I was uploading images to imgur to clear space off my phone yesterday and got an automated message that “content” in one of my albums broke community guidelines and therefore the album was deleted.
What picture exactly broke the guidelines? I have no clue. I wasn’t posting anything I’d consider borderline.
How did this unknown picture break the rules? I don’t know, because imgur won’t tell me.
Can I appeal it? I don’t see any way, which sucks since it is almost certainly an automated filter and those are known to make mistakes.
This is a problem on a lot of sites, both with and without automated content moderation. I’ve seen people defend sites having unknown rules as a way to keep uploaders from gaming the system, but frankly to me that’s just stupid. People with enough time to figure out the workarounds will always game the system, while more normal casual uploaders are stuck essentially rolling dice.
I had a Google Voice number for well over a decade. One day any text I tried to send returned an error message. Went through the automated process to see why and was told, essentially, that “you did something wrong worthy of suspension but we won’t tell you what it is.” Did the appeal thing a couple of times and got little to no useful response. I also found out that, while Google was stopping me from using my Voice number and giving me error messages, they were still allowing people to text and call me with no error on their end so friends, relatives and companies thought I was a ghosting jerk. Finally, after not being able to use Voice for about 4 months, I got the message that “You haven’t been using your voice number so we are going to reallocate it…yesterday.” 10+ years of texts and voice messages just…gone. Last messages from friends (and my mother) who had died…gone. Picture attachments in those texts…gone. Messages telling me that a friend had died and this is when the service is…never received. That was the beginning of my slowly continuing (and almost done) degoogling. Fuck Google…and companies like google.