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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.

Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.

On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.

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This is not a safe assumption. You're just one crazy person willing to harass the family of whoever runs the registrar away from being 'too difficult to work with' and getting your account nuked. They don't charge enough to stick their neck out for you.

We're also one button press away from thermonuclear apocalypse.

Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.

Nuclear security had many buttons and many people.

Harassing people is far more accessible and has a proven track record of success.

> has a proven track record of success.

Do you have examples of someone successfully harassing a registrar employee into breaking the registrar's ICANN accreditation terms?

Agreed. I don't know why the other thing is even an argument.

Yes, and a cray person could blowup your house or your business premises,

The registrar does not own the domain, they just registrar it for you. If push comes to shove they need to let you transfer the domain to another registrar of you choosing after which your users will be able to reach you the same way as always.

Not so much with social media where the respective tyrant has a TOS that makes it clear they can tell you to pound sand whenever they feel like it.

> On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day.

If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.

Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.

> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.

Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.

You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?

> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.

That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.

My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later.

A year is enough time to kill a business.

I was once involved in my friend's SaaS startup and he got locked out of Facebook ads for having an inactive account and then spending too much money in the first day. "Too much" in this case was a few hundred dollars. Turns out you're meant to slowly increase your spend over a week while doomscrolling shitty clickbait, otherwise Facebook thinks your account has been compromised.

> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.

This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.

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