I work at Vimeo. We use automated detection to flag suspicious accounts. This was a clear false-positive, and the account has been unsuspended.<p>We don't convert urls to hyperlinks in video descriptions when the user has signed up recently, because hyperlinked urls have been used by spammers to trick visitors into visiting fraudulent sites.<p>This is clearly legitimate behaviour in context, but a brand-new user posting identical descriptions and urls on multiple videos is behaviour commonly seen in spam accounts, and we tend to err on the side of caution.<p>Edit: clarified circumstances under which urls are converted
Something I've found to be true in both game design and software UX is that generally speaking, you want users to feel safe trying new things. This helps sidestep some problems that tech-illiterate users have where they become scared to guess where anything is and have to be shown how to do everything. In game design, it makes it easier to teach users new mechanics.<p>It's also a prerequisite to having more intuitive, predictable interface. You can train people to just try clicking things or looking in their settings to see if something will work, but only if they're not worried that they're about to break the application. In a game, people will experiment and learn new mechanics, but not if they're worried that doing something wrong will come with severe consequences.<p>Reading this, I'm suddenly struck that policies and terms are subject to the same rules.<p>Of course I know that the point of having vague policies around stuff like this is very explicitly to <i>not</i> allow bad actors to feel safe probing your system. The point is to <i>avoid</i> the above scenario. But it occurs to me that this is a tradeoff. In order to keep bad actors from experimenting, you are also going to keep good actors from experimenting. People will be very careful not to go off the beaten path with your service, even to the point where they'll avoid building creative things.<p>They'll contact support more often instead of just trying things, and they'll be less creative with how they use your platform. Back when Youtube still had annotations working, I saw people building weird overlays and choose-your-own-adventure videos. Seeing that I could get banned this quickly for even accidentally stepping out of line in one place, I would never try something like that on Vimeo.<p>This doesn't mean that Vimeo's policies are bad. Vimeo may not even <i>want</i> people to experiment with their service. But the choice to immediately ban users, rather than popping up a notification or error message -- it's not just a policy decision, it's a UX/design decision, and it changes the way that ordinary people will interact with the company.
It's important to quickly abandon companies that have automated account closure systems.<p>The message has to be conveyed to these companies that automated account closures result in loss of business.<p>Automated suspicious activity systems should be flagging the issue for human attention within that company, where presumably someone will make a considered decision about the issue and communicate effectively with the account holder about what the issue is to understand and resolve it.<p>Auto account closures are completely unacceptable where someone is paying for that service.
Reminds me of that startup that recently got knocked off the web by digital oceans automated system.<p>Scary to think that for us average Joes, our accounts can be nuked with no recourse unless you have a large Twitter following to get someone important to notice
I'm thinking about making a website that lists all dark patterns and user experience fudges of a given service/app/website so that we users/customers can better choose where our time/money is going.<p>Users would be able to complain about: Phantom credit card charges, captcha walls, requiring cellphone verification, random account termination, etc.<p>What do you think about it? I think it's really susceptible to astroturfing, but maybe there's a way to fix that.
I used to use Vimeo for hosting product videos that I embedded onto my website. It was better than YouTube because it didn't show "recommended videos" (often with competitors' products or useless videos) after it finished playing. But then Vimeo started doing it too for embedded videos, so I switched to YouTube since users are more familiar with its UI.
>indicating that it may be in violation of our Acceptable User Policy.<p>Well, was it? The author makes no claim that he didn't violate the policy.