zlacker

> But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.

Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.

The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.

Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...

>>london+(OP)
Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it just notes the reason for the ban in the database, and then tells the user why the ban happened?

I don't see why all the reasons above mean basic transparency can't happen.

>>Closi+72
Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify. Google have multiple billion accounts (Chrome has 2B users). I use "utterly trivial" here because "XYZ is likely" type events that might occur at xxx,xxx users translate to "sheer overwhelming force of statistics" when you get to x,xxx,xxx,xxx users - if you have 100,000 users and just 10 people successfully figure out how something works internally, scaling that to 1,000,000,000 users increases that pool of 10 people itself to 100,000. And a pool of 100,000 proactive and interested people is more than enough to create several thousand cottage industries, lots of competition, then one or two emerge at the top and become an exponential force, etc etc etc.

>>exikyu+pL
> Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it just notes the reason for the ban in the database, and then tells the user why the ban happened?

> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify

There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.