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Banning legitimate users, editing their posts, and shadowbanning are examples of "arbitrary and capricious censorship". Banning IP ranges for effectively taking
by Nadya 8y ago
Banning legitimate users, editing their posts, and shadowbanning are examples of "arbitrary and capricious censorship". Banning IP ranges for effectively taking down the platform (thereby censoring everyone using the platform) is not arbitrary - although it may be capricious (since it may be unbanned once the abuse has stopped in hopes the abuse doesn't immediately start back up).
Spinning up an ad bot and spamming 10,000 messages every hour on every board effectively shuts down discussion for any legitimate users. It takes extremely bad faith to argue that stopping spam and bots is anything equivalent to censorship. Especially when the goal of the abuse is to remove the platform for the legitimate users to converse on, in an attempt to silence them.
- jstanley 8y agoStopping spam and bots is fine, but I'm not a spammer or a bot and I'm still banned. Reddit can do better than this, and doesn't market itself as a "no censorship" alternative. Voat should be doing even better than reddit.
- Nadya 8y agoNo, but you were trying to access through a DigitalOcean IP which may have been range banned for spam/abuse/botting. Same reason why almost any public proxy is banned on 4chan. Same reason many uploading/hosting sites block Tor exit nodes. If your intention was to remain private - they do not guarantee that anywhere. Arguing that you "are" DigitalOcean and they are censoring you is a bit disingenuous if you ask me.
- jstanley 8y agoI'm not arguing that I am DigitalOcean any more than someone browsing via Comcast is Comcast. It wouldn't be fair to block all Comcast users and it's not fair to block all DigitalOcean users.