[CPLX]

This is one of my least favorite innovations of Silicon Valley, the opaque, confusing, no stated reasons practice of banning users.

I totally understand why things developed the way they did. The internet is huge and full of bad actors, and a nascent service is in real existential danger of being overwhelmed and swamped by fraud. If you tell bad actors why you're banning them and spend valuable time communicating with them it can put you out of business early on.

But like in so many other arenas, the Valley mentality hasn't adopted to the fact that they are no longer underdog rebels besieged by barbarians on one side and big scary rich corporations on the other site.

The reality is now that these companies are the ruling class, and the users are the general population. And people rely on these services and base their lives on them. Arbitrary and capriciously depriving people of access to these platforms without any kind of due process rights isn't OK any more.

There's a reason we have consumer protection laws, why someone decided we needed things like the Montreal Convention and the FDCPA and CPSC and so on. It's axiomatic that we can't trust monopolistic corporations to do right by the little guy.

This Silicon Valley mentality is increasingly going to lead to pitchforks, torches, and regulation in the near future, it's an inevitability. Rightly so.

[meuk]

I am quite bitter about the state of affairs. If a company decides to screw you over, they pretty much can. Legally, there is not much you can do if you're not filthy rich. The most you can do is make a fuss about it on social media. If you attract a lot of people, the company will issue an apology and give you a stupid surprise.

I absolutely despise this very common pattern. In the end, the company gets free publicity for screwing you over, and the 100s or 1000s of people in the same situation won't be helped - just because they don't have a massive userbase on social media.

[crankylinuxuser]

The state of affairs, is that Silicon Valley along with companies that are willing to sell out to automation for everything - have become the new ruling class.

Thought experiment:

What happens if Amazon, right now, decided that you are not a good customer and deleted every one of your accounts and deleted all your AWS data? As of right now, you can't buy anything from them goods wise. And if you were using AWS as a webservice platform, now, you can't. No recourse. At all.

Your Google account was hacked, but google saw you as a spammer and hacker trying to penetrate Google's security systems. They blast all accounts away that have logged in with your IP address of the duration of the hack. You're now without a whole slew of services. Dead in the water, again. Who do you call? Nobody. But you can leave a badly worded post in Google forums - oh wait, you can't even do that.

[dragonwriter]

> The state of affairs, is that Silicon Valley along with companies that are willing to sell out to automation for everything - have become the new ruling class.

Capitalists being the ruling class in capitalism is not new (it's rather the effect that the system is named for), neither is capital being drawn to new technologies that improve the return on capital and reduce the relative power of labor.

[kuschku]

> What happens if Amazon, right now, decided that you are not a good customer and deleted every one of your accounts and deleted all your AWS data? As of right now, you can't buy anything from them goods wise. And if you were using AWS as a webservice platform, now, you can't. No recourse. At all.

People actually have sued against that in Germany, and a German court determined that Amazon has to allow you to recover all your data, and all digital products (e.g. Amazon Kindle books) you paid for.

[crankylinuxuser]

That's fine and good for citizens in Germany, and likely the EU at large.

In the USA, non-negotiable click-through agreements are legal. And we, the citizenry, can give up a good class more of rights then the EU allows. These rights would have protected their citizens, and in your instance have. They do not protect US citizens.

We have small claims, and the hope an instance of the company resides in the state. If not, they can effectively ignore small claims. Nothing to collect from.

[s73v3r_]

So yell at your congressional representation. Yell until you're blue in the face. Make others yell with you. And if that doesn't work, run for office yourself.

[ryandrake]

The solution is to not rely on (or minimize your reliance on) services that you can be arbitrarily banned from. If my Amazon account gets banned, I don’t care. I can buy things elsewhere and they are not gatekeeping anything I paid for. I don’t use Gmail or any other cloud mail provider. I don’t have DRM’ed content just waiting to be pulled out from under me. Really, the only failure point that would screw me is if my ISP decided to ban me.

[adventured]

You're manufacturing a modern complaint that actually has never not existed in industrial US history. There's nothing new about the Silicon Valley giants in that sense, they're just the latest corporations to have outsized economic power.

There is no scenario where you are not beholden to some corporate entity, and most likely you're beholden to dozens of them to keep you alive and keep your life functioning at all times. The food supply can be cut off by less than a dozen major corporations, and you will die. Less than a dozen major corporations can choke off the supply of fuel or electricity, and you will die. This is true, in one form or another, in every developed or semi-developed nation on earth. Maybe the government acts fast enough to counter that action by said corporate giants, maybe not. It's a system built on the profit motive being the predictable pursuit by said corporations, meaning they overwhelmingly will not behave that way; combined with the threat of military or domestic armed reaction by their respective government (namely that any tech giant can trivially be destroyed any day of the week by the US Government; Zuckerberg could be in chains in three hours if the US Military decides to do it, there are consequences that prevent that as it is).

What happens in ~1955-1975 if AT&T, at their peak of monopoly, decided to blacklist you from their telephone service?

What happens in 1910 if Standard Oil decides to cut off your shop's access to its oil-related products?

What happens if you're in a small town, with Walmart as the primary goods seller, and Walmart blacklists you? Maybe you can drive somewhere far out of your way, if you can afford to, and replace them as an option. At a minimum it severely screws with your life. There's nothing unique about Amazon there, you can order from other online stores, and it might be a huge inconvenience.

What people think is new with Google et al., is not new.

[eesmith]

"What happens in ~1955-1975 if AT&T, at their peak of monopoly, decided to blacklist you from their telephone service?"

It rather depends on the reason for the decision to put you on the blacklist.

In general, AT&T was allowed its monopoly power under government regulation. A goal of the Communications Act of 1934 was to provide universal telephone service. Section 254(b) lists the Universal Principles, including (4), "All providers of telecommunications services should make an equitable and nondiscriminatory contribution to the preservation and advancement of universal service."

If your service was cut off because you liked to pump line voltage through the phone system, then they could do that because it's a nondiscriminatory meant to protect the phone service.

If they cut you off because you wrote a letter to the editor complaining about their services, then that's discriminatory, and you could take your complaint to the local public utilities commission or FCC ... or perhaps sue as well; I don't know the regulatory history.

In any case, there was certainly government oversight of what AT&T could do, in terms of putting someone on a blacklist.

[ucaetano]

Don't mix your AWS account with your personal shopping account.

Don't rely on free services for mission-critical aspects of your life. And don't expect free services to provide support.

And no, "it isn't free, you pay with your data" doesn't make it a paid service, it is still free.

[lsc]

So, if you are a business, I think relying solely on AWS is a super bad idea. Amazon is aware of the lock in effect, and if your usage spikes and you don't have a good alternative ready to go? Amazon is setup so that you will pay through the nose. AWS is wonderfully cheap if you only need a little bit, but it is crushingly expensive at any kind of real scale.

Starting on amazon is great, as it really is cheap at small scale, and you can test your shit at large scale for short periods... but it gets expensive fast as you grow, so the more you can do to prepare to move, (or credibly threaten to do same) the better off you are.

[ucaetano]

Exactly, don't put all your eggs in the same basket, especially if you're mixing different types of eggs (personal vs. professional identities).

And don't put any valuable eggs in a free basket.

[toomim]

You can take them to small claims court, for about $50.

[saagarjha]

Unless you agree not to do that in the terms of service.

[toomim]

In order to enforce such a terms of service, the company would have to send a lawyer to court.

Most companies don't even show up to court, because the cost of paying a lawyer is more than you are suing them for in small claims court.

If they did show up to court, they would then have to argue that (a) their terms of service take precedence over the law -- in many juristictions, it is illegal to write a contract preventing someone from suing you for particular conditions.

And they would have to argue that (b) their terms of service are still valid, considering that they aren't honoring their contract in even paying the OP in the first place.

If OP took Upwork to small claims court, it is almost guaranteed that he would get the money owed to him by the clients who paid him that Upwork is currently holding onto illegally.

[swat535]

Terms of services are not laws.

People mistake them for absolute laws but they can be challenged and many of them are not even enforceable.

[s73v3r_]

Sadly, the US courts have held that many of these terms are binding.

[JadeNB]

> Unless you agree not to do that in the terms of service.

Are such agreements enforceable?

[pluma]

In the US? Probably.

[127]

How is that legal?

[RandomTisk]

That's exactly what jumped out at me too, it's pretty disturbing that they're closing someone's account and stealing or preventing them from getting their hard earned money without any real due process. There is a reason when the government hands you a fine or imprisons you they have to tell you exactly what you did wrong, doing anything but is extremely unethical.

[ghthor]

This seems reckless on Upworks part considering the lawyers I know are using upwork for a significant portion of they're income.

[tankenmate]

I don't think it is right to regard UpWork as a "nascent service". They have had plenty of time to make better policies if they felt it was necessary, but it's hard to assume other than it is not "worth it" to them. UpWork's antecedents Elance and oDesk have been around for 18 years and 15 years respectively. From outside observations it is not hard to come to the conclusion that they care little beyond "working the numbers", as long as their sales pipe is full they probably won't change.

As you suggest bringing this to your local trade body and making a formal complaint is probably the way to go. It will take a long time and a lot of complaints to get there though. In the mean time avoid them, both the buy and sell side.

[adventured]

I think it's very clear the parent was not referring to Upwork as a nascent service. They were speaking generally about the process that leads to a culture of ingrained behavior over time, which starts from that nascent service context.

You can derive that is very likely the case based on the intelligence and composure of the rest of their post. You can also derive it directly from the full paragraph text, which is not referring specifically to Upwork, rather it is referring to Silicon Valley broadly, and why "things" developed the way they did with how SV firms have tended to treat customers/users.

[crankylinuxuser]

It's not just "banning users". The core issue is deeper than that.

The core issue is that Silicon Valley sold a dream: "We can build business without people in its ranks. Instead, we can staff programmers and build glue-logic around our business cases, and automate everything. This saves all the money from hiring people."

The investors bought into that idea. Because if it did work, you can have companies that are 1/10'th the size of previous high industry companies, because all the work is automated. Look no further than all the current crop of companies using software in this fashion. Some AI system "learned" that your combined inputs related a fraction higher as fraud - banned. Or someone checked a box in the wrong location and you're locked out. Or your system is deleting user content at random, and there is no-one to call.

Who ends up being tech support for these new companies? The executives. But that's only for people smart enough to realize to send them messages, or otherwise garner their attention via Twitter, Reddit, or HN and happen to be in the right place at the right time. Even the aforementioned gamification needs to be done for even HN, to get the right post at the right time.

Where do we go from here? In truth, not many places. Non-software companies with real human service will get eaten out of house and home by companies willing to make deals with machines. The VC funding is in AI businesses, not traditional. But one can still choose to be customers at respectful businesses. But the internet makes that much harder, as going online also includes 'selling out' customer service. Some AI will then tell agents "you can't do that" even , if it is what's needed.

[Slansitartop]

> Where do we go from here? In truth, not many places. Non-software companies with real human service will get eaten out of house and home by companies willing to make deals with machines. The VC funding is in AI businesses, not traditional. But one can still choose to be customers at respectful businesses. But the internet makes that much harder, as going online also includes 'selling out' customer service. Some AI will then tell agents "you can't do that" even , if it is what's needed.

You're talking like the only solutions to this can come from the market, and if the market forces won't work that way then we're screwed and must give up.

The real solution to this is customer/employee friendly regulation. I'm thinking something like a rule requiring an easy, timely way to appeal to a human that's empowered to override the automation after any adverse ruling by it; backed up by the threat of fines and legal sanctions. In the current American federal political climate, that's a stretch, but there are other jurisdictions, at the state level and internationally, where something regulation like this might be feasible.

[x0x0]

GDPR provides something close to this, at least for high value decisions. Decisions taken by profiling and automated decision making must be reviewable, at least if they "[produce] legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her".

That said, I've worked for a b2c website. The internet is jam packed with scammers. I'd bet it's an order of magnitude worse on sites like upwork where real money changes hands. At least in our case, if we'd had these types of regulations, we would have terminated service to a list of countries that produced little revenue and high hassle.

[KittiHawk]

> Who ends up being tech support for these new companies? The executives. But that's only for people smart enough to realize to send them messages, or otherwise garner their attention via Twitter, Reddit, or HN and happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Obviously we just need to make this kind of behavior expensive enough that execs don't take 20 years to develop a reasonable support model. Hold them personally responsible for their companies, and don't let them hide behind their shitty algorithms.

[scardine]

It feels like there is an incentive to ban high reputation, high earning freelancers from the marketplace for the slightest excuse.

New users often charge bellow their market rate in order to build reputation on the platform. Then once you get your 5 stars and start making good money you get banned kafka style, lame explanation, no resource.

Looks like they want to keep it a race to the bottom more than anything.

[saint_fiasco]

If they take a percentage as commission, wouldn't it be good for them if their freelancers charged a lot of money?

[scardine]

I'm sure the do their math but if they make more with higher income freelancers the current state of affairs in the platform does not reflect this - personally I feel it is the contrary as there is more incentive to charge bellow market rate.

Perhaps Upwork makes more in volume if workers race bottom. Or they are really dumb. Lets hope some insider post anonymously and explain the contradiction.

[s73v3r_]

It's better for them if the money gets put in their escrow, and then they ban the user, confiscating the money.

[saint_fiasco]

But then they don't get money from that user ever again.

It only makes sense to do that if they suspect that is the last job their user will take. Otherwise it's better to keep the user happy and keep taking a percentage for all their future work.

[s73v3r_]

You're thinking way too long term.

[njarboe]

It is too bad that these companies can't charge some high rate for dealing with problems in person at an office. I would sure love to have the option to have no password reset available on my gmail account with the option of going to an office and paying $50 to reset it. Or $50 to figure out why my Google account got banned and the option to get it re-instated. I guess such a system is bad for PR, "Look, Google screws up and makes you pay to fix it.", but for me this would be a really nice system. I really don't like how I can reset my brokerage account password without meeting someone in person and verifying my identity.

[JasonFruit]

I think requiring payment when your customer is at their least pleased is probably not a good business move.

[njarboe]

For 5%(?) of people it might be and that 5% are the customers businesses want the most.

[readams]

Brazil came out in 1985 and basically involves identical bureaucratic obstacles. Catch 22 was published in 1961 and also describes similar unthinking callous bureaucracy.

It's not Silicon Valley you're railing against: it's blind unthinking bureaucracy. It's a problem that goes back much further than the days when "silicon valley" was all orchards.

[CPLX]

Brazil and Catch 22 both describe dealing with tortuous government bureaucracy. There's a long tradition of government being miserable in this regard but it's still a public institution that's accountable to its constituents. In fact often the bureaucracy is because of its public nature.

Comparing this to private Silicon Valley companies that are't accountable to anyone for their behavior towards individual users actually illustrates the problem neatly.

[paulpauper]

I disagree. not like Walmart can deny their employees their pay. The move to independent contractual work instead of salaried work means workers are at the mercy of not only a bureaucracy but simply not getting paid.

[vkou]

The problem in our society is that power is incredibly unevenly distributed.

Silicon valley looks at this problem, and says that it needs to be disrupted. It then disrupts it, by taking away power from organizations that have it, and giving it to itself. We then all pat ourselves on the back and order a rum and coke.

[Slansitartop]

I look forward to the day when the employment market has been thoroughly disrupted by startups that bans like this have severe economic consequences to those affected. Truly building a better for all of humanity. /s

[DannyBee]

"This is one of my least favorite innovations of Silicon Valley, the opaque, confusing, no stated reasons practice of banning users. " This isn't a silicon valley innovation, it was the modus operandi of insurance companies, disability roles etc for years.

(and i'm sure various industries before that)

[sschueller]

It's gone off the deep end.

I created a new twitter account and a few days lates it's banned. I haven't even had a chance to follow/tweet or do anything.

[brador]

We need regulation that any ban must come with a chance to appeal and a fixed end date no more than 3 years into the future.

Forgiveness is an important part of humanity that, at times, must be enforced.

[sillysaurus3]

Also HN. I no longer have the right to upvote anything. I'm not allowed to more than five comments every three hours. My ranking for my comments is now penalized in a unique way: unlikely to ever be the top comment regardless of upvotes, but my comments are no longer pinned to the bottom, like they used to be.

What does that have to do with this? Well...

But like in so many other arenas, the Valley mentality hasn't adopted to the fact that they are no longer underdog rebels besieged by barbarians on one side and big scary rich corporations on the other site.

The reality is now that these companies are the ruling class, and the users are the general population. And people rely on these services and base their lives on them.

That's exactly how this feels. It's everywhere in Silicon Valley. And when you try to talk to them and point out that maybe this is unfair, it's like they don't even grok it. "Fairness? Morals?"

It's about power. The power to control you and have you obey. You either have power or you don't. And unless you build something, you have no power at all.

Those are uncomfortable conclusions. It pretty much defines what you have to do in life, for years, if you want to be in a position where anyone will listen. But that was always true – the world just makes it more obvious now.

But... It's also exciting. We have the ability to acquire power. It's true that most of us won't acquire funding, which is what we really need to influence the world. But at no point in history has it been so easy (relatively speaking) for a side project to suddenly influence the world. If you were a farmer in the middle ages, you were boned. Ditto for most of the present world today.

Isn't it weird? SV suddenly became the ruling class; you're exactly right. And no one has really been talking about the implications yet.

[rgbrenner]

have you considered emailing hn and asking what's going on? They're usually pretty responsive.. and I've always thought of you as a reasonable contributor to this site.

[monksy]

Well theres that Church guy that shouldn't be named here. They're not always "fair" or responsible.

[Teichopsia]

Do you mean the guy that created the OS? I never understood why he gets downvoted if he lives with a particular situation. And why can't he be named?

[pavel_lishin]

> I never understood why he gets downvoted if he lives with a particular situation.

Most of his comments that I've seen are rarely on topic, and are followed up with an artifact of his mental illness, which is tragic, but typically has no bearing on the subject. So yeah, people downvote those comments that have no bearing on the discussion.

[sillysaurus3]

Hey, I'm sorry. My earlier reply to you was way out of left field.

I was so terrified to post any of this or to speak publicly about anything that it was very hard to read the replies. I was sort of skimming them holding my breath for the inevitable backlash. I happened to read your reply, and it happened to be nearly a verbatim description of me, completely by chance. And me replying about Terry was also by chance, since Terry was the first example that popped into my head of someone who has it way worse.

The truth is, I've been struggling with a few mental problems, and it's been very difficult. Partly because of how carefully you have to conceal them so as not to be labeled and shunned, or at least treated differently.

Somehow in the heat of the moment, it all made complete sense that my mental instability was so obvious that people were talking about it. And I was so stressed about the entire situation that I immediately started replying without thinking. That's more than a little stupid, on a few axes.

But um.. hi. I have a few problems. They're not so bad. And I try to remember to be thankful that at least it's not anywhere close to what Terry's going through. But they do get in the way of social interactions. This whole thread is arguably some evidence of it. Suffice to say, I empathize strongly with Terry and I wish that there were a way to include him in some activities.

When you're completely isolated by almost everyone you care about, it starts to get to you after awhile. I don't know what's up with me but I'm just going to take a break and focus on making the alt-HN good.

Sorry again. I tried to find your email but it's hard to locate. In hindsight my replies to you are incredibly embarrassing (more like mortifying, but whatever).

[Teichopsia]

I know, but it doesn't change the fact that it doesn't make any sense to me. It's publicly known that he has a mental illness. I would also like to believe it is generally known that solitude can, and generally will make a situation worse.

I see it as he is trying to reach out, but he is downvoted because why? What effects does a downvoted have on someone? I know I feel bad and I'm generally a person that says "eff it" to a lot of things. I would also like to believe people, especially here on HN, who are much smarter than myself, or so I would like to believe, have all read the same articles and comments I have over the years.

One doesn't need to engage if one does not want to, but where the hell is the humanity?

Sorry, the more I think about this the more upset I get.

[sillysaurus3]

It's true I inherited some problems. Rather than be ashamed or conceal those, I've learned it's a source of strength. When you classify those problems as "tragic," you downplay situations like TempleOS' author.

Did you know youtube removed all of his 850+ videos? That was actually tragic. Archive.org has copies of most of them but no one sees them anymore.

Also, did you notice? He singlehandedly built an OS. If I'm destined for a similar fate, I'll take a quiet life filled with skill.

Besides, it'll be entertaining. I have quite a show planned!

[monksy]

Not the temple os guy. (Church is part of his last name) It was a different guy that was more active on hacker news. He was also really critical of Silicon Valley.

[Pica_soO]

Also, a lot of the task-rabbits forced to do customer-service work have a axe to grind with the upper echelon.

You can test this out- try to get customer service as a yeoman and try to get customer service as a valley baron.

So, lesson learned- never enter true occupation data in a field when registering.