[trabant00]

A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".

I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

A while back, I operated the postfix mail servers for a B2B app. AFAIK the only way to get email from these servers was to work at a company using our product, add your email to the app, and explicitly opt into getting notification emails. And even then, the only emails they'd send were transactional emails; the marketing dept did their own unrelated thing. In spite of this, we semi-regularly found our servers blacklisted for allegedly sending spam. Since then I don't just trust by default when people add things to blacklists.

All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.

[pif]

> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!

I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.

[elashri]

I tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.

[trabant00]

I myself was wrongly banned more than once by automated systems. Google even identified gmail pulling email over pop3 from another gmail account as an attack! Hilariously bad.

But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?

[adamc]

I get that life experiences give you biases. Those of us who've been blamed for things we definitely didn't do might have the opposite bias.

Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.

[TiredOfLife]

I could understand this worldview if talking about some random unknown person. But this is creator of Anti Idle - a game with million+ players and a pretty sizeable TV Tropes page.

Similar situation with the creator of uBlock Origin (8+ million installs on Firefox and 39 million on Chrome) Being treated like shit by Mozilla (uBlock Origin is sole reason people still use Firefox)

[commandlinefan]

> operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust

Curious how much you could share more details about what you discovered during that time?

[indymike]

> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".

Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.

[arp242]

Yeah, some of these stories that get posted here definitely have more going on than the author admits. Some, not all.

But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.