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I've always wondered about this. What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays wh

I've always wondered about this. What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. Would you be able to make a new account? If not, that seems like a pretty big deal. Same concern with your email, or any of the other big services that we usually depend on. If I just suddenly lost my gmail, I would probably lose access to external accounts and other important data, which could be crippling.

bsder 2y ago
> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. Would you be able to make a new account? If not, that seems like a pretty big deal. You are screwed, and it is a big deal. However, until some ambulance chaser manages to corral the affected people into a class action lawsuit and win, there will be no change. > Same concern with your email This one is straightforward--have your own domain. Download everything such that you can change provider if they stomp you.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off? What if AWS or some cloud provider kills your self-hosted VPS? What if your ISP or mobile phone provider does it? So many fragile layers to our indispensable digital lives; we all walk on eggshells. I'm paranoid about backups and redundancy, but I'd be devastated by a single lockout.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off? Then you're fucked. What do you want me to say? That having been said, domain registrars seem to be FAR less likely to do an automated AI rugpull than hosted services from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
    - gertop 2y ago
      If you use your country's ccTLD you also have recourses against your registrar (if you live in a nice enough country and assuming you just broke some ToS and not committed a crime).
      - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
        Some Britains lost their .eu domain because they no longer fulfilled the requirements.
        baq 2y ago
        That’s… not completely unexpected, right?
        lazide 2y ago
        Everyone has wants, nobody likes consequences.
  - elashri 2y ago
    > What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off Compared with your chances with getting back google account (unless you know someone inside and still not guarantee it will work) you have many actions that you can take. Talk to your registrar support and try to work things out and even ask for transfer. If they don't respond or don't help you then you can complain with ICAAN and even take them to court.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    What's a VPS, and if it's self-hosted, where does the reliance on cloud providers comes in ?? ISPs (and maybe cellular providers ?) cannot cut you off without reason or advance notice, or they will the ones facing legal consequences...
rlayton2 2y ago
This happens regularly (perhaps not frequently) to people with their Gmail account. Google's AI says no, and there are very few people reporting successfully navigating the system to get their account back. This is one of the anti-google arguments, the other main one being they kill big projects all the time. You are right though, it can be crippling, and this thinking part of your personal (and business) risk profile. Ideally your email is at least tied to a domain name you separately own. That way, if your Google/MSFT/Apple/whatever account gets blocked, you can switch over the email to another provider and still get access. * edit to add: I don't know if this is more a Google thing than other companies, I was just heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and have researched these issues specifically with Google, leading to me ensuring I'm not as reliant on them as I used to be. I figure now I have about a full days worth of hassle if all my google stuff gets blocked, but otherwise I'm recoverable.
- r3trohack3r 2y ago
  I lost access to a Google account almost a decade ago; trying to get it back was one massive Kafka trap. Every few years I go back and try navigating the Kafka trap again hoping against hope for better results. But I’m still locked out. It’s particularly frustrating because IMAP is setup for it into another google account, so I can still send and receive email from the address but I’m fully locked out of the service. Some precious files were in that account from childhood.
  - zero-sharp 2y ago
    How did you lose the account? Was there a reason from Google?
    - hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
      I once had a functional bug where a MFA recovery email would receive the token, but the system would flag any further steps as ‘suspicious activity’. I also had an active gmail session via thunderbird, so I could easily have proven my claims legitimacy if required. Alas, there is no concept of support at google.
richbell 2y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... You're typically screwed and have no recourse.
taspeotis 2y ago
Post on the big tech company's official help channel - Hacker News?
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  I feel like posting on public forums only works if you have a big enough name. I want to be wrong about that.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    HN will very happily brigade for little guys, too. Every few months there's a new "Stripe closed our account" thread that picks up a lot of steam. Every once in a while it gets Stripe's attention and they fix it. Most of the time the torches burn for a few hours until someone researches the author and figures out they were building a gambling platform or something else explicitly against Stripe's ToS and the thread quietly dies out as people realize OP was just exploiting HN's visceral reactions.
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      That's not HN helping. That's because some Stripe employees actively browse HN, especially those threads pertaining to their company, looking to help. Though some Googlers browse HN, I've never seen where they could actually help someone here - the company is too large and dispersed. Those Googlers are here for leasure, not business.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        I agree it's not HN helping—I think those threads are one of the most toxic parts of this forum. As I said, most of the time HN gets out the pitchforks in support of someone who knows full well why they were banned.
klabb3 2y ago
My linkedin account got taken over a couple months ago. The attacker changed the phone number and immediately added 2FA, but they didn’t control my email. During account recovery LinkedIn suspended the account and asks for ID verification, through a 3p vendor who do government id verification. That passed and LinkedIn said I could login and reset, but it still stayed suspended and asked for id again. My guess is they drowned in complexity in their own recovery flow and I hit an edge case or something.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
stackghost 2y ago
>What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? If you have a friend who is an employee of the BigCo you can sometimes get results. Otherwise your choices are: get frontpage of HN, or cope.
bschmidt1 2y ago
> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work I agree with your larger point esp. Gmail - would be quite crippling - but I haven't had LinkedIn for years now, and it hasn't negatively impacted my job or searches. If anything, it helped me be more proactive when I was looking instead of feeling like I was praying to the abyss. There was a second in ~2020 where LinkedIn was starting to feel like finding work in the Myspace days - people were expressing themselves in more personal ways on their profiles (I guess because of the lockdown) and remote work was just kicking off. It had this glow that reminded me a lot of the early 2000s work scene online. Soon enough, as LI caught onto the trend those quirky profiles and posts were replaced with branded influencers and "viral posts". The platform quickly became as influencer-focused as Instagram or Twitter, which feels inappropriate for a job site. But it's not a job site they say, it's a career platform... or professional network... or something (of which a huge aspect is uploading your resume and applying to jobs). Anyway, the way the LinkedIn influencer sphere covered layoffs was like an E! television show - they loved it. Turns out LinkedIn is not an "essential social media" shall we say. It's not the career accessory that my GitHub and a Macbook are, it could have been, but they chose their path.
jvolkman 2y ago
My Instagram account was banned. I was never an active user, and I'm not sure I actually had a single post, so I have no idea why they found it necessary to disable my account. I tried the ID verification process but got nowhere. I had no problem creating a new account. All of the accounts are linked together with my Facebook account, so it's not like they weren't aware. I didn't care until Threads came along, and now my preferred handle is unavailable.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  [flagged]
coffeefirst 2y ago
Yep, it would be a huge mess. This is what lead me to switch to Fastmail. If it's _essential_, it's probably worth paying for to ensure you have real support. It just so happens that Fastmail is also puts out an excellent product.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Fastmail is excellent, but for business purpose… they lack Google Docs, Meet, Drive, Chrome (so you have to create a Google account anyway if you want to save your Chrome bookmarks) and being the major SSO provider on the market.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    I use Fastmail and Firefox sync and it works fine... Mostly because email has nothing to do with bookmarks except for Google trying to force it to.
  - stavros 2y ago
    So? Use Google for those, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
  - MandieD 2y ago
    Separation of concerns is a positive, in my book - I don't want my personal email to be mixed up in my file storage and document creation. I guess I'm old school like that.
treyd 2y ago
> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. This is only true if people repeat it and believe it to be true.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  Ok. So if you’re locked out of linkedin, now all you need to do is change the hundreds of thousands of other LinkedIn users to change their mindset instead of pleading with LinkedIn themselves to restore your access.
- romwell 2y ago
  >This is only true if people repeat it and believe it to be true. Which they do. Particularly, employers.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Well, you can think about it like a filter for bad jobs : as a hacker, why would you want to work for an employer that uses a Microsoft platform ?
    - romwell 2y ago
      >bad jobs >Microsoft platform Are you 13, and living in the year 1999? >as a hacker, why would you want to work for an employer that uses a Microsoft platform ? Because I want to work in organizations like NASA. Out in the real world, people care about what gets things done more than what the FOSS community thinks about that choice. And recruiters will use whatever platform that will allow them to find the right people. Your definition of "bad jobs" excludes any job that matters (or pays).
bbor 2y ago
It's shockingly frustrating and disheartening. I recently (like, yesterday) got permanently banned from Reddit for "report abuse", for some random semi-nonsense comment I reported a month ago on a meme subreddit. Regardless of how justified that is or isn't -- I only have one side of the story to share of course, and I think I just got caught in some labor-saving measures for their underpaid+overworked admin staff -- it's a great reminder of these corporations' power over us. A lifetime ban from a forum is certainly not as practically bad as the nightmare scenario of losing GMail, but still not great. I used Reddit to discuss technology, philosophy, and politics, and was quite active over the last year especially, using the platform's various science subs to share+refine the ideas I'm developing for my upcoming book with experts. Obviously there's a professional element there, but it was also a big outlet for me, keeping me motivated to share my work when I was feeling like scrapping it all due to anxiety and/or pessimism. Getting 50 upvotes on your detailed critique of some tenured professor's work feels better than you might imagine! I even had 45 "followers", though I never quite learned what that feature was or why it existed -- still, it was a nice ego boost at time when I needed that desperately. Now that I'm banned for life, I'm basically just planning on giving up that part of my personality for now. Perhaps publishing my book will earn me some friends/critics willing to discuss such things with me, or perhaps I can make some when I start a PhD someday, but until then, Reddit's the only show in town; I've realized that Reddit is to scientific discussion what LinkedIn is to professional networking. Like LinkedIn there are alternatives, but also like LinkedIn, the alternatives lack network effects and features. Lemmy is absurdly small+monolithic by comparison (/r/philosophy alone is 395x bigger than the entire 'Lemmyverse' put together, and much more diverse), HackerNews is highly focused and intentionally underdeveloped ("You're posting too fast!" + no markdown or communities), Twitter is somehow a Nazi thing now, and LessWrong is... well, it's its own beast. I could try Bluesky or Threads, but A) I've been a forum diehard since finding giantitp.com in middle school, and B) that feels a little like asking to be hurt again, lol. Would love any recommendations from passerby, though! ...sorry, had to get that off my chest, I guess. 12+ years of comments disappearing due to a random incident was more of an emotional blow than I expected, to be perfectly honest. TL;DR: Never, ever report any comments on Reddit. Ever. It's an under-appreciated risk.
- baq 2y ago
CalRobert 2y ago
You get excluded from society I think. It's pretty bad. I filled out a job application the other day (for Bunq) and they said "gmail preferred". So much for using my own domain! I applied for an accelerator and they refused to let you proceed without using a Google account. I was banned from selling on Amazon 14 years ago because someone who had lived in my apartment before me was shady. I'm still banned and they give no recourse.
amatecha 2y ago
Usually you're just straight-up screwed unless you know someone who works at the respective company (or know someone who knows someone). Even worse, some Terms of Service forbid you from ever signing up again if you're banned, meaning you're perpetually at risk of another ban if you sign up to the service again.
vishnugupta 2y ago
> If I just suddenly lost my gmail, I would probably lose access to external accounts and other important data, which could be crippling. Exactly, the downside is too high. Which is why I migrated to my own domain + Fastmail.
Haskell4life 2y ago
[dead]
Beretta_Vexee 2y ago
This happens all the time, usually the service provider blocks the account, denies any error and refuses to reopen it, citing its terms of use (which provide for unmotivated account closure). The idea is that losing a user costs infinitely less than legal fees, so when in doubt they pull the plug. I had direct confirmation from a gafam employee There are many stories of paediatricians, healthcare professionals or parents wrongfully accused of paedophilia. They never got their accounts back. I advised an association to buy a domain name and a paid email service and not to rely on Gmail. They didn't listen to me, and two years later Google cut off the account for sending spam or some other similar reason. They lost all contact emails with their suppliers, their accounting, invoices, etc. ... Don't expect anything from the customer service of a free service. You are the product, not the customer. They will throw you out like rotten fruit at the slightest problem.
chmod775 2y ago
> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? I think most people would be... just fine? Personally I'm from a culture that is very distrusting of those big platforms anyways, so people are even less likely to rely on them. If my mom lost access to her google account she would be fine, my dad wouldn't notice (he has been using his own e-mail domain forever), neither would my brother (since he makes a new google account with every phone anyways, having forgotten his previous password), and I wouldn't be bothered much either. I've also been doing fine professionally for 15 years and don't even have a LinkedIn account. It's a similar picture for everyone around me. Some Facebook account or whatever may have seemed important when we were 16, but by and large people grow out of that vain phase, or even grow out of using the likes of Facebook at all. Nowadays whatever can deliver a message will do. There's a dozen ways to each anyone. If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better.
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  >If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better. uhhuh. While it's a good idea to have backup plans and to exercise independence, people usually aren't accustomed to losing substantial parts of their livelihood for no reason and having no recourse. There's no reason to form a backup plan for a scenario that shouldn't occur. We depend on services all the time whose providers we can't control. That's modern life. What would a backup plan look like here for the average person? Do you think your average tech savvy person has taken those steps? The intention with this post isn't to defend unpreparedness. But there is a point to be made that cutting somebody off, through some technical loophole, shouldn't be a thing. And companies know that. Every so often they get called out in public by somebody with a lot of traction and they correct the problem. So it's only a problem if it gains enough visibility. That's the system.
  - 2y ago
tybulewicz 2y ago
My Amazon account was recently limited to digital goods. Supposedly it was caused by too many returns. I've checked and I have 2 orders returned during 15 years of purchases. There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.
dgellow 2y ago
> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. It is kind of expected to have a profile you can link companies to, but I didn’t know people were actually active and engaging in discussions on the platform. I only sign in every few years to update something, but are you all actively exchanging with others on LinkedIn as a way to find jobs? I thought it was accepted since >10 years the whole platform is corporate noise.
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  It is corporate noise. But I think it's a great way to find, and talk to, people with similar professional backgrounds. Or to stay in touch with people that you've worked with.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
We lost access to one of our phones numbers recently - moving it from Three (UK) to Smarty (a trading name of Three). No access for 3 weeks over which time I spent hours-and-hours contacting them. So many things tied to our phone number, including banking authorisation (work, charities, and home), online account auth (2fa), contact from school, contact with family, ... it was an absolute nightmare. The single worst customer support experience of my life AFAIR. In the UK there are two Ombudsman for such services but one says they won't help until 8 weeks after you report a problem to the company involved (and the other somehow says they won't help at all). It's really given me resolve to, instead of simplifying and signing the family up to the same services, distributing suppliers to avoid us all being stuck without service at the same time.

bsder 2y ago

> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. Would you be able to make a new account? If not, that seems like a pretty big deal. You are screwed, and it is a big deal. However, until some ambulance chaser manages to corral the affected people into a class action lawsuit and win, there will be no change. > Same concern with your email This one is straightforward--have your own domain. Download everything such that you can change provider if they stomp you.

AStonesThrow 2y ago
What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off? What if AWS or some cloud provider kills your self-hosted VPS? What if your ISP or mobile phone provider does it? So many fragile layers to our indispensable digital lives; we all walk on eggshells. I'm paranoid about backups and redundancy, but I'd be devastated by a single lockout.
- bsder 2y ago
  > What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off? Then you're fucked. What do you want me to say? That having been said, domain registrars seem to be FAR less likely to do an automated AI rugpull than hosted services from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
  - gertop 2y ago
    If you use your country's ccTLD you also have recourses against your registrar (if you live in a nice enough country and assuming you just broke some ToS and not committed a crime).
    - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
      Some Britains lost their .eu domain because they no longer fulfilled the requirements.
      - baq 2y ago
        That’s… not completely unexpected, right?
        lazide 2y ago
        Everyone has wants, nobody likes consequences.
- elashri 2y ago
  > What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off Compared with your chances with getting back google account (unless you know someone inside and still not guarantee it will work) you have many actions that you can take. Talk to your registrar support and try to work things out and even ask for transfer. If they don't respond or don't help you then you can complain with ICAAN and even take them to court.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  What's a VPS, and if it's self-hosted, where does the reliance on cloud providers comes in ?? ISPs (and maybe cellular providers ?) cannot cut you off without reason or advance notice, or they will the ones facing legal consequences...

rlayton2 2y ago

This happens regularly (perhaps not frequently) to people with their Gmail account. Google's AI says no, and there are very few people reporting successfully navigating the system to get their account back. This is one of the anti-google arguments, the other main one being they kill big projects all the time. You are right though, it can be crippling, and this thinking part of your personal (and business) risk profile. Ideally your email is at least tied to a domain name you separately own. That way, if your Google/MSFT/Apple/whatever account gets blocked, you can switch over the email to another provider and still get access. * edit to add: I don't know if this is more a Google thing than other companies, I was just heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and have researched these issues specifically with Google, leading to me ensuring I'm not as reliant on them as I used to be. I figure now I have about a full days worth of hassle if all my google stuff gets blocked, but otherwise I'm recoverable.

r3trohack3r 2y ago
I lost access to a Google account almost a decade ago; trying to get it back was one massive Kafka trap. Every few years I go back and try navigating the Kafka trap again hoping against hope for better results. But I’m still locked out. It’s particularly frustrating because IMAP is setup for it into another google account, so I can still send and receive email from the address but I’m fully locked out of the service. Some precious files were in that account from childhood.
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  How did you lose the account? Was there a reason from Google?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
    I once had a functional bug where a MFA recovery email would receive the token, but the system would flag any further steps as ‘suspicious activity’. I also had an active gmail session via thunderbird, so I could easily have proven my claims legitimacy if required. Alas, there is no concept of support at google.

richbell 2y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... You're typically screwed and have no recourse.

taspeotis 2y ago

Post on the big tech company's official help channel - Hacker News?

zero-sharp 2y ago
I feel like posting on public forums only works if you have a big enough name. I want to be wrong about that.
- lolinder 2y ago
  HN will very happily brigade for little guys, too. Every few months there's a new "Stripe closed our account" thread that picks up a lot of steam. Every once in a while it gets Stripe's attention and they fix it. Most of the time the torches burn for a few hours until someone researches the author and figures out they were building a gambling platform or something else explicitly against Stripe's ToS and the thread quietly dies out as people realize OP was just exploiting HN's visceral reactions.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    That's not HN helping. That's because some Stripe employees actively browse HN, especially those threads pertaining to their company, looking to help. Though some Googlers browse HN, I've never seen where they could actually help someone here - the company is too large and dispersed. Those Googlers are here for leasure, not business.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I agree it's not HN helping—I think those threads are one of the most toxic parts of this forum. As I said, most of the time HN gets out the pitchforks in support of someone who knows full well why they were banned.

klabb3 2y ago

My linkedin account got taken over a couple months ago. The attacker changed the phone number and immediately added 2FA, but they didn’t control my email. During account recovery LinkedIn suspended the account and asks for ID verification, through a 3p vendor who do government id verification. That passed and LinkedIn said I could login and reset, but it still stayed suspended and asked for id again. My guess is they drowned in complexity in their own recovery flow and I hit an edge case or something.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

stackghost 2y ago

>What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? If you have a friend who is an employee of the BigCo you can sometimes get results. Otherwise your choices are: get frontpage of HN, or cope.

bschmidt1 2y ago

> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work I agree with your larger point esp. Gmail - would be quite crippling - but I haven't had LinkedIn for years now, and it hasn't negatively impacted my job or searches. If anything, it helped me be more proactive when I was looking instead of feeling like I was praying to the abyss. There was a second in ~2020 where LinkedIn was starting to feel like finding work in the Myspace days - people were expressing themselves in more personal ways on their profiles (I guess because of the lockdown) and remote work was just kicking off. It had this glow that reminded me a lot of the early 2000s work scene online. Soon enough, as LI caught onto the trend those quirky profiles and posts were replaced with branded influencers and "viral posts". The platform quickly became as influencer-focused as Instagram or Twitter, which feels inappropriate for a job site. But it's not a job site they say, it's a career platform... or professional network... or something (of which a huge aspect is uploading your resume and applying to jobs). Anyway, the way the LinkedIn influencer sphere covered layoffs was like an E! television show - they loved it. Turns out LinkedIn is not an "essential social media" shall we say. It's not the career accessory that my GitHub and a Macbook are, it could have been, but they chose their path.

jvolkman 2y ago

My Instagram account was banned. I was never an active user, and I'm not sure I actually had a single post, so I have no idea why they found it necessary to disable my account. I tried the ID verification process but got nowhere. I had no problem creating a new account. All of the accounts are linked together with my Facebook account, so it's not like they weren't aware. I didn't care until Threads came along, and now my preferred handle is unavailable.

yieldcrv 2y ago
[flagged]

coffeefirst 2y ago

Yep, it would be a huge mess. This is what lead me to switch to Fastmail. If it's _essential_, it's probably worth paying for to ensure you have real support. It just so happens that Fastmail is also puts out an excellent product.

eastbound 2y ago
Fastmail is excellent, but for business purpose… they lack Google Docs, Meet, Drive, Chrome (so you have to create a Google account anyway if you want to save your Chrome bookmarks) and being the major SSO provider on the market.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  I use Fastmail and Firefox sync and it works fine... Mostly because email has nothing to do with bookmarks except for Google trying to force it to.
- stavros 2y ago
  So? Use Google for those, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
- MandieD 2y ago
  Separation of concerns is a positive, in my book - I don't want my personal email to be mixed up in my file storage and document creation. I guess I'm old school like that.

treyd 2y ago

> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. This is only true if people repeat it and believe it to be true.

hnlmorg 2y ago
Ok. So if you’re locked out of linkedin, now all you need to do is change the hundreds of thousands of other LinkedIn users to change their mindset instead of pleading with LinkedIn themselves to restore your access.
romwell 2y ago
>This is only true if people repeat it and believe it to be true. Which they do. Particularly, employers.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Well, you can think about it like a filter for bad jobs : as a hacker, why would you want to work for an employer that uses a Microsoft platform ?
  - romwell 2y ago
    >bad jobs >Microsoft platform Are you 13, and living in the year 1999? >as a hacker, why would you want to work for an employer that uses a Microsoft platform ? Because I want to work in organizations like NASA. Out in the real world, people care about what gets things done more than what the FOSS community thinks about that choice. And recruiters will use whatever platform that will allow them to find the right people. Your definition of "bad jobs" excludes any job that matters (or pays).

bbor 2y ago

It's shockingly frustrating and disheartening. I recently (like, yesterday) got permanently banned from Reddit for "report abuse", for some random semi-nonsense comment I reported a month ago on a meme subreddit. Regardless of how justified that is or isn't -- I only have one side of the story to share of course, and I think I just got caught in some labor-saving measures for their underpaid+overworked admin staff -- it's a great reminder of these corporations' power over us. A lifetime ban from a forum is certainly not as practically bad as the nightmare scenario of losing GMail, but still not great. I used Reddit to discuss technology, philosophy, and politics, and was quite active over the last year especially, using the platform's various science subs to share+refine the ideas I'm developing for my upcoming book with experts. Obviously there's a professional element there, but it was also a big outlet for me, keeping me motivated to share my work when I was feeling like scrapping it all due to anxiety and/or pessimism. Getting 50 upvotes on your detailed critique of some tenured professor's work feels better than you might imagine! I even had 45 "followers", though I never quite learned what that feature was or why it existed -- still, it was a nice ego boost at time when I needed that desperately. Now that I'm banned for life, I'm basically just planning on giving up that part of my personality for now. Perhaps publishing my book will earn me some friends/critics willing to discuss such things with me, or perhaps I can make some when I start a PhD someday, but until then, Reddit's the only show in town; I've realized that Reddit is to scientific discussion what LinkedIn is to professional networking. Like LinkedIn there are alternatives, but also like LinkedIn, the alternatives lack network effects and features. Lemmy is absurdly small+monolithic by comparison (/r/philosophy alone is 395x bigger than the entire 'Lemmyverse' put together, and much more diverse), HackerNews is highly focused and intentionally underdeveloped ("You're posting too fast!" + no markdown or communities), Twitter is somehow a Nazi thing now, and LessWrong is... well, it's its own beast. I could try Bluesky or Threads, but A) I've been a forum diehard since finding giantitp.com in middle school, and B) that feels a little like asking to be hurt again, lol. Would love any recommendations from passerby, though! ...sorry, had to get that off my chest, I guess. 12+ years of comments disappearing due to a random incident was more of an emotional blow than I expected, to be perfectly honest. TL;DR: Never, ever report any comments on Reddit. Ever. It's an under-appreciated risk.

baq 2y ago

CalRobert 2y ago

You get excluded from society I think. It's pretty bad. I filled out a job application the other day (for Bunq) and they said "gmail preferred". So much for using my own domain! I applied for an accelerator and they refused to let you proceed without using a Google account. I was banned from selling on Amazon 14 years ago because someone who had lived in my apartment before me was shady. I'm still banned and they give no recourse.

amatecha 2y ago

Usually you're just straight-up screwed unless you know someone who works at the respective company (or know someone who knows someone). Even worse, some Terms of Service forbid you from ever signing up again if you're banned, meaning you're perpetually at risk of another ban if you sign up to the service again.

vishnugupta 2y ago

> If I just suddenly lost my gmail, I would probably lose access to external accounts and other important data, which could be crippling. Exactly, the downside is too high. Which is why I migrated to my own domain + Fastmail.

Haskell4life 2y ago

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Beretta_Vexee 2y ago

This happens all the time, usually the service provider blocks the account, denies any error and refuses to reopen it, citing its terms of use (which provide for unmotivated account closure). The idea is that losing a user costs infinitely less than legal fees, so when in doubt they pull the plug. I had direct confirmation from a gafam employee There are many stories of paediatricians, healthcare professionals or parents wrongfully accused of paedophilia. They never got their accounts back. I advised an association to buy a domain name and a paid email service and not to rely on Gmail. They didn't listen to me, and two years later Google cut off the account for sending spam or some other similar reason. They lost all contact emails with their suppliers, their accounting, invoices, etc. ... Don't expect anything from the customer service of a free service. You are the product, not the customer. They will throw you out like rotten fruit at the slightest problem.

chmod775 2y ago

> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? I think most people would be... just fine? Personally I'm from a culture that is very distrusting of those big platforms anyways, so people are even less likely to rely on them. If my mom lost access to her google account she would be fine, my dad wouldn't notice (he has been using his own e-mail domain forever), neither would my brother (since he makes a new google account with every phone anyways, having forgotten his previous password), and I wouldn't be bothered much either. I've also been doing fine professionally for 15 years and don't even have a LinkedIn account. It's a similar picture for everyone around me. Some Facebook account or whatever may have seemed important when we were 16, but by and large people grow out of that vain phase, or even grow out of using the likes of Facebook at all. Nowadays whatever can deliver a message will do. There's a dozen ways to each anyone. If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better.

zero-sharp 2y ago
>If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better. uhhuh. While it's a good idea to have backup plans and to exercise independence, people usually aren't accustomed to losing substantial parts of their livelihood for no reason and having no recourse. There's no reason to form a backup plan for a scenario that shouldn't occur. We depend on services all the time whose providers we can't control. That's modern life. What would a backup plan look like here for the average person? Do you think your average tech savvy person has taken those steps? The intention with this post isn't to defend unpreparedness. But there is a point to be made that cutting somebody off, through some technical loophole, shouldn't be a thing. And companies know that. Every so often they get called out in public by somebody with a lot of traction and they correct the problem. So it's only a problem if it gains enough visibility. That's the system.
- 2y ago

tybulewicz 2y ago

My Amazon account was recently limited to digital goods. Supposedly it was caused by too many returns. I've checked and I have 2 orders returned during 15 years of purchases. There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.

dgellow 2y ago

> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. It is kind of expected to have a profile you can link companies to, but I didn’t know people were actually active and engaging in discussions on the platform. I only sign in every few years to update something, but are you all actively exchanging with others on LinkedIn as a way to find jobs? I thought it was accepted since >10 years the whole platform is corporate noise.

zero-sharp 2y ago
It is corporate noise. But I think it's a great way to find, and talk to, people with similar professional backgrounds. Or to stay in touch with people that you've worked with.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago

We lost access to one of our phones numbers recently - moving it from Three (UK) to Smarty (a trading name of Three). No access for 3 weeks over which time I spent hours-and-hours contacting them. So many things tied to our phone number, including banking authorisation (work, charities, and home), online account auth (2fa), contact from school, contact with family, ... it was an absolute nightmare. The single worst customer support experience of my life AFAIR. In the UK there are two Ombudsman for such services but one says they won't help until 8 weeks after you report a problem to the company involved (and the other somehow says they won't help at all). It's really given me resolve to, instead of simplifying and signing the family up to the same services, distributing suppliers to avoid us all being stuck without service at the same time.