
Vimeo Disabled My Account for Submitting HTML - hispanic
https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/vimeo-disabled-my-account-for-submitting-html
======
muglug
I work at Vimeo. We use automated detection to flag suspicious accounts. This
was a clear false-positive, and the account has been unsuspended.

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.

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.

Edit: clarified circumstances under which urls are converted

~~~
gesman
This is great and fast response here.

Does Vimeo has a way for human employee to proactively (not as a result of
social media shaming) look at- and unblock customer account in case it was a
result of false positive?

Ban-first, handle-later is not exactly customer friendly policy.

~~~
muglug
> Does Vimeo has a way for human employee to proactively (not as a result of
> social media shaming) look at- and unblock customer account in case it was a
> result of false positive?

No, but we have a great support team that responds to all customer enquiries
(though paying customers get priority).

> Ban-first, handle-later is not exactly customer friendly policy.

It is when the content being banned might harm customers.

~~~
zapzupnz
> It is when the content being banned might harm customers.

I think this is the right way to approach it because it seems, and this is
entirely my unscientific view, a lot of those scammer websites target
uploading to Vimeo, Dailymotion, and so on (basically, the websites that
aren't as big as YouTube) because they think that being a smaller outfit, the
company is less likely to flag and remove the viedo.

Then those scam videos turn up relatively high in Google Searches for full
movies, full episodes, etc.

I notice this especially for non-English, non-Hollywood content. Lots of
French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean stuff, all with dubious links.

~~~
luismedel
I think it's not.

If the scoring system detects some suspicious activity, it's the current
operation which should be halted (in this context, the video should have been
retired), but not the user account.

If after a human review, the account present evident violation of TOS, then,
yes, ban the user.

edit: bad grammar.

------
danShumway
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.

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.

Reading this, I'm suddenly struck that policies and terms are subject to the
same rules.

Of course I know that the point of having vague policies around stuff like
this is very explicitly to _not_ allow bad actors to feel safe probing your
system. The point is to _avoid_ 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.

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.

This doesn't mean that Vimeo's policies are bad. Vimeo may not even _want_
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.

------
andrewstuart
It's important to quickly abandon companies that have automated account
closure systems.

The message has to be conveyed to these companies that automated account
closures result in loss of business.

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.

Auto account closures are completely unacceptable where someone is paying for
that service.

~~~
burnte
First, he mentioned explicitly that he did not pay for their service, he was a
free user.

Second, every system open to the public that has even a moderate amount of
users has automated abuse detection and mitigation techniques in place. It's
flat out irresponsible to not have such systems in place, ESPECIALLY if you
have paying customers s the opportunity for abuse are huge.

------
s09dfhks
Reminds me of that startup that recently got knocked off the web by digital
oceans automated system.

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

~~~
wolco
I'm surprised customer service just doesn't exist. Google can get away with it
but vimeo with 15% market share can't afford to throw in the towel on support
already.

~~~
gowld
How much customer service should a $0/month subscription buy?

~~~
wolco
Put another way videos uploaded by the average user earned vimeo 'x' dollars
over the last month.

Without any revenue they close up.

How many customers can they afford to lose? 5%,10%, 90%

If they don't support the free tier users they will lose them. At one point
vimeo was making a serious run for global marketshare.. now it looks like they
are in a different market..

~~~
muglug
> At one point vimeo was making a serious run for global marketshare

Vimeo hasn't been going for global marketshare of video watching in well over
a decade - it ceded that competition to YouTube very early on by policing
content more actively (Viacom sued YouTube in 2007 for $1B because of its lax
enforcement of rules).

Vimeo chose a different direction, launching a paid account in 2008:
[https://vimeo.com/1977937](https://vimeo.com/1977937)

------
lone_haxx0r
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.

Users would be able to complain about: Phantom credit card charges, captcha
walls, requiring cellphone verification, random account termination, etc.

What do you think about it? I think it's really susceptible to astroturfing,
but maybe there's a way to fix that.

~~~
QuadmasterXLII
If I grabbed 50 friends and we all posted identical and untrue complaints on
your website, stating that you randomly deleted our accounts, would you delete
our accounts?

~~~
lone_haxx0r
Not those accounts specifically.

Maybe I would have to implement a system that deletes accounts automatically
when comments are identical. It's unlikely though, because I prefer to err on
the side of deregulation and would not like to delete accounts, even if I'm
90% sure that those accounts are bots. I presume innocence until proven guilty
(where guilty: breaking the site rules).

It's impossible for me to know what complaints are true and which aren't for
every complaint in the site, so I wouldn't delete any of them based solely on
their truth value. I wouldn't even delete those that I know are false.

It's all imagination though, I don't know if I'm ever going to create the
site. I just wanted to gauge interest and maybe receive some criticism.

------
vortico
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.

~~~
Scaevolus
You can pass rel=0 to YouTube iframes to only recommend additional videos from
the same channel.
[https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel](https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel)

~~~
duskwuff
For now, at least. "rel=0" used to mean "don't show related videos at all";
now it means "only show related videos from the same uploader", and I wouldn't
be shocked if YouTube limited its functionality even further in the future.

------
jarfil
At least they tell you what's going on, some other websites will just throw
you a "login failed" and that's it.

------
Causality1
>indicating that it may be in violation of our Acceptable User Policy.

Well, was it? The author makes no claim that he didn't violate the policy.

~~~
hispanic
I didn't find anything in any of their policies that submitting markup for
inclusion in the video description is a violation.

