[beng-nl]

I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?

I don’t know the number. But personally I think using the services and ‘simply’ only use them if the disappearance isn’t catastrophic and have the price be low or free while it works isn’t too bad a trade-off.

Admittedly that’s a big ‘if.’

[alemanek]

That is the wrong way to look at it.

If this requirement was in place they would be a bit more careful about terminating accounts because the cost equation would incentivize it. Maybe they would be more careful in their automation or require more than one level of human review before cutting off access.

These companies are gatekeepers for their platform. It isn’t crazy to require them to act more responsibly.

[prox]

These are usually multi billion dollar companies, they’ll be fine, stop worrying about them.

Start worrying about the erosion of your rights as a consumer.

[prmoustache]

I agree in that case but be wary with these kind of assessments. There are tons of regulations that are meant for big players but can also affect much smaller negatively.

For instance I don't think to this day it is possible to operate a Mastodon server and be compliant with GPDR and the UK online safety Act. There was the famous case of LFGSS forum about to shut down due to the former, the forum was kind of saved by a group of individuals willing to take the risk but the founder stepped down from fear of legal risks.

There hasn't been home raided and servers and personal computers seized yet but that doesn't mean it can't happen and technically any EU or UK volunteer hosting some forums or open source based social media that isn't GPDR or online safety act compliant could be at risk. For most I believe it is not that they don't want to be compliant but they aren't aware of that and/or don't have the technical means without further development on the software they are using and despite them not abiding to their own user rights, most of their users would be more sad to see them shutdown than the current status of not obeying the law.

[HackerThemAll]

Look how much profit Microsoft made last year.

"Financially, it was a year of record performance. Revenue was $281.7 billion, up 15 percent. Operating income grew 17 percent to $128.5 billion." https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html

So don't be so naive to tell us that 1-2 additional people to handle the appeal process is anything but rounding error in their balance sheet.

[rangerelf]

If it's impossible for a service provider to even talk to its customers, why is it in operation at all?

[_imnothere]

They sure do earn enough money to afford whatever number that is on your mind.

[zelphirkalt]

Even if they somehow were so expensive, that it would no longer scale to their size, that is still not our problem and if anything, a sign that either they need to improve their systems, or simply cannot be as big as they are. Shit happens, scale down, I won't cry for them.

[harel]

Honestly, it's not our problem. Once a service becomes so vital it cannot be terminated without any meaningful process. My meta developer account is suspended and none of my appeals are responded to . Who can I talk to? Nobody. It's wrong.

[stevenicr]

Have a similar problem. Ran meta ads for about a week, account shutdown. asked to verify ID. Jumped through the hoops. Got a notice perma ban, decisions final.

I still don't know why. I've talked to their chat bots many times. I can't run facebook or instagram ads ever again is seems. (also can't boost posts and some other things mentioned)

Considering they are doing some big push for small business success with meta / facebook / instagram, and our AI helps small business do amazing things...

That just seems like fraud to me considering the experience I have gone through.

Part of me thinks if I had a business that made most of it's money from advertising that I would help people make ads that align with their policies - I got so many generic - follow our terms, community guidelines - nothing explains what they heck is wrong. No way to fix it. No way to keep running ads.

This is your business, this is your AI, this is your policy, and you are trying to promote a welcoming space for small business and a dependence on your AI?

[chromacity]

> I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?

It wouldn't. For example, before Gmail, email was often free or nearly free (bundled with your internet service), but in most cases, you could talk to a human if you had issues with the service.

What we couldn't do is turn these business models into planetary-scale behemoths that rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. In essence, you couldn't have Google or Facebook with good customer support. I'm not here to argue that Google or Facebook are a net negative, but the trade-offs here are different from what you describe.

[alpaca128]

MS could literally double their global employee count with a fraction of what they spend on AI annually.

[amluto]

These services are designed such that security sort of depends on reviewing the programs that are allowed to run. Microsoft, Google and Apple all do this. It adds expense, annoyance, limitations, and really very little security.

The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like, may be more complex but is overall much better. There aren’t many personal-use systems like this, but systems like AWS take this approach and generally do quite well with it.

[ethbr1]

> The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like

There's a lot that one can gripe about Amazon as a company about, but credit where credit is due -- their inversion of responsibility is game-changing.

You see this around the company, back to their "Accept returns without question" days of mail order.

Most critically, this inversion turns customer experience problems (it's the customer's problem) into Amazon problems.

Which turns fixing them into Amazon's responsibility.

Want return rates to go down because the blanket approval is costing the company too much money? Amazon should fix that problem.

Too often companies (coughGoogleMicrosoftMetacough) set up feedback loops where the company is insulated from customer pain... and then everyone is surprised when the company doesn't allocate resources to fix the underlying issue.

If false positive account bans were required to be remediated manually by the same team who owned automated banning, we'd likely see different corporate response.

[thefounder]

I don't think they would be so much more expensive but they would be less profitable for sure and perhaps less "innovative" as a big chunk of the profit will go into regulation stuff.