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! |
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
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.
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.
Cheap!
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.
...
(I shouldn't have to mention this, but please don't build the torment nexus.)
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 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?
What if I route the payment through a third party like my lawyer Mr. Cohen
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.
How can you tell whether someone is a vegan or into CrossFit? Because they will tell you about it.
(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'.
Thanks!
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?
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.
I tried to submit a request, but it gave me an error about sendgrid credits. I guess the site is already a huge success.
In practice this would be premium plans that include some form of special treatment.
2. Payment fraud (which also would be a huge issue on this site if it was to ever take off).
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.
Nice work anyway. Maybe you could market it for bugs/issues rather than just account suspensions. It reminds me of https://xkcd.com/806/
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.
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.
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.
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.
this sentence doesn't make sense
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.
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.
I only remember because I am still trying to get into my Gmail account for which I have the username, password and recovery email.
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."
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.
What if the money was donated instead?
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
Since obviously FB/Alphabet/etc aren't going to allow negative ads targeting their own platform, you post them on a different platform.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
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?
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.
(Just a guess, I don't know the process at Meta.)
Building a platform to bribe your way through the opaque customer non-service system of these companies is either low corruption or high art.
On the other hand, I guess life does imitate art sometimes...
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.
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.
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.
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.
You might run this as a honeypot for corrupt, dumb employees. Make it more easily accessible than the outreaches from criminal enterprises.
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)?
You mean the two engineers on loan to the global investigations team at $techcompany?
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.
With the stock flying high, even the L5s who stayed during the 2022 doldrums are making that kind of money.
they just botched a bunch of the deletion/suspension processes, in a way that made them unrecoverable
This service throws all of that out the window.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure your motives were good, but I’d urge you to think this through.
Lawyers usually serve this role in the US.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"What's really your favorite band, then?"
"Beatles, I guess."
If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, no, not like that
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?
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.
Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.
Spin up a random account, get it banned, then ask an anonymous "employee" to get it unbanned.
If it is? Verification by result.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 service feels capitalistically egalitarian!
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.
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.
I don’t see how he can guarantee you’ll be anonymous for long.
Remember who the true hero was. He wasn't in it for long.
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".
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.
> 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:
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...
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".
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.
I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
Bonus points for sending similar emails to random @company.com addresses so receiving the email alone doesn’t suggest involvement.
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?
> gives an employee money or any thing of value
I.e. a practice universally frowned upon?
100 art points.
But yes, I have no clue what employee inside would agree to work on this for an extended period.
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.
"1A" describes rights of people, not businesses or organizations, and doesn't mention anything about money
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.
How do you know they are doing it on their company paid time?
Isn't modern big tech always saying that employees should shut up and focus on the numbers / delighting users?
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.
Of course they can, they just have to settle for single-digit $billion yearly profits instead of double or triple-digit ones. Unacceptable!
"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.
If not, why do you think this will be the first one?
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."
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!
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Not to mention it is like any crime - not like murders intentionally get caught either, but they still do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
People taking bribes to get people unbanned? People getting banned?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I mean does somebody grinding down asphalt to repave a road implicitly approve of some random government policy?
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"
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?
> 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 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.
stop using them.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.