LinkedIn blocked due Meshtastic video in private chat (opens in new tab)

You are right though, it can be crippling, and this thinking part of your personal (and business) risk profile. Ideally your email is at least tied to a domain name you separately own. That way, if your Google/MSFT/Apple/whatever account gets blocked, you can switch over the email to another provider and still get access.

* edit to add: I don't know if this is more a Google thing than other companies, I was just heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and have researched these issues specifically with Google, leading to me ensuring I'm not as reliant on them as I used to be. I figure now I have about a full days worth of hassle if all my google stuff gets blocked, but otherwise I'm recoverable.

It's pretty bad. I filled out a job application the other day (for Bunq) and they said "gmail preferred". So much for using my own domain!

I applied for an accelerator and they refused to let you proceed without using a Google account.

I was banned from selling on Amazon 14 years ago because someone who had lived in my apartment before me was shady. I'm still banned and they give no recourse.

The idea is that losing a user costs infinitely less than legal fees, so when in doubt they pull the plug. I had direct confirmation from a gafam employee

There are many stories of paediatricians, healthcare professionals or parents wrongfully accused of paedophilia. They never got their accounts back.

I advised an association to buy a domain name and a paid email service and not to rely on Gmail. They didn't listen to me, and two years later Google cut off the account for sending spam or some other similar reason. They lost all contact emails with their suppliers, their accounting, invoices, etc. ...

Don't expect anything from the customer service of a free service. You are the product, not the customer. They will throw you out like rotten fruit at the slightest problem.

This is only true if people repeat it and believe it to be true.

It just so happens that Fastmail is also puts out an excellent product.

I think most people would be... just fine? Personally I'm from a culture that is very distrusting of those big platforms anyways, so people are even less likely to rely on them. If my mom lost access to her google account she would be fine, my dad wouldn't notice (he has been using his own e-mail domain forever), neither would my brother (since he makes a new google account with every phone anyways, having forgotten his previous password), and I wouldn't be bothered much either. I've also been doing fine professionally for 15 years and don't even have a LinkedIn account.

It's a similar picture for everyone around me. Some Facebook account or whatever may have seemed important when we were 16, but by and large people grow out of that vain phase, or even grow out of using the likes of Facebook at all. Nowadays whatever can deliver a message will do. There's a dozen ways to each anyone.

If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better.

Even worse, some Terms of Service forbid you from ever signing up again if you're banned, meaning you're perpetually at risk of another ban if you sign up to the service again.

You're typically screwed and have no recourse.

You are screwed, and it is a big deal.

However, until some ambulance chaser manages to corral the affected people into a class action lawsuit and win, there will be no change.

> Same concern with your email

This one is straightforward--have your own domain. Download everything such that you can change provider if they stomp you.

So many things tied to our phone number, including banking authorisation (work, charities, and home), online account auth (2fa), contact from school, contact with family, ... it was an absolute nightmare. The single worst customer support experience of my life AFAIR.

In the UK there are two Ombudsman for such services but one says they won't help until 8 weeks after you report a problem to the company involved (and the other somehow says they won't help at all).

It's really given me resolve to, instead of simplifying and signing the family up to the same services, distributing suppliers to avoid us all being stuck without service at the same time.

Exactly, the downside is too high. Which is why I migrated to my own domain + Fastmail.

I had no problem creating a new account. All of the accounts are linked together with my Facebook account, so it's not like they weren't aware. I didn't care until Threads came along, and now my preferred handle is unavailable.

It is kind of expected to have a profile you can link companies to, but I didn’t know people were actually active and engaging in discussions on the platform. I only sign in every few years to update something, but are you all actively exchanging with others on LinkedIn as a way to find jobs? I thought it was accepted since >10 years the whole platform is corporate noise.

There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.

If you have a friend who is an employee of the BigCo you can sometimes get results.

Otherwise your choices are: get frontpage of HN, or cope.

I recently (like, yesterday) got permanently banned from Reddit for "report abuse", for some random semi-nonsense comment I reported a month ago on a meme subreddit. Regardless of how justified that is or isn't -- I only have one side of the story to share of course, and I think I just got caught in some labor-saving measures for their underpaid+overworked admin staff -- it's a great reminder of these corporations' power over us.

A lifetime ban from a forum is certainly not as practically bad as the nightmare scenario of losing GMail, but still not great. I used Reddit to discuss technology, philosophy, and politics, and was quite active over the last year especially, using the platform's various science subs to share+refine the ideas I'm developing for my upcoming book with experts. Obviously there's a professional element there, but it was also a big outlet for me, keeping me motivated to share my work when I was feeling like scrapping it all due to anxiety and/or pessimism. Getting 50 upvotes on your detailed critique of some tenured professor's work feels better than you might imagine! I even had 45 "followers", though I never quite learned what that feature was or why it existed -- still, it was a nice ego boost at time when I needed that desperately.

Now that I'm banned for life, I'm basically just planning on giving up that part of my personality for now. Perhaps publishing my book will earn me some friends/critics willing to discuss such things with me, or perhaps I can make some when I start a PhD someday, but until then, Reddit's the only show in town; I've realized that Reddit is to scientific discussion what LinkedIn is to professional networking.

Like LinkedIn there are alternatives, but also like LinkedIn, the alternatives lack network effects and features. Lemmy is absurdly small+monolithic by comparison (/r/philosophy alone is 395x bigger than the entire 'Lemmyverse' put together, and much more diverse), HackerNews is highly focused and intentionally underdeveloped ("You're posting too fast!" + no markdown or communities), Twitter is somehow a Nazi thing now, and LessWrong is... well, it's its own beast. I could try Bluesky or Threads, but A) I've been a forum diehard since finding giantitp.com in middle school, and B) that feels a little like asking to be hurt again, lol. Would love any recommendations from passerby, though!

...sorry, had to get that off my chest, I guess. 12+ years of comments disappearing due to a random incident was more of an emotional blow than I expected, to be perfectly honest. TL;DR: Never, ever report any comments on Reddit. Ever. It's an under-appreciated risk.

I agree with your larger point esp. Gmail - would be quite crippling - but I haven't had LinkedIn for years now, and it hasn't negatively impacted my job or searches. If anything, it helped me be more proactive when I was looking instead of feeling like I was praying to the abyss.

There was a second in ~2020 where LinkedIn was starting to feel like finding work in the Myspace days - people were expressing themselves in more personal ways on their profiles (I guess because of the lockdown) and remote work was just kicking off. It had this glow that reminded me a lot of the early 2000s work scene online.

Soon enough, as LI caught onto the trend those quirky profiles and posts were replaced with branded influencers and "viral posts". The platform quickly became as influencer-focused as Instagram or Twitter, which feels inappropriate for a job site. But it's not a job site they say, it's a career platform... or professional network... or something (of which a huge aspect is uploading your resume and applying to jobs). Anyway, the way the LinkedIn influencer sphere covered layoffs was like an E! television show - they loved it.

Turns out LinkedIn is not an "essential social media" shall we say. It's not the career accessory that my GitHub and a Macbook are, it could have been, but they chose their path.

However, I don't think it's a consequence of the platform, but of work culture. People are like that because it works, and it works because we're deep, deep into a headlong rush toward annihilation in the name of profit.

The people profiting from destroying every public good - peace, pollution-free air and water and soil, housing, healthcare, etc etc - own basically everything. Our politicians, our media, our military. It's been this way for a long time.

Speaking up against this isn't what most people want to hear. It's uncomfortable - and a distraction from short-term survival. There are no easy answers. It's not a message you'll ever hear amplified on corporate media, and it doesn't fit well into a soundbite or tweet.

There's an ocean of subtle and not-so-subtle messaging across every type of media telling you not to look behind the curtain. There are very real consequences for doing so in a way that gets peoples attention.

LinkedIn rewards superficiality over substance because our society does, workplace culture especially so. Professional posturing is a byproduct of a system that commodifies everything: even authenticity, even revolution.

Essentially, our 'hearts and minds' have been hacked, in every possible way.

That said, if you have any good ideas on how a different platform could change that I'd love to hear them.

I unfollow everyone I'm connected with just so I don't have to see any of it when I have the misfortune of having to log in.

I get updates from daughters fights with cancer of people I don't know. I don't need to see this on a 'professional' network. Not sure why people post such intimate private things.

Also it mathematically required multiple local hits before anything would've been sent to Apple.

And even at that point an actual human would've checked the image(s) (reduced quality versions) before any action is taken.

So even if you would've managed to trigger the system multiple times on someone's phone with hash collisions that actually are pictures of kittens, the most you've done is slightly inconvenience a low-paid image checker in a cheap call center.

And in the actual justice system, there's a presumption of innocence.

As for platforms, that's why in the EU big ones must engage with mediators. (Though IMHO it's better to just avoid them.)

To answer this question honestly - I would assume that the service owners don't want to get pulled in front of a congressional inquiry about why their service isn't doing anything to prevent the distribution of child abuse material.

I grew up in a communist regime and can assure you tyranical censorship is not exclusive to fascism nor its sole defining part.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U

Low chance but with millions of users you might have been a lucky one.