[austinl]

Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is why I think the frustration techniques, or simply account suspension aren't widely used).

The field of spam-prevention is fascinating because it's essentially an arms race between companies deploying tactics to detect spam and sophisticated spammers using increasingly complex methods to avoid detection.

So there's an advantage gained by companies if spammers believe they don't need to evolve their methods.

[qingcharles]

The problem is real humans getting snared. My TikTok account is shadowbanned (anything I post now gets zero views, and my LIVE gets zero viewers).

And my Instagram account got permabanned because they said I was impersonating myself. This was worse because I lost the entire account. They even had me send a selfie of myself and the instant I submitted the image was when they did the permaban lol.

[AnthonyMouse]

There is a clip from The Grand Tour where James May explains what happened when he tried to create an Instagram account: He signed up, discovered that there was already an account on there impersonating him, reported the impersonator, and so Instagram took the report and shut down his real account instead.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The harsh truth is that the occasional false positive doesn't affect their bottom line even slightly. Unless a false positive is some social engineering genius that can stir up a shitstorm of bad PR, they can be silently ignored forever.

You're the sacrifice that they're willing to make to build their social media, and if you don't think it's fair... no one cares.

Even if this somehow offends people, those people will never notice that it actually happened.

Probably, this means that sane people should want the government to regulate at least those services considered essential to life to require appeals systems. Not TikTok, but I've heard of people losing access to Amazon forever. There are people for whom Amazon is essential, there are no local alternatives. And if the people wrongly permabanned from it ever overlap with those who can hardly live without it, then we have a big problem.

[willdr]

I don't mean to cause offense, but maybe you haven't built a following yet? I see plenty of Lives with 0 viewers.

[jaggederest]

Just out of curiosity, how would you build a following if none of your videos ever receives any views? I'm not someone who uses the tikity tok but it seems like an intractable problem.

[yowlingcat]

Leave noteworthy comments on other peoples videos, make noteworthy stitches of theirs. Embrace remix culture, essentially. It only seems like an intractable problem to non power users of social media.

[jaggederest]

What if those videos also receive no views? Serious question, I don't know how Tiktok works well enough to intuit.

[yowlingcat]

If those videos receive no views, then it means the concept of the stitch wasn't compelling. Practically speaking -- just do it over and over again until you find something that does work.

Some people have a knack for making content that goes viral, but for most folks, it's a muscle that needs to be learned through lots of practice, with a lot of early going seemingly bearing little fruit until the inflection point is reached.

[noAnswer]

Search for "zero views" on Youtube.

[jonny_eh]

Share your videos as a response to a comment on HN.

[TeMPOraL]

In other words: be a spammer.

Yay, incentives on social media sites are totally not perverted.

[pjc50]

The problem is that "getting people to see your stuff" is the route to monetization, and therefore is horribly choked with spam that stacks the odds against real humans.

[khalilravanna]

I think at least initially TikTok would push traffic to new accounts. My first few videos got a bunch of likes/views even though I had 0 followers. And then I noticed it started to trickle down video after video even though (subjectively) the content remained largely the same. It’s a clever mechanism to increase stickiness for new users as well as detect early on if a new content producer has that Good Shit that will do mega views.

[qingcharles]

No, on a regular account TikTok's algorithm will always send a few dozen viewers to any new video or any LIVE just to get feedback from users (e.g. playtime, likes, faves, shares etc).

I have an old account with almost 4000 followers.

TikTok just woke up one day and hated me. Hopefully it has a timeout on it.

[petre]

> They even had me send a selfie of myself

So they could compare it with what, the content posted?

[inciampati]

They want to collect name:face mappings. I've had the same issue with IG but haven't got around to posting the selfie.

[qingcharles]

DO NOT post the selfie. It is a trap.

Read my suggestions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254898

[qingcharles]

I think they just wanted to see that I was a real human. They had me hold up a sign with a code written on it. The only thing I thought of was that they might compare it to my profile pic? But it makes little sense as many people have something abstract as their PFP, or a photo of their cat.

[petre]

Nice try. What stops anyone from going to Madame Tussauds and posting a selfie of Frank Sinatra holding up a code? Or paying a street performer to do it. Because that would be my first thought, how to screw these sociopaths.

[TeMPOraL]

And the irony here is that the leading spam-detection teams work for spammers. Ads are spam, except when it's adtech that's paying your bills.

[sdenton4]

Depending on the context, account suspensions can be weaponized. By making someone you don't like /look/ like they are doing something dodgy, you can get them banned.

[getrealyall]

Like fail2ban. Nothing quite like the anxiety of almost locking yourself out of your own system because you mistyped a password one too many times. It's a delicate balance (although, for something like SSH, I wouldn't even bother, unless the traffic is measurable enough to cause issues. But then you're getting (D)DoS'd, and you probably have bigger problems).

[willcipriano]

Modern spam tools I've encountered accept a second account list to be used for verification purposes for this reason. They can automatically purge shadowbanned accounts by spot checking comments for visibility.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I wondered about that - it seems like an actual spammer would have an easy time checking from other accounts, so it adds at most a minor amount of extra work, while real users who are incorrectly flagged never even think to check.