A few months ago I was banned from Twitter for sharing a meme that literally said "I fucking love outer space." [0] That was it. Just an image with some text on it. For some reason this angered some algorithm and 10+ years of tweets and interactions were gone. It was heartbreaking. For a lot of people I followed that was my only real way of engaging with them.
The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from Twitter. I tried opening a support ticket and got no response. DAYS later, I got an automated email about what I needed to do, but the instructions didn't even work. Eventually I was able to get my account back about a week after that by going through some cumbersome verification process.
All for sharing a dumb space meme.
In that moment, if I could pay $10 to talk to an actual human being who could resolve my problem or at least tell me what I needed to do, even if it was via web-chat, I would gladly have done so.
Hmm, I know how you feel. Got banned on some subreddit for some stupid post. 10 years of comments linked to that account. Will never be able to post in there any more, and there is zero appeals process. The moderators themselves are just silent, no response to my appeal at all. The response from the admins I got to my ticket on an ‘unjust ban’ was basically ‘tough luck, subreddit moderators can do whatever they want’.
Living in a liberal democracy has made me so used to the system working mostly fairly that these interactions with a ‘fiefdom’ introduce some sort of cognitive dissonance.
The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from Twitter. I tried opening a support ticket and got no response. DAYS later, I got an automated email about what I needed to do, but the instructions didn't even work. Eventually I was able to get my account back about a week after that by going through some cumbersome verification process.
All for sharing a dumb space meme.
In that moment, if I could pay $10 to talk to an actual human being who could resolve my problem or at least tell me what I needed to do, even if it was via web-chat, I would gladly have done so.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/746515-space