I wonder what the right rule is. I think if I were running a Web 2.0 site, a deactivated account would still allow log-in for, say, 60 days, but present only an account admin panel with four options:

- Appeal the deactivation, with guaranteed human review of the account if above the, say, 20th %ile of account age

- Download your text and media assets

- Send a message to social connections with an e-mail where to reach you

- Truly delete everything within the next 24 hours (right to be forgotten, etc.)

I think you present some excellent ideas. And I would guess some of them depend on the reason for termination (although often the reason selected by some automated processes makes no sense).

In the OP's scenario, for instance, YouTube could have at least allowed his partner to export all the videos.

There are some definite easy wins to be made by players in this space that don't even involve them having to hire more humans.

Thanks! For the things that do require human review, I wonder what the best way is to scale that.

It actually might be a potential business opportunity. Gig economy social media moderation. Pay $50 and YouTube contracts out with a company for $40 to pay a subcontractor $30 to spend an hour reviewing your appeal and account history and making a recommendation.

It has an icky protection racket feel to it and would incentivize YouTube to be more aggressive in deactivating accounts. But... maybe it's less icky than advertising, selling your privacy for pennies, and permanently deleting your stuff?

And while the quality of random gig economy contractors would be pretty poor, it certainly could not be worse than no support at all as they are bound to make the correct determinations some of the time.

Maybe some kind of consensus protocol?

I am very curious to get a tad more context about the bank issue, if that's straightforward.

Also, I have no idea if this will work, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418165 - a bit of quote-googling (recommended to verify) suggests this person may use gmail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's worth a try, thanks :)

The bank (Square) issue is that I ordered something online, FedEx screwed up the delivery, it got returned to merchant, but merchant does not respond. I asked bank for chargeback, but they can't do one as the package got delivered (back to the merchant). Their support script only allows chargebacks when there is no delivery at all. They tried to get me to persuade FedEx to change the package status to nondelivered, but I refused, so they gave me the money back anyway and closed my account because it was easier than changing their immutable support script to allow for an edge case where a package was delivered, but not delivered to customer.

Now I'm curious to find out how it works out.

That comment was from a few years ago so the poster may be relatively distant to Tumblr nowadays and it might take a few additional people-hops (if it doesn't fall through) to get anywhere. I also wonder if old/deactivated non-public account data is held indefinitely (eg, private messages)... it probably is...

Regarding Stripe, wow, I admittedly didn't quite read the name the first time through the paragraph, and was very surprised when I actually noticed ("...that Stripe?"). I guess it makes sense; they're similar in scale and incumbance to the big-N stuffy local banks now. A good reminder that class-leading web design isn't necessarily a function of broad-spectrum competence across the board, just a very well-paid design team lol

I take it you can't reopen an account? :/

(Uh, if you'd even want to...)

Not Stripe - Square. I get the two mixed up also. Square is now Block, but their banking at least is still called Square.

I sent an unsolicited email to the person above, and was polite about asking, but no reply yet :)

Oooh. Humble thanks, I did indeed get the two confused. There was a recent post talking about how iPhones will be able to pretend they're payment terminals (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30259183), with Stripe in the position of major partner, and Square as the unimpressed incumbent that had just had their core competency made redundant. That kind of backs out my point somewhat then heh. *Moves Stripe back to "probably ok"*

The comment I linked incidentally happened to be (understandably) stuck in my head, but some bumbling around and experimentation with Algolia for a few minutes (trying keywords like "works at", "engineer" and "dev") also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700627, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12924580, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928349, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20701499, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815847, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16971725, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3587191, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728531. It's quite possible none of these are relevant or useful; I also just thought of https://github.com/search?q=tumblr&type=users, which surfaces an interesting level of signal right on page 1, and this is not even mentioning LinkedIn, notwithstanding that site's caveat of "oh no" vs "likely most direct solution to problem" :)

(Now to work through this small pile of unrelated interesting things that also mysteriously opened themselves over the past few minutes. Welp. All good :D)