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I was permanently banned in Twitter

5 points by alexanderisora ↗ HN
Yesterday morning, I opened my to-do list. There was one nagging task that I have been delaying for months: reply to all DMs on Twitter. There were roughly 100 missed DMs.

People reach me out often there. Half of them ask questions about my project. The other half wants me to upvote their thing on Product Hunt.

To people who need me to press "Upvote" I reply with a template. Here it is:

> "Hey! I supported you (put my upvote) Good luck on your launch. P.S. Check my YouTube channel about launching on Product Hunt. I made an entire playlist of videos about this: <link> I also tell there about how to grow startups with $0 budget."

So I sent this text to roughly 25 people who asked me for an upvote.

And got my account permanently suspended. I'm also disallowed to create a new account

> Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, Repost, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts.

Lessons:

1) According to Twitter's documentation, your account gets blocked after 500 DMs. But I barely sent 50 DMs. Be careful.

2) Do not send copy-paste. Type.

3) Better avoid sending links to external resources.

4) The most important: you do not own your Twitter account.

9 comments

[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread
majortennis
Think we should all abandon that ship, mastodons not great I'm waiting for a better alternative
logicalmonster
a) I feel that any comments about X (please respect how they identify themselves) have the well poisoned right now. Whether they do anything good or anything bad, it's impossible for them to get an objective opinion right now so posting this on here is just inviting really vapid criticism.

b) Should X have banned you? Probably not.

c) Was it kind of dumb of to post a random copy/paste message to multiple people with a link on X knowing how algorithms are dumb? Probably.

d) A suggestion for Elon. Zig where others zag. Most SV giants provide no human customer service to fix issues like this. Can you figure out a way to provide good customer service in some form to resolve the issues these customers face? If you want X to be the method to handle online payments and anything else you envision in the future, you have to be trustworthy to people and be able to handle problems with intelligent humans.

alexanderisora
Even though I feel devastated (I have been growing my account since 2016), my post is emotions-free. Only facts. Did Y got Z.

> d)

Great point! But do you think people of China trust WeChat? I doubt you need to have reputation to do what Elon plans to do with X. You just need lots of power/money.

logicalmonster
> Great point! But do you think people of China trust WeChat? I doubt you need to have reputation to do what Elon plans to do with X. You just need lots of power/money.

That stuff flies when the media is indifferent towards you, or even supportive. But what about when you're on their shitlist and every media piece is an opportunity to whine and groan about you?

With Elon being on the mainstream media's shitlist due to many reasons, I think he'll have to work harder than average to get customers right now and doing some things like customer service in a radically atypical way would be a smart decision.

spansoa
> You won’t be able to create new accounts

On what criteria? IP address? User-agent? Easily spoofed.

Getting a burner SIM is tricky depending on where you live (Mandatory KYC is required in some countries)

alexanderisora
Even if I'm technically allowed to create a new account, I'm not doing this: I do not want to stress because of a risk of getting banned again.
VDOVault
I think there's something like rate limiting going on for Twitter/X DMs & if you fire off too many similar / identical DMs in too short a period of time, that gets you suspended.

Also I'd add a fifth lesson to your list 5) Request an archive of your Twitter/X account on a regular basis (at least monthly, maybe more often) while that's still possible to do

alexanderisora
The rule of thumb is to act like a regular human. If you are a savvy user, you have shortcuts for everything, you have scripts for optimizing your work, then be careful.

Exporting your data is a great piece of advice. Thanks for reminding that.