media in itself has always been somewhat of a grift, and it's created all kinds of opportunities for scammers to be faceless and to coordinate activities that mislead people... It's shameful, but all part of the building story that will be epic to read when it all collapses.

Social media pushed NFTs, Crypto, Influencer Culture, and all kinds of other "Fake It Till You Make It" schemes, we can really do without it and go back to independent web communities, it will be painful for a little while of course, but far better than just getting 30 views on a post promoting your business because you didn't pay them money for more views... Social Media has always kind of been extortion in a way, they want your time and money for returning very little entertainment/business value.


We can dream.


What if it’s over a series of transactions? Eg, two dozen visits to a restaurant where you get better service than other tables because you’re a big tipper?


> without the knowledge or consent of the employer


Interesting. Does this apply to the people making 5-6 figures on paid interview prep sites?


Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.


It is indeed a massive ethics issue, but that's actually the aspect I love the most about it: Due to the ethics/compliance/corruption aspect, it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.


Love your optimism. I wish I was as optimistic as you. My guess is that they’ll fire these employees and not improve their processes.

These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence


It's hilariously apropos that employees are maximizing their revenue by solving a problem... that their employer created by maximizing its revenue (and underfunding support)

Isn't modern big tech always saying that employees should shut up and focus on the numbers / delighting users?


With corporatism and capitalism, m

maximizing revenue != maximizing benefit for customer and/or society

Corporations' business model have not being long term sustainable, most of them have being off setting the hidden cost to environment, tax payers and general public for quite sometimes. Not event sure they can actually delighting users and make money at the same time.


> Not event sure they can actually delighting users and make money at the same time.

Of course they can, they just have to settle for single-digit $billion yearly profits instead of double or triple-digit ones. Unacceptable!


The optimistic view is that they will decide to capture this market and just let people pay a fee for a human review of their account.


The problem is they have zero incentive to make for-fee service to be any better than the free service. What are you gonna do, turn to somebody else for the same service?


More likely it'll lead to more red tape and shuttering those programs down and making them useless. They know that they make life-altering mistakes all the time. The nature of 1-in-a-million ensures that they're inevitable. Preventing all of those is not possible.


"All of them" is a big word, preventing is another one. Correcting the overwhelming majority of them is possible.


> it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.

The underlying issue is "it costs money to have people doing this, and we don't lose any money by not having people doing it."

My guess is that the site will see a burst of activity where corporate security departments successfully bait employees into breaking the law / company policy, and word will get around pretty fast that you will get fired and possibly charged with a crime...

...and then the companies will sue the site owner, citing all the employees they baited.


As others pointed out, this is a huge problem in the making.

Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the employee is using their authority to let in randos. If the company is smart, they mark accounts that have been lifted by internal employees, so they will discover the first time it happens.

The best probable scenario for this is that said employee gets fired. Presumably, the company trusts said employee knows who they are vetting because they are risking their job; and I'm confident they would not be happy knowing they are using this service. But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.

At the very least, if this site is a joke, it should put up a disclaimer that indicates such. Not just a disclaimer to vet the rando, because I doubt an internal employee can do so any better than the customer support can. It should actively remove functionality like sending or publicing emails so that posters and developers can't actually use it to contact each other and exchange money.


> But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.

That would be a positive outcome.

The two-tier system is bullshit and creates a bubble that further insulates companies/employees from feedback about broken processes, because everyone in their social graph is exempt.

Far better they have to deal with friends telling them how bad the public appeal process is.


The official form isn't the real mechanism though. The real mechanism is that somebody in the company is in charge of that system, the general public has no access to that person, but someone inside the company can find them in the company directory and bend their ear. That's the case whether there is an official form or not.


> But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.

That feels like a good outcome to me. "I know a guy" should not be a reason to get preferential treatment. As much as I'm sure it absolutely sucks to lose an account on most of these services, I'd rather they stay lost for everyone, rather than get reinstated for people who happen to have connections.


The thing is that this preferential treatment should be the default - people should be able to get their accounts looked at, but as always there are hold-ups and moderator shortages and whatnot that drag waiting times closer to infinity. It's not like everyone else is guaranteed to be banned indefinitely - it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself. As long as it's not done at the expense of everyone else, I don't care much for it.


> it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself

I.e. a practice universally frowned upon?


The problem is everyone else is guaranteed to be banned indefinitely.


This seems unlikely to me. No company is going to fire you because you were trying to help. However, accepting money for this service seems pretty much guaranteed to result in termination even if 100% of the accounts you help with were legitimate. The side dealing is the problem.


> No company is going to fire you because you were trying to help.

This absolutely happens. As an example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-fired-stop-kidnapping/

"You were employed by The Home Depot until June 19, 2017 when you were fired because you assisted the police in preventing a kidnapping."


> "Our leadership team wasn't aware of the termination when it occurred. Once they found out and looked at the circumstances, they quickly reversed the decision."

So yes, they got fired, but it was a mistake. Certainly drawing attention to yourself may attract more mistakes than blending in, but it works out in the end. (The difference, probably, is that FAANG employees have a little more breathing room than Home Depot employees after not getting a week's worth of pay.)

Come to think of it, a friend of mine got mistakenly fired recently. They totaled her vacation hours wrong, saw that it was over some limit, and just fired her on the spot. I told her to call HR and appeal and they admitted the mistake and rehired her. She then got a higher paying job at a competitor since she was free for interviews for a couple days. So... it happens all the time.

If someone is being kidnapped and you can help safely, take the chance!


Being told not to physically intervene in a dangerous situation and then being fired when you disobey company policy is unsurprising.

Filling out a form to request another team review an account is entirely different. No one is physically interacting, and the company clearly has a sanctioned happy path for this request.


This is tangential, but quoting the Snopes story:

> according to Reagan, he was at work on 12 May 2017 when a co-worker told him he saw a man attack a woman in the parking lot. Reagan said he heard the woman scream: "Somebody help me, he's kidnapping my kid, he's stealing my kid!" Reagan told us he then contacted police, who instructed him to follow the man as he left the store area: "They said, don't touch him, don't engage with him, but keep an eye on him. Let us know where he is going so we know where to go when we get there."

> Reagan said that after returning to the store he was scolded by a supervisor and was fired four weeks later.

Physical intervention didn't occur.


>Being told not to physically intervene in a dangerous situation and then being fired when you disobey company policy is unsurprising.

when the situation involves the police, I'd imagine the situation is different. Hence why he was reinstated after blowback. This isn't an employee tackling a violent customer (which should be allowed, but I digress).

If "leadership" gave no reason for the termination or simply said "you left the campus on company hours (outside of break)", they would have been slightly more in the clear (unless the employee sued, of course. That would have been an interesting lawsuit).


I think it's the getting paid to do it part that will get people fired.


I think it's unlikely if the content is benign and it's not guaranteed anyways.

But if the person is posting illegal or very graphic content, and the company knows you unbanned them, I think it would raise questions like "how do you know this person" or "what made you trust them?". Which you'll have trouble answering if all you have is their name, email, and the sparse information they gave for why they should be unbanned. You'll argue "this person hid that side of themselves from everyone" but at minimum it calls your judgment into question, and if the company is aware of this kind of service, they'll probe for more information.

Also if someone uses this service repeatedly disguising themselves as different people, it will raise questions why different internal employees kept unbanning them. That would be much more suspicious.


The thing is, how would the companies know you're paid to do this, instead of perhaps just being an overzealous employee? Not like this service is going to disclose who is working for them...right?


I imagine it becomes obvious if you file 1000 of these a month, not to mention probably many of the people wanting this service were blocked legitly, so its more likely bad requests will be filed.

Not to mention it is like any crime - not like murders intentionally get caught either, but they still do.


> Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted

I don't know why you think people who deserve to be suspended would be reinstated. You act as if these people have no agency or discretion as to what accounts to reinstate.


They would be at first.

"Personally knows an employee of the company" is a strong signal that a person is not a bot, and may be more likely to be a decent person, because they are capable of maintaining enough of a relationship with an employee that the employee is willing to do something for them. The employee has already been vetted as trustworthy.

So that signal will apply to the first few people applying through this service.

Then some employees will get fired, the signal/noise ratio of internal requests changes, and employees can no longer get accounts reinstated via internal forms like this.

Basically this service will cause a brief spike in illegitimate accounts being reactivated, and then we will arrive at a new status quo that is strictly worse than the current one.


Sounds like pure speculation based, once again, on the assumption that this will be misused.


Sounds like a safe assumption. The only realistic assumption, really.


Why would that be the case?

The existing problem is that moderators aren't given enough time to investigate whether suspensions are legitimate, so there are enormous false positives. You can't expect much accuracy out of a decision made under excessive time pressure.

If someone is instead receiving e.g. hundreds of dollars, they can spend more time to get it right. Meanwhile getting it wrong could get them in trouble at work, so they have the incentive to be careful.

Companies could do this themselves -- charge a fee for appeals -- except that it would be bad PR to make innocent people pay a non-trivial sum of money to fix the company's mistake.

This would give the company a way to launder the fee through a third party while still reducing their other PR problem when they ruin peoples' lives through false positives.


Could you give an example of a large system that has ample opportunity for easy abuse, but does not have widespread abuse?

If not, why do you think this will be the first one?


Because there's a monetary incentive.


So? Monetary incentives lifted more people out of poverty than any prior system. There is also reputational risk for being stupid and which would get them shut down.


Perhaps not a joke, but in terms of how arbitrary social media banning is, I would consider this site a sign of "the times".


I guess it depends on what percentage of account suspensions are due to actual bad behavior on the part of the user and what percentage are false positives. My wild guess is the vast majority of account suspensions at a BigTech company are false positives of an overly-aggressive algorithm, so having an insider reactivate accounts is going to be a net-positive, even if a few actual bad accounts are reactivated.


Agreed. It's based on accepting personal payment to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants. Sounds like low-key bribery to me.

I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.


The verification email can be intentionally vague and agreed upon in advance.

"What's really your favorite band, then?"

"Beatles, I guess."


The best way would be to send an email disguised as spam, and have the employee respond out of band with its contents without actually replying.

Bonus points for sending similar emails to random @company.com addresses so receiving the email alone doesn’t suggest involvement.


> to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants

If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.


The time doesn't, the resources do.


For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.


Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhelmed.

On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.


Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ...

Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.


'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this.

I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.


Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything, they won't even tell you what exactly you violated or how to return into their good graces.

It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.


I like to imagine how insanely good Google’s customer service would be if no company including them captured more than 5-10% of market share.


Yep, it feels like them being a monopoly effectively kills every incentive for them to try harder. It's reminiscent of bureaucracy in third world countries where you will not get your passport issued or renewed until you grease enough palms of the right people who feel entitled to a certain level of corruption for their respective role.


> Yep, it feels like them being a monopoly effectively kills every incentive for them to try harder.

Microsoft at its worst had insanely good enterprise level support.

Even small business owners had access to paid premium support options, and if the issue you reported turned out to be a product bug, the support costs were refunded.


100%. Monopoly destroys value for every market participant except for major shareholders of the monopolist.


> until you grease enough palms of the right people who feel entitled to a certain level of corruption for their respective role.

The capitalist way of looking at that would be they maximally decreased the market price of their service, and the bribery is simply accounting for externalities that you weren't paying for in that market price.

Or in other words, bribery is their support-funding model.


The model involves artificial scarcity and setting examples. You don't give a passport to 1000 people, charge $5 and you have $5000 charge $500 and you have $50 000, charge $5000 and you have $100 000, charge $20 000 and you have $200 000. I know one story where a prison charged 1 million for release. If extended family is not extremely poor they should really put their 3-50 k into the bag each to avoid all kinds of free services like torturing the victim and getting abducted themselves.

If you [say] didn't buy the passport it is only fair to put you in prison? $20 000 is much more value for money than you think!


There is no market incentive for this to be the steady state. All companies only want to pay lip service to competition, but in reality, they do everything in their power to prevent competition and monopolize the market. Product tie-ins, lock-ins, exclusive contracts, etc.

For your vision to be a reality there needs to be significant tax on monopolies and no company should be allowed to become a trillion dollar company. Taxes & Regulations FTW.


> There is no market incentive for this to be the steady state.

The market incentive is that everyone other than the monopolist will want to take the monopolist's market share. The monopolist, in turn, captures the government and uses "Taxes & Regulations" to ensure that random small businesses can't enter the market and take their market share.


Yes, because money == power, and lobbying is legal. If you had progressive taxation that would essentially prevent any entity from acquiring power to rival the state. The inherent weakness of democracies is that they require constant care and attention. If you look away for a second, there is going to be some corporation trying to re-write the tax code or do away with regulations.


> If you had progressive taxation that would essentially prevent any entity from acquiring power to rival the state.

We have progressive taxation. That doesn't matter because fixed costs are fixed.

If it costs $30,000/year to live, someone who makes $30,000/year will accumulate no wealth even if you tax them at 0%, because all of their income is going to food and rent and utilities. Whereas someone who makes a billion dollars a year will accumulate wealth even if you tax them at 90%, because the remaining 10% is still a hundred million dollars and after you subtract out $30,000, or even $250,000, there is still nearly the entire hundred million dollars left. Then that hundred million dollars collects interest every year going forward.

Trying to use taxation also ignores that the problem isn't actually billionaires. Corporations have more money than any individual, but the largest ones are publicly traded, so that would still be the case even if no individual shareholder had a lot of wealth. Because the corporation would, and its executives would thereby be in control of those resources and use them to capture the government.

It also ignores that you don't have to be a single entity to capture the government. For example, many professional licensing requirements purposely take a long time to satisfy (e.g. multi-year apprenticeship requirements) to create barriers to entering those trades. Not because General Electric wants to limit the supply of electricians, but because local electricians do, and together they represent a significant voting block. Landlords and homeowners capture zoning boards to inhibit housing construction, not because any of them individually have a monopoly, but because they all want housing prices to go up at the expense of people outside the local jurisdiction who have been priced out of the local area by the zoning restrictions and thereby don't get a vote.

> If you look away for a second, there is going to be some corporation trying to re-write the tax code or do away with regulations.

Why is it that the largest corporations and most corrupt organizations are the ones asking for regulations? DMCA 1201 wasn't enacted out of popular demand. The National Association of Realtors hasn't been lobbying to relax zoning rules. The telcos are the ones who want those laws prohibiting anybody from competing with them. Certificate of Need laws don't exist for the benefit of the public.

Corrupt regulations don't exist because of oversized corporations, oversized corporations exist because of corrupt regulations. If the megacorps didn't exist, all it would take is for some small organization with contacts to a powerful legislator to get something snuck into a bill, and soon the small organization is a megacorp with the power to keep those laws on the books. There were no trillion dollar corporations in 1913 or 1791, but there was Congress, so we don't have to wonder which came first.

What you need is to constrain the legislators from passing those laws to begin with, regardless of whether they start off at the behest of a billionaire or a trade organization or just the Senator's brother-in-law.


>We have progressive taxation.

In the US it stops at ~35. Lets go all the way to 100%.

> Then that hundred million dollars collects interest every year going forward.

The progressive capital gains taxes also need to go up to 100%.

>Corporations have more money than any individual, but the largest ones are publicly traded, so that would still be the case even if no individual shareholder had a lot of wealth. Because the corporation would, and its executives would thereby be in control of those resources and use them to capture the government.

That is why we have monopoly laws. The point isn't that corporations should not accumulate wealth, the point is that the state should not have a rival in terms of power.

>Why is it that the largest corporations and most corrupt organizations are the ones asking for regulations?

Sure, they want regulations that build a moat, they don't want regulations that reduce their wealth. I'm talking about the latter.

>What you need is to constrain the legislators from passing those laws to begin with, regardless of whether they start off at the behest of a billionaire or a trade organization or just the Senator's brother-in-law.

Yes, and campaign finance reform would reduce some of this donor/lobby culture. Fixed amount of ad-spend per candidate, no PACs, etc.


> In the US it stops at ~35. Lets go all the way to 100%.

What do you think the result of that would be? Anyone who can provide value to someone else in that tax bracket couldn't be paid for it, so they'd arrange to be compensated in some other way.

The most likely way is favors. That is not likely to reduce corruption.

> The progressive capital gains taxes also need to go up to 100%.

So now you're doing one of two things. If unrealized capital gains aren't taxed until the shares are sold (as is the case now), nobody would ever sell, because all of the money would be taken as tax. If they are, you have all the problems with trying to value a capital asset which is not being traded, and on top of that then people would establish their companies as a non-profit (since they can't keep the profits anyway) and we're back to compensation as favors.

> That is why we have monopoly laws.

But how do you enforce them once there is an incumbent monopolist using its power to corrupt the system? That is the problem already, you need some solution to it.

> The point isn't that corporations should not accumulate wealth, the point is that the state should not have a rival in terms of power.

That seems like a bad thing. Then what is the check on the state if it becomes authoritarian? All concentrated power is bad, not just corporations.

> Sure, they want regulations that build a moat, they don't want regulations that reduce their wealth. I'm talking about the latter.

They're more than willing to pay their lawyers to draft something which claims to be the latter and is actually the former. That is how the majority of such regulations are enacted. They don't call it the "reduce competition in telecommunications act" now do they?

> Yes, and campaign finance reform would reduce some of this donor/lobby culture. Fixed amount of ad-spend per candidate, no PACs, etc.

This was never really the problem. The reason politicians are beholden to Google or Apple isn't just that the company buys ads, it's that the company buys ad networks, and YouTube, and chooses which apps to evict which controls what constituents see and hear. A corporation can spend money lobbying but it can just as well spend money buying a major media outlet or social media site.

What you need to do is constrain the government from having the power to pass laws that constrain competition. Because otherwise they will. Politicians will never be angels, the best they can be is the subjects of the people instead of their rulers.


I'm actually shocked no one is arguing with you about your first two sentences. Capitalism will always have one lucky or unscrupulous company after another swallowing the smaller players.

you have 5 equal companies producing widgets. One of the companies has their building near a freeway, and one day a fully loaded truck crashes through a railing and impacts their building, causing a fire and lots of damage. Sure, they have insurance or whatever, but that company's customers don't care about that, they needed those widgets this week. Luckily one of the other four companies has them in stock and they can fill their order elsewhere. That company they filled the order with now has more capital, perhaps they hire a new employee or buy additional tools or machines. Now they can out-compete the other four, for whatever reason, QC, price, etc. The former company might be unable to keep up with the 3+1 other companies on the same playing field, so may sell to one of the other four, but only the latter company in the above example may have the money available to buy.

This is all simplified and nitpicking what i am saying is futile, because the point is - it doesn't matter how many companies are competing, nothing is in equilibrium, and this doesn't even get in to active sabotage or espionage. A lucky company will buy an unlucky company. Eventually you'll end up with 3 or fewer companies when there used to be dozens or even hundreds.

The end goal of a company is to be like Samsung, General Electric, Sony, etc - make everything, sell everything, own everything. A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!

I don't have a solution, because there is a compelling argument to be made for huge companies being able to provide superior quality, price, whatever because of scales of economy, and it just takes one bright lawyer at a multinational to say "but if you break us up it will accelerate climate change because of x, y, z issues we have solved by fact of owning everything!"

Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this, but that would require global cooperation. I think the upside that things would gradually become more affordable would be a good selling point - if all companies are operating with the understanding the shareholders, owners, etc have a hard ceiling on how much value they can extract from the endeavor...


> The former company might be unable to keep up with the 3+1 other companies on the same playing field, so may sell to one of the other four, but only the latter company in the above example may have the money available to buy.

Your assumption is that companies can be destroyed but not created, which isn't true. The way prevent monopolies, then, is to make it as easy as possible to create new companies. There is no monopoly if five new companies are created for every two the incumbent buys or destroys.

> Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this

This has really nothing to do with it. Google is a public company. It could easily be just as big without any single individual owning more than $10M in shares.


i mentioned that:

> A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!

and i disagree that a company can get as big as google if everyone involved was wealthcapped at $10mm. There'd be no real reason to seek ever-higher profits, especially if every company was forced to abide these rules.

as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits? I don't actually think it's weird. It is telling. I bet it's supply and demand, though.


> and i disagree that a company can get as big as google if everyone involved was wealthcapped at $10mm. There'd be no real reason to seek ever-higher profits, especially if every company was forced to abide these rules.

As it is many of these companies are predominantly owned by index funds and pension funds, i.e. the retirement savings of ordinary people, with a net worth of e.g. $200,000 rather than $10,000,000. But they'd rather it be $250,000, wouldn't they? So the incentive remains.

> as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits?

That's not weird, it's how supply and demand works. When demand is higher than supply, anyone who can provide supply makes a lot of money. That's the incentive for anyone who can to increase the amount of supply they can provide, until the price comes back down and increasing supply is no longer profitable.

But OPEC is a cartel, and cartels artificially constrain supply. This is why monopolies are bad.


I don't think social or economic ideologies can exist in isolation. I think its a constant push/pull between different versions, interpretations and combinations of them, interacting, evolving, changing all the time. Some of it driven by the state apparatus, some by emergent group behavior and/or public sentiment via the participants in the local and global economy. It could just be my uneducated brain but I've always had a nagging feeling that all of this (macro-level economics and polices/programs) is a lot of hot-air and people just hand-waving exceptions away to push their own agenda.


The solution is pretty easy - put caps on various types of growth/income/profit for corporations.


> Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch.

Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.


Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.


It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it.

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.


> Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything.

This is strange to me in that you're implying there is actually staff. Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue?


>> Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue?

That is exactly what happened to my coworker.

She bought a Pixel phone from the Google Store and it got lost in shipping. Shipment tracking showed it arriving at the carrier's hub and never leaving for a month.

She called customer service and the first tier workers followed a script that was essentially "apologize and ask the customer to check back later".

After many missed "it should start moving again by $DATE" promises, she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 2 workers. They said they had the ability to create a replacement order, but there was no available inventory in the phone color she had originally ordered. They also had no answer about how to prevent a possible replacement order from shipping the same way and potentially getting stuck.

Finally she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 3 support. The tier 3 worker created a replacement order with an upgraded phone compared to the original order and ensured it would ship from a different warehouse than the original order that got lost.

All this took six weeks and many frustrating hours on the phone for her. And this was for an order directly from the Google Store website.


> She called customer service

of which party in this problem? seems like contacting the carrier would have been more productive. contacting Googs about a delayed package seems like the wrong direction to follow. i realize this verges on victim blaming, but just trying to suggest other methods of problem solving.


Legally the customer has no relationship with the carrier.

They did not choose how the package would be shipped, which carrier would be used, or pay the carrier to ship it.

All of those decisions and the payment to the carrier were made by the seller (Google), not the customer. Thus Google had all responsibility in ensuring the shipment reached the customer.

If Google had failed to pay the carrier the correct shipping cost, or had packed the box poorly such that the item was damaged in transit, would it be the customer's fault?

Similarly, if the carrier mishandled the package and it was lost or arrived damaged, would it be the customer's fault?

The customer deals with the seller whom they paid, not with third-parties. If the seller took the money they ensure the customer gets what they paid for or they lose reputation and go out of business.


the carrier would also never say "you need to contact the manufacturer"


Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules.

The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.


These companies have on the order of 100k employees. It's the job of maybe 0.01% of them to deal with these issues. For the vast majority, a random account having been suspended going to be in scope of their work.

It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".


There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.


Yeah, but it is intended for organic connections, not adversely selected 3rd parties directly enriching the employee.


I'd like to think that but, hiring for a couple open roles posted only internally at a FAANG, I definitely received emails from external individuals inquiring about the role - and found out there's a whole cottage industry around referrals for a fee.


This can go from "corruption" to "extortion" real fast. Employees can start banning accounts to make them pay


Except this is legal. Extortion is a serious crime, especially when businesses are involved.


Being in breach of your employment contract is insignificant compared to the seriousness of criminal extortion, but it's not nothing.


This seems really really easy to honeypot for a security team at one of these companies


"Move fast and break things"

Wait, no, not like that


How many of the bigcorps that are completely blind to user issues are even going to notice employees doing this?


My employer used to have an internal "ambassador app" for employees. If someone I knew used our products and had a complaint, I could put their details and the details of the issue in that app, and they would get contacted on priority. Basically it was a way to positively channel in-person complaints to a structured solution.


Corporations are amoral. Anyone who doesn't want corporations to rule the world must also be prepared to be amoral when standing up to them.


> If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this

you seem to only be thinking about one side of this, the company side. what about the endless amount of normal end users that got caught by some god awful AI, and ignored by a huge tech company and its basically non existing customer service?


It'd be too easy to catch the participating employees. Just would have to ask for help and watch logs to see who bites.


> fire you for doing that

No, a good company would realize that AI-based false positive account suspensions is a problem, is killing small businesses and creators in droves, and should hire more human paid employees people to take care of account suspension appeals and help reduce the false positives of the AI algorithms.

Hand an additional bonus to the employees who were willing to be the first iteration of this additional human labor and helping improve the quality of the platform.


However, they had the opportunity to fix the issue already and didn't, so assuming they would suddenly see the light rather than taking the approach you quoted seems rather optimistic.


yes, how dare you customer service.


It's a calculation of profit lost to needing more human review costs, vs profit lost because some small fries got banned.


finally a correct response


So it’s fine if you do it for free, but not if you take the same action for payment?


Corruption? Huge monopolies companies suck at hearing their customers, so this is addressing a real need. Sounds like free market to me!


At the same time it’s Airbnb for tech support. It just needs a note that people performing the fixes aren’t employees in this context, they’re independent contractors acting in their own name.

Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.


Professor Robert Kiltgaard said corruption = monopoly + discretion - transparency. He wrote this about political systems and bribery, but it also applies here.

https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2014/05/27/klitgaards-m...

Many tech companies have a monopoly on their market, infinite discretion, and zero transparency. It's a wonder nobody has thought of a "facilitating payments" startup sooner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitating_payment

Everyone in the comments seems to think that this is a bad deal for the employees and that may be true at $500/unban. But imagine you're someone making $300k/year where all your accounts rely on 2fa codes sent to your email or you're someone with an social media-based business. You might pay a lot more than $500 to get your accounts back. And not everyone in Big Tech works in San Francisco. There's many people in low cost of living countries (e.g. Europe) that make half as much as Americans. Needless to say, people that earn less are more susceptible.

While I'm not condoning bribery, I'm surprised that the near-unanimous reaction of other commenters is that bribing employees of social media companies is infeasible. Historically speaking, any system without transparency where employees have discretion to do things that others assign monetary value have been corrupted.

Tech companies should take this more seriously, because once people are accustomed to making payments to get fair treatment from a decisionmaker, it becomes very difficult to change that behaviour.


The only way to win is not to play. Screw social media, it’s a plague on humanity.


What else is a plague on humanity that should be capriciously destroyed by bribery?


On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired.

On the other: $150

I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. I can’t imagine risking that for what is essentially an hours pay for most tech roles there.


Plot twist: this is a honeypot marketplace designed to catch employees selling access like this.


If the site's smart, they'd simply verify by challenge/correlation.

Spin up a random account, get it banned, then ask an anonymous "employee" to get it unbanned.

If it is? Verification by result.


Plot twist 2: it's also a marketplace for big tech compliance departments, $10,000 to reveal the insider


To add: this honeypot requires the employee to sign up using their corporate account. Corporate accounts are probably monitored internally.


yes and it seems unscrupulous to take kickback money for this. on the other hand, as someone who has one of these problems, I'd be only too happy to pay an insider to fix it. It's not just the technical problem (account suspension etc.), it's the injustice of the thing in the first place, and then the rage of being put in an endless hell loop.


I mean, that's the nature of bribery, isn't it? Of course you want to pay someone to get special treatment, who doesn't?


It's the nature of payment for services more broadly. Someone with money and lacking a service happily crosses trade with someone offering a service and desiring money.


I think there’s a conceptual difference between a payment made for bare minimum service and a payment made for special treatment. Granted, for most web services these days they seem to be the same in reality


> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this.

For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help:

When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day.

A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help a real personal friend with an account issue, and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation. Months later, he was investigating data for a project, which triggered an audit. They walked him out the door the next day after finding it.

So: yeah. This is not a very good business idea.


> and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation

Sounds like they need better controls, there shouldn't be ways to inadvertently access personal data and violate someone's privacy. Particularly not at such a mature company.


I don't work there but I imagine when this happens it's because the employee needs access to the resource for some legit reasons, but accessing it for illegitimate reason is what amounts to the violation. So access controls here would amount to reviewing the reasons for the access.


Solution would then be to ask for and log the reason for the access. Possibly with an approval needed by a second person. You can still lie about why you need access, but at least it is logged then.


I'm sure they do this--but the rogue employee still gets access and OP was saying access should be prevented in the first instance.


Meta does this.


The controls have gotten better / more explicit over time. They flash you up a pretty explicit clickthrough wall now. And there's pretty explicit training that you hand off issues for friends/family to a 3rd party engineer to handle rather than accessing user/friend data yourself.


When I worked at Google it was literally impossible to access personal data like this in most roles, even for my own account. So it seems like meta leaves something to be desired if it's a click through and a policy.


Maybe? I don't think engineers are likely to "inadvertently" access data inappropriately with either policy.


That two letter tool at meta for profile access?


See, what you need to do is get a job on that team, and sell the ability to have the team overlook the persons case... call it plsfixmyfix.com


Then, the manager of that team has their startup: plsfixmyfixer.com


Yeah, as someone who works for one of these companies, no fucking way would it be worth the risk to me.


Here's my question not to you specifically but the royal you of any bigTech employees reading this forum or similar: why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel.

However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this issue. They clearly do not feel the negative comments on some techy nerdcentric boards or twitter followers amounts to enough to cause a negative impact on the bottom line. So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech.


So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes. They're just gullible enough to believe what they read on the internet, and take action on it.

The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job, and the expertise to predict what the implications of doing the policy changes asked by the complainers would be. Not just how much it'd cost directly, but the second order effects on abuse from making different tradeoffs.

So let's say that you want to give high-touch customer support to billions of free accounts? Not only is it going to be fabulously expensive, but it's going to be abusable as hell. The abusers will quickly learn just what kind of sob story will have the best chance of fooling the humans, and get their accounts falsely unbanned or even use it to hijack the accounts of others. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the customer service reps have no agency. But then you're paying tens or hundreds of millions / year just to have humans execute a script.

And these predictions will be a lot more credible than those from random employees parrotting social media posts and making vague claims about potential brand damage or loss of trust. Ignoring the complaints is going to be a pretty easy choice for an exec.


> The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job

I think it should be evident by the number of cases we see posted about on HN alone that they are not doing a good job. Or, I guess maybe they're doing a good job based on the metrics they were given, but I wouldn't consider it a good job in the sense of living in a fair society where negative actions taken against people (by governments or by private entities) should have a reasonable appeal process involving real humans.

My view is that if even one person loses an account who shouldn't have, and there is either no process to appeal and fix it, or the process ends up not giving that person their account back, they're not doing a good job, full stop. I know that's an incredibly high bar, but I don't care. The loss of many of these types of accounts can cause real financial and emotional harm to people, and that's just not ok.


It should be even more evident that you can't judge whether they're doing a good job by looking at just the numerator. You need to know the denominator as well. Or rather, the denominators.

In a simplified model there are two groups of users {good,bad} and two outcomes {suspended,not suspended}. You're saying that success can be judged by whether there are any people claiming to be good (though you have no idea of whether that's true, they're just claiming that on the internet) ending in the {claims-to-be-good, suspended} bucket.

But actually to judge whether they're doing a good job, you'd need to look at the {good, not suspended}, {bad, suspended} and {bad, not suspended} buckets too.

The first one is a baseline. Obviously if you've got a billion users, all your numbers are going to be 1000x higher than a somebody with a million users just due to the higher number of users. The number of internet complaints will be 1000x higher too. But the actual harm to the average user from the mistakes is the same.

The second bucket are the successes, and they are going to be totally invisible to everyone not working on the problem. Not only to the random HN commenters, but to the random bigco employee too. They literally can't judge the success. The only visibility will be if that number is too low, since it obviously means the third bucket is too high. And that will be visible as the platform being overrun by spam and scams.

Now, I understand that your view is that it must be completely impossible for a possibly good user to lose an account. That's just the kind of thing that people who don't understand the problem space would say at an all hands open mike, and then get ignored because their view is just so detached from reality. It's not even a matter of resources; even if you threw infinite resources at the problem, what you'd end up with is a worse experience in the aggregate.

You'd have scammers reinstated, and continue scamming more people. You'd have accounts be hijacked because the scammers are going to be better at social engineering their way into accounts than the real users will be at social engineering their way to account recovery.

It's all tradeoffs, and absolutist statements about how it's unacceptable for even a single good user to suffer any harm are just as unrealistic as absolutist statements about how even a single piece of spam can't make it through. The best you can do is try to find the best place in the tradeoff space.


Thanks for writing this up. It’s one of the best explanations of this problem I’ve seen.


What is the base for a good job? 99.99%? 99.999%? Something like Amazon or Google has billions of users. Getting it perfect is impossible. So what's the bar?


i 100% agree with you.

i too rage against the insane, bewildering, almost unimaginable scale of anti-customer-service behavior that we seemingly must succumb to, as customers.

i am not sure if there is anything we can do.


Are you really a customer if you are not paying for the service though?


> i am not sure if there is anything we can do.

stop using them.


Raising complaints internally always has value in any organization. At a minimum, it highlights the fact that people outside the organization think your colleagues are doing a shit job.

The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common.


>The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common.

Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people.

Now I still question every decision, but I have experts that I believe will have answers worth listening to.

The answers these days are rarely, we know what we're doing, and much more common to be; we tried that but it didn't work because [reason]. Complaints without suggestions or requests are normally ignored.


>Sounds like you need to start working with smarter people. I used to think this way, until I started working with smart people.

Thanks for the free advice, I guess.

>we tried that but it didn't work because [reason].

If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life.


> If you're not producing results, your experience and expertise and knowledge are no longer relevant. Everything has a shelf-life.

ahh, line on graph must go up, huh?

this isn't a critique of the suggestion you didn't make which I assume you meant to of: everyone should always be seeking out new ideas to improve the status quo. But the meme that if you're not improving what you're doing has no value is a trash take. CPR hasn't changed dramatically in decades. Good chest compression is still the single most important thing if you want to survive to hospital discharge. But you're right, the paramedic's skills who isn't inventing a new method has no value.

sigh


I'm not saying there's no value in raising complaints internally. I'm saying that the proposed method of having somebody uninformed do it in an all hands meeting based on internet anecdotes has no value. It has no chance of affecting change.


> why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem.

This definitely happens for all kinds of problems at big tech companies. But you might be absolutely shocked to learn that many times, random engineers complaining about something doesn't result in management taking immediate action to fix the issue.

> Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel.

Stuff like this does get brought up by employees, especially Google has a lot of internal memes criticizing various aspects of Google's culture or policies. But executives mostly just deflect or ignore it, probably because they don't see the money in fixing it.

> So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech.

I guess the more ignorant ones do? I figured it was common knowledge that when something is broken policy-wise at companies, and they're clearly avoiding fixing it, it's rarely the non-management employees that are the problem. Almost always, it's a strategic decision by management to not address the issue (or sometimes they do address it, but poorly).


> I guess the more ignorant ones do? I figured it was common knowledge that when something is broken policy-wise at companies, and they're clearly avoiding fixing it, it's rarely the non-management employees that are the problem. Almost always, it's a strategic decision by management to not address the issue (or sometimes they do address it, but poorly).

Yikes. I'd call that ignorant myself.

By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it. This is particularly true with well-paid FAANG employees who could absolutely take their expertise elsewhere.


If they were torturing puppies then sure, but the context of this discussion is bad customer service. Having subpar customer service seems to be typical for corporations (and governments) in general, so no, it doesn't trigger my instinct to leave. Especially when the issue is providing customer support at scale to millions, if not billions of users (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything).

I wouldn't leave a company just because execs there seems vaguely anti-union either, even though I think unions are good, because again, that's most companies.

> By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it.

You could say that about a lot of things. Your government does something bad and you don't immediately hightail it to the next city/state/country? I guess that means you implicitly approve.


> (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything)

They are paying, though, with their habits and user data. That's not direct payment, but I don't think the distinction matters. Someone with a Google or Facebook account does pay. Not in currency, certainly, but having those people on the platform is certainly valuable to Google and Facebook, because they monetize their presence in other ways.


Correct, they're still a source of revenue, they're a customer. But legitimately good customer service is expensive, and it may not be viable to provide it even for marginal customers


> Especially when the issue is providing customer support at scale to millions, if not billions of users (many of whom don't actually directly pay anything).

What about those who do pay? Cause I can promise you, you don't get any better support, even if you're paying them tens or hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe if you're paying them millions.

And the context here is NOT customer support, the context is cutting people off from their friends and family because the AI was wrong.


> By supporting the "strategic decision by management" you implicitly approve of it. This is particularly true with well-paid FAANG employees who could absolutely take their expertise elsewhere.

I mean does somebody grinding down asphalt to repave a road implicitly approve of some random government policy?


Is government a corporation?


Not necessarily, but the same principle applies. You can express discontent by voting with your feet and going somewhere else. And many millions, if not billions of people have done exactly this.

And yet, it's also extremely common to implicitly tolerate bad behavior by government, and part of that is that governments do a lot of things and probably all of them fuck up somewhere. If you tried to avoid local governments in the US with "NIMBY" tendencies, you'd rapidly go insane.


Essentially, kinda. They just have different titles for similar roles. If you compare the charter for a city to a company's incorporation papers, they are very similar. Both types of papers are filed with the state. Probably not the answer you were seeking though


> I guess the more ignorant ones do?

the toxicity that this whole type of signaling represents from a company just means the give 0 shits about users. therefore, that means that its employees are placated by paychecks to also be happy to receive the negative aspects and laugh it off on their way to the bank to cash their large paychecks. this is the loss of respect others have towards the "yous"


If you 'lose respect' for individual employees because the megacorporation they work for has bad customer service or UX design or what have you, not sure what to say.

Most companies seem to suck in some way or another, reflecting that onto the individual workers just seems silly to me.

They're not "laughing it off" because they're paid well; if they were paid badly instead, what would change? Do people with low wages who work for corporations do something differently here?


For me, myself, and I, we have changed jobs when it became obvious that management wasn't going to change. I had made my very public comments at all-hands meetings as well as other attempts with coworkers to attempt internal changes. When it was obvious we were on the wrong side of the internal motes, it was time to leave. I've even taken pay cuts to not continue to be involved in the insanity. So, yes, I've walked the walk after talking the talk. I did not want to be associated with that company.


I think tech companies could probably do better with customer support, but I also recognize that it's an extremely difficult problem to handle realistically at scale, especially when most individual users pay little to nothing directly for many services. A higher-touch CS model would do better, sure, but that's expensive. It's different imo when you're a store or similar business where your customers are constantly actually giving you money.


Because when you're dealing with a billion users, a one-in-a-million mistake still screws a thousand users, and everyone realizes that getting the rate of mistakes anywhere near that low is impossible.

At the same time, you're dealing with actual bad actors that genuinely need to be banned, and there is a lot of this abuse. Mistakes will happen. You can't stop banning users. The bad actors will file appeals (in some cases including public escalations - see the various cases where someone complained about being unfairly banned from a game for cheating, and after a bit of a shitstorm, the company posted the evidence of him cheating). The appeal processes often work, sometimes don't - the public shitstorms are often cases where multiple things went wrong.

There is no easy solution, and at the scale these companies operate it's obvious to everyone involved that "just having a highly skilled human review every case" is completely impractical (not just "too expensive for the company to want to pay for it"). Because for each genuine user affected you have many abusers.

The pay-for-support proposals have several issues (PR impact from "screwing customers then extorting them to pay", stolen credit cards, engineering required to make it happen).

Abuse teams are (understandably) rather tight-lipped, and also tend to insist that telling the user what they did wrong would enable abusers to dodge the protections - this is something I don't understand (the abuser presumably knows what they did, while a user wrongfully accused does not), but it seems to be consistently said by abuse teams from many different companies.

All this combined makes it very hard to push for improvement, because there is no clear path towards a solution. You can ask a question at an all-hand generally raising the problem, but you'll get the usual "our abuse teams are working very hard on this, it's a hard problem" non-answer.

At the same time, yes, genuine users are absolutely getting screwed, and for the individual affected user, the consequences can be pretty severe.


(This reply is probably too late, I missed it while scanning this thread in the morning.)

> Abuse teams are (understandably) rather tight-lipped, and also tend to insist that telling the user what they did wrong would enable abusers to dodge the protections - this is something I don't understand (the abuser presumably knows what they did, while a user wrongfully accused does not), but it seems to be consistently said by abuse teams from many different companies.

The abuser will have done a lot of things. They don't know which one(s) got them caught. The more information they're revealed, the faster they can iterate to avoid getting caught next time.

But also, the real user doesn't actually benefit that much from knowing what got them banned. What are they going to do? Go back in time and not do it?

Now, a thing the user will greatly benefit from is knowing exactly what (if anything) they need to do to get their account back. That's where the focus on informing users should be. But since the abusers will also be told the same information, this needs to be something that legitimate users will find easy, but abusers or account hijackers will find hard to do at scale. So it can't just be "write a sob story about how you need the account back because it has photos of your dead grandmother". The abusers will be more competent at that than real users.

Typically it has to be spending a limited resource, or at least proving you have access to some limited resource and rate-limiting recovery actions by that resource. Some examples: non-VOIP phone numbers, proof of real world identity, social vouching by accounts in good standing.


>it's obvious to everyone involved that "just having a highly skilled human review every case" is completely impractical (not just "too expensive for the company to want to pay for it").

It's not obvious to me. These are trillion dollar companies and it's not like the appeals process doesn't take weeks to begin with (too long, but I digress). On top of all that you gotta keep in mind that some influencers are literally making the company money. To have them take weeks over a false negative is unaccetptable.

So yeah, get a proper review team, make sure they know the actual message that got them banned instead of needing to scour an account, give them a proper minute to review and decide.


> to risk becoming a squeaky wheel.

One of my previous managers told me that they kept me exactly because "I am not a sheep," i.e. because it required non-zero effort to convince me to do anything, and I always tried to poke holes in any proposals. So, in a healthy organization, this would not be a risk.


Raise what as a serious problem?

People taking bribes to get people unbanned? People getting banned?


Companies make decisions that ultimately affect their users in a negative manner including when the company's decision is a mistake. Not having a real method of correcting the mistake is a huge sign to me that says company is not someone that I want to do business with at all. I understand mistakes happen, but claiming absolute immunity and acting like no mistake was made is the absolute worst customer service position to take.


Meta has 6 billion or so customers. Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time.

There are processes to correct problems there. It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced.


>Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time.

sometimes would be a good first step.

> It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced.

well we're screwed then. of course shareholders don't understand the need for moderation, nor keeping a satisfied userbase.


Stakeholders. I'm talking about the different teams in Meta that would have to approve your diffs.


400k for one offer right now


Perhaps its just me, but I feel like a lot of users are missing the forest for the trees here. Services such as these only pop up when legitimate solutions prove ineffective at addressing the problem.

To me, these services are more indicative of "Big Tech" failing to create effective appeal processes to meet their consumer's demand... While I'm sure there isn't a lot of money in it, it'd be great for Big Tech to examine how they could improve on this front.


It’s just you. The ineffectiveness is the point. This service is a joke, it’s surely illegal. Everyone knows it’s a “failing” system, you can’t scale free customer service forever.

The legitimacy of the need for this service proves the value of these accounts. I predict that tech companies will get in on it, and within a few years will offer paid customer service the way enterprises get today. You can already pay for “verified” accounts, so this is the next step. If companies don’t monetize it, government will regulate it.


> I predict that tech companies will get in on it, and within a few years will offer paid customer service the way enterprises get today.

Good! That would be a fantastic outcome if that's all plsfix accomplishes. Tons of people would be willing to pay for support but it's just not offered.


>It’s just you. The ineffectiveness is the point. This service is a joke, it’s surely illegal. Everyone knows it’s a “failing” system, you can’t scale free customer service forever.

Is the spirit of this service corrupt? Absolutely. Does it undercut Big Tech's checks and balances? %100. Is it morally lacking? Personally I think so. Is it illegal though... ehhhh? It might be shocking but not every term found on a FAANG's term and services agreement is legally binding.

Services like these are inevitable so long as humans are corrupt but typically only pop into public consensus when the institution has failed so spectacularly that the average consumer has completely lost faith in them to adequately address their problem. While I'm not condoning corruption, clearly the Big Tech companies have failed in providing adequate solutions to this problem and I feel our time is better spent examining the negligence of these institutions which caused the problem rather than the malicious service looking to exploit said negligence.


Customer service is a profit center sometimes. Person calls in, and sell them antivirus and pc cleaner subscription.


I'm not sure the 'You deleted my YouTube account because I got 3 false copyright claims in 1 hour' to 'I've installed Google(TM) YouTube(R) Antivirus Subscription' pipeline is a strong one.


Before this existed, it's likely that most internal requests are from employees genuinely trying to help people. Sure, it's possible there's some employees already taking money to submit internal forms rather than personally evaluating the applicant's morals, but it's unlikely that it's very widespread. Formalizing the process like this website does makes it much more likely that most submissions to internal forms for unbanning people will be in exchange for money with no moral consideration, due to 1) making a marketplace to match applicants and suitably unscrupulous employees; 2) reducing friction for actually executing the transaction; and 3) by being explicitly money-oriented attracting employees who are very much not in it to help unfairly banned applicants. Those factors make this seem far more ethically repugnant than existing processes


Self reply to start a new thread of conversation, the lack of consideration of these factors is incredibly stereotypical of "Valley techbros" and the mismatch in values between people who'd make this kind of site and people who'd find this kind of site awful is why many people outside of Silicon Valley aren't as enthused about tech companies as the tech companies themselves are


I'm okay with evil tech companies fighting with other evil tech companies in a way that might benefit end users.


>the mismatch in values between people who'd make this kind of site and people who'd find this kind of site awful

enemy of my enemy is a friend. If I cared enough to properly appeal a bad ban, I care less about the ethics of how I get unbanned and more about just getting unbanned.

You're already convinced the company that banned you is unfair and uncaring. Why would you care about exploiting the weaknesses?


I think the majority of HN is aware of Big Tech's failure to create effective appeal processes. It's not exactly a secret. This service is still naked corruption, though.


Absolutely, I just think our time is better spent examining the source of the problem.


>Dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery.

Don't see much dishonest. And honestly, it may fall under a bribe, but bribe implies the person in power was the one who affected you. Which clearly isn't the case here.

In my eyes, this is just making a public service of something we 100% know people who make tech companies profitable already have access to.


This is an unsanctioned, under-the-table payment to someone in power in exchange for special treatment. You're saying this /may/ fall under bribery?


It's only slightly lower in my eyes than an influencer getting sanctioned, private access to someone in power in exchange for continuing to kinda be an employee (but not actually). I mostly want to emphasize that the "official" ways to do this was already razor thin.


> This service is still naked corruption

This service feels capitalistically egalitarian!


I read about a more entrepreneurial approach a while back: Only Fans model got their instagram account back by finding employees on linkedin and trading sex for account un-bans.

https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...


How do you verify that the requestor isn't just some Joe/Joeline Schmo who's account has been blocked for no reason, as opposed to someone who has been legitimately blocked, say for CSAM or other legislative reason, or is otherwise operating against the service's TOS?

When Mike Meta gets canned because he's tried to un-suspend an actual terrorist account (because you know that they're monitoring internal mentions), are you on the hook for that?


I suppose as a "verified employee" at the company. You could do your own investigation prior to filing the appropriate paperwork. But that would often result in its own paper trail getting generated and leading back to you anyways.

Honestly, the risks here outweigh the benefits. Not sure why anybody would do this in the first place.

"6 figure job with stable income" vs "one time payment of $100 from rando on the internet"

It's a no brainer.

Honestly smells like a sting operation to me.


The same way problems get resolved when someone's sob story goes viral? Presumably an employee sees it and files a ticket that says "hey this stranger is having problem XYZ." Then a support person investigates and takes the appropriate action.

(Just a guess, I don't know the process at Meta.)


Also, my understanding is that a common cause for an account to become frozen is that the account has been (perceived to be) taken over by someone else. Having an accelerated side channel to restore access to those accounts needs to be implemented with great care.


I had to check if it was April Fools' Day. This is one of the most disturbing posts I've seen in a while. I sincerely hope that people who profit off of this will get fired at the very least.


The concept seems like… performance art protest or something.

Building a platform to bribe your way through the opaque customer non-service system of these companies is either low corruption or high art.


100% - I see lots of comments saying things like "Don't you know companies would fire you for this??" which to me sounds a little bit like "Don't you know you shouldn't eat babies??" after reading A Modest Proposal.

On the other hand, I guess life does imitate art sometimes...


Yeah, my initial response was: this is wrong on so many levels, and I love that it is out there for public to see

100 art points.


Right, my reaction was initially to be a bit horrified, but then I kinda smiled a bit. It's absurd, and awful, but so funny.


The author is either for real or very committed to the bit.


I mean, aren't you likely to already have some cognitive dissonance from working at FB? What's a few hundred dollars more worth of it in the grand scheme of things.


I see this in a less cynical light… this seems to be a commentary about how these companies can disrupt an individual’s life cor whatever reason and said individual has no legal recourse. Legislation certainly hasn’t address what seems to be a very common issue that even within this thread, lots of people are sharing experiences about losing accounts that held thousands of dollars in them.

These companies claim that people can make a livelihood, or save their digital lives with their services, but the dark underbelly seems to be that for any reason, these companies can erase you, and even worse, you can “bribe” an insider to get things back. Its an elegant way to expose an issue that you only really might see a random youtuber complain about. How much more widespread should you allow this to get?

Instead of writing an article for wired, create an app to bring attention to an issue.


I love this theory.

Society at the mercy of customer service so bad that we revert to bribes.

And the techbro answer is an upstart third-party for-profit service to facilitate the bribery, complete with a launch on HN.

And it's a marketplace, with offers, for libertarian bonus points.


If you’re one of the employees who sign up for this, beware. Facebook will surely sue this guy and the payment paper trail will be the first thing he’s required to give over in discovery.

I don’t see how he can guarantee you’ll be anonymous for long.


Everyone reading I should watch the movie Brazil.

Remember who the true hero was. He wasn't in it for long.


This guy will be able to request things for discovery too.


It's quite likely a honeypot.


On what grounds could they sue?


The employees are clearly engaging in fraud by doing non-work activities on the clock. The companies know this because they haven’t hired anyone to do customer service.


But the person said they could "sue this guy". I can see how they would have a beef with their employee doing this, but don't see what grounds to sue "this guy"? Mind you, I know little of the US legal system outside Suits and other probably as incorrect shows.


TBH I have no idea, I just wanted to make the “no customer service” joke.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference perhaps?


somebody been watching Suits recently?


> [...] by doing non-work activities on the clock

How do you know they are doing it on their company paid time?


Honestly I see it more as giving some rights back to the common man that these giant tech companies don't feel the need to respect.


I fully understand why this is considered unethical. I fully understand that employees will get fired for taking the bounties.

But what actual law is being broken here? I suspect it is legally a bribe, because it is facilitating a non-routine action. But only because of that non-routine bit. Would it be possible to prosecute this, going into court and admitting that your suspension appeals process is non-routine?

And what part of a standard employment contract is being broken here? Taking money to perform a service your employer does not offer? And interestingly, if the employer does offer the service, then it is no longer a bribe but a legal facilitation payment (so you would want a clause in the employment contract to prevent this)

(Not rhetorical - looking for answers to the above questions)

In many ways, this process already happens, and even expected by all concerned. More than once I've seen twitter personality manages to get some decision reversed seemingly only because they could make enough noise, often ending up on the front page here. The difference is in the currency used to pay to bypass the system.


There is a simple fix. Just make the amount a contribution to a charity or charity's of their choice. Makes it a much harder to fire someone who is earning money for a charity, perhaps even one the company contributes to annually.


Came here to say this. Seems like a slam dunk to me.


> But what actual law is being broken here? I suspect it is legally a bribe

It's called "commercial bribery", though I believe state law generally covers this sort of thing, so things will differ depending on jurisdiction. Someone else posted[0] the text of the law for California. (In CA's case, if the amount is under $250, the law doesn't apply, but there are quite a few "bounties" on OP's site that are above that level.)

> And what part of a standard employment contract is being broken here?

I'm not sure if it's standard, but many employees have signed things that say they won't accept other employment. Not sure something like this would count as "employment". But I also wouldn't be surprised if some employment contracts have broader language around this, more to the effect of "no outside paid work".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435890


My employment contracts have all required at minimum that I inform them of any commercial work I am doing outside my employment for them, and sometimes required that I get approval from them before beginning. Having some undisclosed second employment would definitely be grounds for firing, if they wanted.


My employment contracts have never specified anything of the kind. I suspect it’s just illegal where I live.


Apropos of all the valid concerns with this, I don't think "being asked by someone outside the company to do something at the company you currently work for" would ever be described as "undisclosed second employment".


OK sure, but is it illegal?


I asked two questions specifically because a clause like this in an employment contract is there to enable termination no matter if the act is legal or not. Also, breaking your employment contract can make you liable for damages if the employer can demonstrate them.


Probably at least a breach of contract for the employees offering the service.


FWIW, having friends at Google and Stripe has been critical for my startup to survive potentially extinction-level disasters. Automated systems false-positive flagging us and shutting down our payment processing with no recourse happened on both. Only by having people on the inside was I able to get my case appealed by an actual human who was capable of reasoning.

I don't think I'd be okay with a platform like this. The ethics around it are questionable. But I think it's important that you don't take on a dependency unless you personally know at least a few people at senior roles at the company you'll be relying on.


So it's ok for you to use your contacts to get avert 'extinction-level disasters' but it's questionable ethics if others try to do the same?


The bribery angle is where it appears questionable to me.

And I'm not at all happy with needing to rely on contacts. These companies should not be able to get away with potentially destroying other businesses or adversely impacting peoples personal lives and just handwave the reasoning to be "the algorithm". People should have recourse.


This feels like a contradiction at first glance. Violates Ethics of privilege? It would be better and more fair to have everyone pay.


I don't think it's okay having to have relied on internal escalation either. The problem is that critical dependencies like payment processing and platform distribution can just destroy you at the whim of a false-positive flagging from an algorithm. You're then left with no recourse.

Having everyone pay for support that actually delivers would be fine in theory, but that doesn't really work out either. It would just punt the problem down until you hit it again. Even if you're paying for support, you're still likely to hit a human who just regurgitates a script at you and is unable to resolve the issue. Oftentimes, escalation is needed. If your support agent is unwilling to escalate, back channels are the only option. Having internal friends raise a fuss is one method that sometimes works, but going viral on Twitter/HN are other ways that people accomplish this.

The reality is that people who are more well-connected have advantages. Someone with a large social media following or a business that's more well-known will always get better support than someone unknown. I don't know what the solution to this would be.


it would be better and more fair to either A) provide actual support for everyone or B) do away with the "internal forms" and provide zero support to everyone. there shouldn't be two hidden levels of support depending on how deep your pockets are or who you know.


The description_text that is supposed to only be visible to verified tech workers is exposed publicly in the response to one of the 'msearch' requests if you inspect the network requests using your browser's developer tools.

I'm not familiar with the details of the bubble.io platform that this seems to be based on, but from a very casual look, it looks terrifying from a security viewpoint. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more data leaks.


Not the first time I've seen that kind of leak from a site using bubble.io


My Instagram account was blocked for years for no reason. Even when I decided I no longer wanted the account, I still couldn't delete it.

I posted about it here multiple times. Some posters offered suggestions -- if I was in the EU, they said, I could invoke the "right to be forgotten", and Instagram would legally have to remove my account. Unfortunately, I do not live in the EU.

When Meta Verified was launched late last year with a human support feature, I paid the subscription fee and created a support ticket. They asked for screenshots and videos of the problem, but ultimately said there was nothing they could do. Stubbornly, I kept at it, and over 100 emails later they finally fixed the issue by resetting the email that was linked to my account.

My question is: why didn't mine take 5 minutes?


If any FAANG employee falls for this, it's a good way for the company to weed them out, and terminate them for-cause.

You might run this as a honeypot for corrupt, dumb employees. Make it more easily accessible than the outreaches from criminal enterprises.


I really hate to phrase it like this, but i don't see another way...

if a FAANG employee would be considered dumb when signing up for this... how can this not have crossed OPs mind when spending his/her time building this platform (as an ex-FAANG)?


> how can this not have crossed OPs mind when spending his/her time building this platform

You mean the two engineers on loan to the global investigations team at $techcompany?


I'd think they would make this offer seem less sketchy... facebook & co know better than anyone how to make bad & evil stuff sound desirable. It's in their DNA.

If this was actually a honeypot, i would have thought it would seem less like a "sign up for your own lawsuit"-form kinda site.

Maybe they use the same technique as the "prince of nigeria" kind of emails & porn ads being made so bad on purpose, to cater to a specific target group... but i just never fully understood how this kind of stuff works out better than... just actually making something better...


I'm surprised no one has considered that this is a way to get people talking more than it is a way to get accounts unsuspended...


I didn't consider it because i couldn't think of what it would be that they want people to talk about. What do you think about? Who made this for achieving what?


Can you really say this after it generated 400 comments on the topic amongst the people closest to the issue?


This has to be a sting operation.

No way would I risk my stable 6-figure job for some random to get their account unlocked. Especially not for "$100" lol.

If the account was locked for fraudulent activity or worse, something illegal like CSAM. That paper trail will easily lead back to you. Bye bye job and possible investigation by authorities.

On the upside, at least you will get "free" security from the FBI when you are put on the watchlist.


This is a great fit for a call center support person in an emerging economy for whom 150 bucks is a big deal, I doubt this would entice a staff eng doing 500k tco.


> staff eng doing 500k tco

With the stock flying high, even the L5s who stayed during the 2022 doldrums are making that kind of money.


Which is to say:

> the company stated that its median employee made just over $379,000 in 2023

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-median-yearly-pay-emplo...

and then check the stock price since 2023:

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/META:NASDAQ?window=1Y


On the flip side I'd pay for this. My Twitter account was suspended last year for no reason I can fathom. I wasn't abusive, I wasn't hacking/abusing the platform etc. Just one day I posted a comment and was then told "Your account is blocked" I'd really love to get it back as it's a 3 letter handle. Alas, despite submitting upwards of 100 appeals I hear nothing back (I guess since Elon took over there's no support staff anymore) Anyway, I can see there would be a market for this, however unethical/risky it would be for employees to participate in.


from the stories i've heard, even if they hired back a support team, they wouldn't be able to bring back a lot of accounts people ask for

they just botched a bunch of the deletion/suspension processes, in a way that made them unrecoverable


Interesting. I can still login, my content is still there etc (none of the images are though) so I hoped it'll still be possible. Given that almost all the people I followed etc have left, there probably wouldn't be much left, but I had that account for ~15 years before it was nuked.


I am in the same exact situation.


The reason asking an employee is the only way to get an account unblocked is because it solves the most difficult part of the process: verifying the user is who they say they are. When internal employees fill out that form, you're agreeing SEVERAL times that you are 100% sure you know the person and they aren't compromised.

This service throws all of that out the window.


The idea is insanely unworkable, but the PROBLEM is entirely real.

Personally, I look to the FCC and like bodies to implement the required governance norms: if you offer freemium services to people, you have an obligation to implement real-person interaction on account suspension, and a mediated access path to your effects inside the locked-down digital store.

These identities now fuel our access to governments, and public services. If you can't access your google account you can be blocked from legal documents.

I know "caveat emptor" and all that.


> the required governance norms: if you offer freemium services to people, you have an obligation to implement real-person interaction on account suspension, and a mediated access path to your effects inside the locked-down digital store. These identities now fuel our access to governments, and public services. If you can't access your google account you can be blocked from legal documents.

Yes, very well stated, this exactly. If you have a hold over how people interact with others or organize their lives or do business, you should offer reasonable processes for addressing issues e.g. lockouts that could impact them seriously. It's the sort of process that should exist: if your email account got shut, what if the helpdesk refused to ever tell you why or how it could be reopened? It's too late to move (social media) providers by then.


Ah, fixers. This used to be a problem mostly in corrupt third world countries. Now ordinary Americans need them.

Lawyers usually serve this role in the US.


This is a real problem that needs solving, but I can see this sort of thing at scale leading big tech companies to not allow their employees to do this anymore.


It's definitely a grey zone. I am definitely keeping all tech employees' info private, nothing is displayed on the site.

If it becomes large, I imagine big tech companies would try to fight it, but let's cross that bridge when we get to it.


Won't tech companies just post honeypot bounties and see who bites?


Hehe, you've learned well the SV way of doing things. After all, your former employer is the one who coined "move fast and break things".


I find this disingenuous. You explain how you verify that the employees work for big tech on your FAQ. It would be trivial for companies of this size to go backwards.

I’m sure your motives were good, but I’d urge you to think this through.


If this makes money, big tech could open a lucrative market for themselves, suspending more and more accounts, and requesting higher and higher "priority fees" to unsuspend them. (Hmm... somehow reminds me of organised crime...)


I think the phrase you might be thinking of is as follows: "Hey, that's a nice account ya got there...Be a shame if something were to happen to it!" ;-)


Facebook doesn't need the money. Twitter on the other hand...


Imagine if some competitor showed up that skipped the middleman and made a business model where you pay them a recurring bribe and they just keep your account open.


EU law to the rescue: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...


When you have verified employees offering “full account takeover”, are the employees just advertising their willingness to just hand over your account to anyone willing to pay?


It is seems wildly corrupt and unethical if somebody would built a business with such bad customer service that people are willing to bribe their way around it.


Oh, great. Simjacking as a service.


This site is bad, but what's worse is it may be the only way to get your problem solved!


I've posted about it a few times, a few years ago my entire Google account was locked out for "fraud" with Google Pay. Lost my email, DNS, GoogleFI (my CELLPHONE) access. Sent them a picture of my license 3 times on a form they make you fill out (which you have to google, they don't tell you anything, you just can't log in).

Never received a response.

I'd kind of like this for stuff like that. Bypassing horrendous or non-existent customer support.

I never once received a response from Google. I tested my account maybe a year later and it was unlocked.


That's terrible! I'm curious if you pay for any Google services, do you get better support? For example, I know people who pay for Youtube Premium just so they don't have to watch ads, or spend a few dollars on GCP for personal projects.


Nope. Zero difference. I was a paying Google DNS, GoogleFI, and Gmail user. Maybe more. The first thing that happened was my Google Wallet/Pay account was marked as fraud. I didn't know this until my OTHER accounts stopped working.

My OTHER accounts stopped working because I couldn't update my credit card at Google Pay to change my recurring bills for all of those services to keep paying for them.

I was in the middle of SELLING A HOUSE, literally happened that week. My Gmail was made back when Gmail first started so I have so much mail I have to pay for it to receive mail. I had to migrate everything THAT week to another provider (fastmail).

Miserable experience. I couldn't even use my cell phone. I think that might have been cut off immediately. I forget. I don't use Google for anything but SSO now and even then I try to use Apple instead if available.

edit: Oh, yeah, I didn't know any of this was broken until I stopped getting email at my private email (via gmail DNS) Gmail account when I was selling the house. Literally nothing told me I was banned.


Sorry, I missed you were paying for GoogleFI when I read your original message. So if your cell phone gets shut off, there is nothing they'll do about it?! That's crazy. I can understand having little-or-no support for "free" users, but you're a paying customer.


Right, there's no customer service at all. Nobody to call or contact, not that I could call. I switched to an iPhone at another carrier that week. I've de-googled my life as much as possible.


Yeah I almost feel like it is tongue in cheek / a joke.

Doesn't seem like a real service, what employee would risk their job for a few hundred dollars.

Maybe it is a dig at how the customer support for these huge companies is so poor that this seems like a real thing.


This is a clever hack to solve the problem. It’s essentially an underground market for customer support, converting company employees into clandestine customer service reps. Better than nothing, but think about how silly that sounds.

Tech companies know customer support doesn’t scale and they don’t have a strong enough incentive to hire customer service people. Automating away these “cost centers” of labor is largely why tech companies have grown to have the highest market caps in the world.

Until we address this incentive issue, tech companies are going to keep eliminating jobs that require lots of manual labor through automation. Or the free market will solve it for the highest bidder.


It’s not clever at all. It doesn’t solve the core issue, which is identity / ownership verification. You’re conflating clever with “something I’d find personally useful”.


It’s clever in that it potentially helps with the problem of “I’ve been banned and there’s no customer support to help me” by incentivizing employees to perform contractually dubious customer support.

The problem you’re talking about is a different one. I’m not claiming that any of these problems are being solved entirely nor ideally with this clever hack.

My point is that hacks like these are symptoms of a larger problem in incentives for tech companies. We’ve exchanged humans being paid to help humans for a few tech companies that rule our lives via automated decisions.


Yes this is excellent. companies usually provide these services anyway to large clients. This is a win win for both the small clients and the lowly worker drone at Google.


Having been one of those drones, I can attest that it will be very popular. :D

Thanks!


Oh, you're former tech support? That makes so much more sense that you or your colleagues would accept such small amount of money for these favors, then.

Most of the comments in this thread are likely from the perspective of developers who make AT LEAST 250k. But your target pawns are the lower drones, possibly outside the US?


Anyone who's ever worked at any big tech company has got to just have a chuckle at how fast you know you'd be fired for being anywhere near this.


I think this is a great idea to show how to create a product to attend a real customer pain - but only as a protest site to raise some awareness to the customer service problem of these big techs.

But, if real, it's an huge unethical breach for bribery, privacy violation, and will only benefit illegal content. A real customer using this will never be accepted again on those platforms.


> A real customer using this will never be accepted again on those platforms

this sentence doesn't make sense


sorry, english is not my first language. my point is if a real customer, let's say get blocked on Instagram after an account takeover try to use this service to rescue and unblock and get caught by Meta team, surely will not get their account back because of the unofficial means used to recover the account.


There is a big difference between helping a friend or acquaintance just being nice to doing something for money.

Once you add money into something, there is a whole level of scrutiny and legal and ethical implications.

Like others have been saying, this is the type of thing that will get you fired immediately. You are not allowed to take your internal access and go into business for yourself selling it.


we've been struggling with verifying our business on Meta and tried many ways to get around it with no success, do you think you can help with it? can you reach out to founders@activepieces.com?


I just shot you an email


I reckon advertising the fact you're willing to pay to get around this, which I expect is probably against ToS and the employment agreement with the company name isn't the best choice.


we're not willing to do anything against the ToS, I haven't checked them yet and we'll do things in compliance with policies, I'm just posting a problem and looking for a valid credible solution. thank you for the note!


This is identical to another site that was posted on HN last year offering the same service, with almost identical description. If I can find the post I'll edit my comment here.

I only remember because I am still trying to get into my Gmail account for which I have the username, password and recovery email.


Here it is from 10 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899787

"Enter FaangSupport. FaangSupport connects you and me to verified (via email) Faang Volunteers. When complete, the main interface will be an Inbox like layout, through which you can create tickets and correspond with a Faang employee."


This is no different than corruption .. caused by terrible design from the likes of shitter etc.. I'm sure it will be popular.

I fucking hate shitter for locking me out of my account but I refuse to pay ransom to get it back.

I instead stopped using social media besides anonymous social media and my mental health improved immensely.


Based on the anger in this comment, maybe the anonymous sites aren't for you either?


“We don’t need legislation, the free market will fix it”

The free market: this website

This website is absolutely insane, and it’s insane that the creator doesn’t seem to have any awareness of how insane it is, judging by the about page.

However, I can’t lay too much blame on the creator when it’s clearly emblematic of a much larger problem.


For budgeting purposes, I'm trying to amortize the cost of freespeech. Twitter keeps it simple, free speech is $8/month there. How much do you think I should budget monthly/yearly for account suspension appeals? Do you plan on offering a subscription option?


This just shows how broken and insanely anti-consumer Big Tech is. You have to pay 200 bucks for somebody to look on the down low into your account being randomly disabled... and everybody pretty much accepts it as normal. Very dystopian.


This is one of the most unethical things I think I've ever seen on hackernews.


Certainly more ethical than automated banishment without recourse.


On one hand, if you're willing to pay a large sum then it indicates you value your account highly. But on the other hand, this creates perverse incentives for tech employees, and could get them fired.

What if the money was donated instead?


FYI if you sign up as a tech employee, it lets you view requests (and seemingly respond to them? I didn't try.) without verifying your account. This includes whatever personal details the user put into the request.


This is wrong and risky at so many levels, not sure if using the big tech name here was a clickbait in the first place

1. Not all employees have access to account and user data in any medium+ size company

2. What one does in their own time is personal business but what one does in their own time on company IP is not personal anymore. The person might even get fired, the karma point or couple hundred are not worth the risk.

3. This just creates a channel to identify the weak links in human chain for phishing attacks

Ironically instagram was not even in the list for selection for the form


I wonder if it'd be more effective to make a platform for victims of wrongful account suspensions that helped them to purchase ads targeted at likely ad buyers, highlighting the wrongful suspension of the individuals. These are advertising companies, they'll likely care if their customers are getting negative press from their victims constantly.

Since obviously FB/Alphabet/etc aren't going to allow negative ads targeting their own platform, you post them on a different platform.


I've been looking for something like this.

I was an idiot and my 18 years old reddit account got hacked. Figured it out in a few hours, did a password reset, I change the password but I still get invalid password after.

It's been 9 months now without a reply from support. I wished I'd have paid for reddit gold or something to have an actual legal base to do something.

If anyone from reddit is reading this, it's the same username as here.


What a wonderful, terrible thing.


The companies should just have paid premium support.


Maybe the folks at these companies writing the corny AI that bans people for posting pictures of cups and flowers, are the same ones getting kickbacks for fixing the problem?

I’m sorry, I just can’t help but be cynical about this. These platforms have next to zero actual customer support, the AI inmate is running the asylum and the users suffer the most.


given the legal issues people have pontificated about, I think an prediction/assassination market is better for this

will @jpdpeters instagram account by restored by May 31st?

the person that predicts this most correctly with the largest position was the person in control of the outcome

and you can then just make a feed of these kinds of predictions to your “market” of employees


It's kinda telling that there's enough demand for freelance tech support that this could exist. Imagine what would happen is Google et al actually did provide support.

I'm not sure this is the win for malicious actors that people claim it is. It's gotta be cheaper to buy/make a new account that pay to recover an existing one.


Many great comments already as to why this is a bad idea, but here is another reason it won’t work:

Anyone at these companies can sign up with their @company email address, post an “urgent bounty” and 10 minutes later show up at your desk to fire you.

Though I am sure that a lot of money has been made through these types of services, just not out in the open.


This feels like some sort of HN April Fools joke. At this point it’d be impossible to actually parody this place.


[Gripe] Viability/ethics of the program aside, I'd love to have this for Reddit, where my decade+ account was randomly thrown into an inconsistent Kafkaesque censored limbo.

In short: One more morning I woke up and it was shadowbanned for no discernible reason, I used the appeals page, the appeal was granted with an apology... but it wasn't actually fixed, and I can't contact anyone because the appeals page says my account is already back to normal and refuses to accept any input.

... Oh, and reusing an old throwaway account to ask for help led it to be killed the exact same way.

Well, at least I'm spending more time on other hobbies I guess.


I'd love the anecdata on what type of commenter you were.


Almost never posted links/text submissions, but daily comment-discussions to the tune of 524k comment karma. Everything done on one account except for some resume-review throwaways.

Interestingly "new" Reddit shows everything on my user-page as [Removed], but on *cough* proper Reddit you can still see content, although if you try following a permalink you'll see (or rather not-see) that it's shadowbanned. (In some cases they've hidden/removed comments that replied to me, which is exta-weird.)

https://old.reddit.com/user/terr_/


Politically interested, Deus Ex, Birds Aren't Real, could read and write beyond cat memes — starting to see why they didn't "want yer kind around" there!


I've had the same problem. Oddly the only Reddit account I can use is the one that shares cookies with my original one that got banned (for participating in Save3rdPartyApps), so they know it's ban evasion. Any other account I make gets shadowbanned very quickly, seemingly no matter which device, browser and Internet connection or VPN is used. My use of reddit drastically declined around the CEO tantrum.


This is great news for employers! They get a highly motivated workforce focused on solving client problems and improving retention, all for free. No need to hire customer service reps and waste all that money when the invisible hand will take care of your customers for you.


Plot twist - this a honeypot operation by a group of tech companies to find employees to fire.


Put an LLM on the website that answers all kinds of google/facebook related questions. Create that customer service service they should have build themselves years ago.


Posted earlier on HN as "FAANG support" - prolly fishing in the end


Thank you! I spent ages trying to find the previous submission!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899787


Okay, regardless of how many (or all) rules this breaks..

One must minimally respect the risk to publicly post a self-created novel concept as such.

With such confidence. Awesome marketplace - I hope it helps save some time ultimately.


This actually speaks volumes about the ethical standing and abusive power those companies hold over commoners where genuine no-reason suspensions are impossible to apeal against.


Going by the title I was hoping this was about the choice these companies have made to maze like appeals and support service. This solution solution to the problem is kinda cursed


I badly need something like this because Big Tech sites are awful.

I tried to submit a request, but it gave me an error about sendgrid credits. I guess the site is already a huge success.


Showed up late and the site is filled with garbage content.


What’s stopping big tech from running their own plsfix pages like this and pocketing the money?

In practice this would be premium plans that include some form of special treatment.


1. Bad PR and everything that comes with it (e.g. the kind of unwanted attention from politicians that's bad for business)

2. Payment fraud (which also would be a huge issue on this site if it was to ever take off).


1. Paytofix. All proceeds go to charity. 2. 2FA + identity verification


Premium for the 'no ads' tier, of course.


Please stop..

I’m pretty sure people will be fired for doing this.

Talk about misaligned incentives. What’s stopping employees from intentionally messing with accounts to get paid to fix them.


If people take bribes, the deserved to be fired. Not much to say other than you are 100% right about this webs site being the wrong solution to the problem. I think people need to stop using software and services with awful support. It's legal and it sends the right message.


The old cobra bounty problem


I’m interested in this but not willing to sign up just yet - how can I reach you to get in touch?

If you need an email to reach me at: magic at_symbol tuta dot com


Also former FB employee. I tried using the same internal system, for my own account, about 3 years ago. It was completely useless.


Reminds me of all the upcharge bribery in Snow Crash. For only a bit more you the rent a cops will take you to the nice jail.


As of midnight CST, the board has been flooded with bogus requests. It’s unfortunate there were no moderation tools.


This could work to hire big twitter (x?) accounts to tweet for help on your behalf to get the company's attention


Here’s the biggest problem with big tech. Too many people think this behavior is just ok. ಠ_ಠ


This could be great satire. The fact it's actually serious is both surprising and sad.


It's sad to see all the negative comments considering that HN is often the go-to place for similar requests. This is a great idea, although I can understand how it can be risky for big tech employees.

Nice work anyway. Maybe you could market it for bugs/issues rather than just account suspensions. It reminds me of https://xkcd.com/806/


Please add X/twitter platform, my account just got suspended without reasons.


Damn, of course there's an internal form to fill out. Google/Meta demonstrably know that there needs to be a way around broken automated ban systems. They just gate it behind access to an employee (who wants to keep their job) to prevent people from using it.

So let's have a thought exercise: what would it cost, in dollars, to have a hyperscale web service that doesn't have this problem? In other words, a Facebook/Google-equivalent web service of some kind that has a public a link to a 'mistakenly banned appeal' form for anyone to use.

The constraints/spirit of the exercise are that the volume of worldwide engagement with our hypothetical service needs to be equivalent to engagement with Google/Facebook (and equivalently appealing for ToS-violators to abuse, leading to a comparable volume of automated bans). Auto-ban systems and ToS are similar to Fb/Google as well. The product doesn't matter a ton. Maybe it's a social network, or an office/email suite, whatever.

The difference is that ImaginaryCorp honestly strives to provide a ban-appeal process equivalent to what you get if you know someone who works at Google to absolutely everyone. Let's say they promise a verdict within a calendar month, with at least some amount of useful explanation.

The review process can be automated within reason, but not if it violates the goal of reducing abuse and false ban rates to the level that a Google employee can expect when they submit their uncle Doug's marginally-suspicious banned account for internal review. ImaginaryCorp really believes in the spirit of that goal, so they're not willing to compromise on the review process much. Yeah yeah, it's implausible that belief in the spirit of the goal would be present at every level of the company. It's a thought excercise about monetary cost, just go with it.

They won't half-ass it and just grant everyone's appeal because the have a similar commitment to Fb/Goog to not losing users after becoming a cesspit, are subject to CSAM etc. laws, and generally care about not being a clearinghouse for abusive content.

Doing this would probably require a lot more human review (unless Google is for some reason sitting on a way better auto-ban system and not using it), and as a result would require a massive staff and process edifice to execute that, keeping false-positives to a bare minimum, on a global scale. Financially, the business has to remain sustainable with this system in place (but not necessarily successful or growing on par with competition).

So the question is: how much would this cost me, the user? Even if ImaginaryCorp runs ads like Fb/Google, would that account-review edifice require subscription fees to not run the company out of money? If so, assume users act like shitty free-but-your-data-and-clicks-are-the-product users and not like paying customers, so legitimate abuse rates stay high (again, thought experiment). If there are fees, how much am I paying a month--$5? $50? $500? Or would running this review system just mean that the company is a little (or a lot) less profitable than its competitors?

It's an interesting question to think about. The requirement of providing useful explanation to legitimately banned users actually complicates things a great deal, because it might lead to gaming the system. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge: high-social-context groups of reviewers would need to be present all over the world. Staffing is an even bigger challenge if you opt to solve issues "at the source" by fixing the auto-ban systems themselves (which results in needing to solve realtime moderation at scale, a notoriously intractable problem). Automation is tempting, but risks falling directly back into the issue we're trying to solve.

In the real world, this would obviously never happen, but I'm interested in what you all think.


How do you verify employees? Are they really going to sign up to this?


For now, I'm verifying them via their work email.

So far, I've gotten decent feedback from my former colleagues and friends in big tech. Most of them take some sort of compensation for helping restore Insta / ad accounts - this is just a more direct way.


I'm shocked people take compensation for that. I would've felt super weird taking money for it (not least because with how much I make charging for a favor feels like an incredibly crass thing to do)


So you'd do it for free?


Yes, of course I would. Would you not?


Yeah, if was someone who I wouldn't want to do a favor for I just wouldn't do it. I make so much money that the idea of taking money from friends for a pretty simple favor comes across as weird and miserly.


Do you vet the client side of the transaction as well?


Got it, you are friends with corrupt big tech employees.

This site is an absolutely terrible idea. Anyone that thinks this is acceptable should not be working for these companies. Your friends and former colleagues are, quite frankly, stupid. If they sell access to recovery they will be caught and fired, or worse.

It would be trivial for the insider risk people at said companies to find out who you have communicated via their work email.

It is absolutely against terms of employment across the industry to sell recovery of accounts. Not to mention completely unethical. Why would you think this is acceptable?

Just stop.


The terms of employment are in many cases also a form of corruption. You just don't recognize it because you're trained to see the established law and order as morally right (probably). Something something Kohlberg's stages.


A marketplace for social engineering access to internal DBs.


Satire inspires change, sometimes as a last resort.


How to destroy your privileged life in one easy step!


So it costs <$250 to identify each compromised employee?

Cheap!


Lawyers gonna have a great day with this one


If this is not satire, then facebooks influence on society is already worse than i thought...


Seems like something from darknet.


This is modern art, highlighting the absurd difficulty of getting in touch with a human that can fix your issues at big tech.


Not sure whether to laugh or cry.


Yeah I don’t know about this. Looks like you’re opening yourself up for a TON of liability with some very powerful businesses.

But not only that, you’re likely endangering the jobs of the people who take up your offers.

Seems icky. I am all about generating side-income streams by connecting people with needs to those who can fulfill them. But this is not it. I would recommend you take whatever you’ve built and apply it to a different problem.

What about monetizing Reddit AMAs? Things like that are a lot more useful and apply to a much wider range of people.


Isn’t this just Twitter Blue?


There's an old joke(?) where a guy yells to his neighbor, "Sam! My house is on fire! Quick, who do you know at the fire department?"


This seems too apply to healthcare and legal matters in most of the US as well.


Lmao, this is a fantastic idea. Extremely needed.


Thanks!


And I suppose internal employees can also block accounts for no reason. I smell a market opportunity for a service that blocks accounts of people who are likely to be able and willing to pay $500 to get their accounts unblocked.

...

(I shouldn't have to mention this, but please don't build the torment nexus.)


Is this legal ?


No escrow?


I don't know why we've as a society have decided these companies that work this way will be the way we organise our lives.


You've seen Silicon Valley disrupt money laundering to great success, so get excited for Silicon Valley to disrupt bribery!


No twitter?

I have a very old account with a 4 letter username. I used it sparingly for years. I had made my profile pic the same as Trump and wrote proud cuckold & 45th president of the US during the election as a joke. The background was Trump golfing in unflattering photos. I lost access to the email address I created the account (I still have the email address name, the account password, nothing else has changed) because the recovery email was from college.

They may have sent me a warning to that address, but I have never seen it. My account was permanently suspended. I wish I could just go in and delete the existing content / make a normal profile page / fix whatever is offensive.

Elon had said there would be 1 time amnesty for all suspended accounts, but it never happened. I appealed at least 5 times over the years, but it was always upheld. I would pay for that account back.


I love the pearl clutching on hacker news.


> for the benefit of that other person

What if I route the payment through a third party like my lawyer Mr. Cohen


Then both you and your lawyer go to jail.

When you accept money from someone, it doesn't matter who physically hands you the money, it matters who caused the money to be given to you.


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435890 and marked it offtopic.


I laughed, but I felt the need to downvote. By the rules, this is off topic, but personally, I'm exhausted by politics being injected into every other topic of conversation. Even if you and I agree politically, I think we can reduce hyper partisanship by not being political in discussions outside of politics. It's the reason this joke exists:

How can you tell whether someone is a vegan or into CrossFit? Because they will tell you about it.


I agree there should be some spaces free of politics. Will avoid.

(The original point was -- if the law is strictly worded such that it is a crime only if there is demonstrable benefit for the person who is paying then the "loophole" exists where the person getting the benefit and the person making the payment can be separated. I could have said the same thing without using the most recent known example of a similar attempt.)

But also crime and fraud are what they are -- whether committed by politicians or business people or those in other professions.

If we are talking about something questionable done by say SBF or Elon Musk and they also have some political connections or leaning -- that might not in itself make the discussion political. Yes there are subtle ways those discussions can carry undertones and phrased to score imaginary points. In that sense avoiding references where possible is advisable - probably akin to 'defensive driving'.


Please add…

Emergency Room staff willing to get you looked at faster because you think you are “really sick”

Building inspectors willing to sign off on your home house wiring because you’ve “done it for years and it’s fine”

Burning Man ticketing because you swear your internet was fine but died at noon on the sale day.

Dang because your downvoted comment was just misunderstood and deserves more upvotes.

/s


Despite the sarcasm tag, I’d argue my first two examples are not really that different than the service advertised.

This service places no responsibility on the requester to prove they have a real case. And in some cases (like the second) there is potentially true and measurable harm if in fact the petition should in fact be unequivocally banned or blocked from a service.


[flagged]


It's not "moralfagging", it's just so idiotic to do this while being an employee. It is in fact so insanely stupid that one should get fired for the ineptitude alone.

I am glad this service exists and exposes some of the toughest cases holed up in the corpo employment space.


100% agree. Would never take money for something like this feels irresponsible. But it is a reaction to a very real problem that everyday people have all the time, and the comments all being "omg im sooo angry u deserve to be fired" instead of something useful is sad


So much what?


We think your tone deafness is so outrageous it’s almost comical.


My reddit accounts get banned instantly. Absolutely sure it's a real person too. There's a reason why and given the emails they still send I don't ever want to appeal. It's like a waste of my time anyway.

The only problem being I refuse to work. Was hyping to post sexy pictures of myself to maybe get a girlfriend but that didn't happen.




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