15 ms·

I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and wou

by Antwan 7y ago

I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles. Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would stream chunks over TCP so the slowness feeling was even more real). Worked like a charm. Few days after the recalcitrant would no longer come on the website. I called this “moderation by degradation of user experience”, and was pretty effective like the solution described in your post. Think about page load if you need to restrain visits.

marksomnian 7y ago
Not an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/
- kortilla 7y ago
  No, he calls it slowbanning. Hellbanning is when you let them keep posting but other people can’t see the posts. Hackernews hellbans as well and you can see the comments from the deplorables if you turn on “showdead” in your profile.
  - tylerchilds 7y ago
    I've always thought people might catch on, since no one is engaging with their takes. I'm curious if letting bots do some markov responses might keep them in the dark a little longer.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - atoav 7y ago
      I think nowadays you might catch on because the culpit might not be identified to your site with both their phone and their PC or something among these lines.
    - phpnode 7y ago
      I see it far less frequently now (thanks @dang!), but a few years ago it wasn't uncommon to see shadow banned HN users continuing to post for years, talking into the void. Sometimes I'd look into their post history and so many of them had been banned for utterly trivial reasons, it was pretty sad.
      - mirimir 7y ago
        If I see an account that's been shadowbanned for years, and has consistently posted appropriately for maybe several months, I report it via the contact address.
      - ignoramous 7y ago
        Would you have a profile or two handy that I can take a look at? I left showdead on for a while but found it useless in terms of coming across interesting comments from such users. Thx.
        jquast 7y ago
        I seem to remember being pretty upset when I found out Terry Davis of Temple OS was being shadowbanned. Maybe it was just temporary for a short period or a single comment, but I didn't like it. I found this (related?) poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
        phpnode 7y ago
        Terry was permanently shadow-banned, the subject came up quite often. He suffered from schizophrenia and would make racist and paranoid comments about 80% of the time, but his remaining posts were often pretty technical / insightful. As the victim of an illness it seemed unkind that he was banned, but at the same time a lot of his output was obviously very offensive.
        redis_mlc 7y ago
        I only lurked on his comments, but I remember some to be very interesting and thought that his unique approach to OS design was food for thought Somebody should make a shrine of his lucid and technical posts. And also a book. Anybody know of such things?
  - downerending 7y ago
    I think of myself as hard-nosed, but I don't think I could be this cruel to someone.
    - CalRobert 7y ago
      Reading said comments may convince you otherwise.
  - iscrewyou 7y ago
    Oh wow! Thank you! The setting was on for me. (By default? Or maybe I turned it on.) I just turned it off. Thanks for this suggestion.
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      Even if it was accidentally set on, one sees [dead] against shadow-banned, greyed-out comments.
  - asjw 7y ago
    And that's the reason why arts don't follow these rules. Imagine Van Gogh on HN...
    - chinesempire 7y ago
      Unfortunately I can't upvote you I agree with the sentiment, shadowbanning is a passive aggressive way to hide communities problems under the carpet by hiding them from the public Banning is legit if done publicly with reasoning, so people can make a clear idea of what happened and why, like > you broke rule number 3 not when it is done just to keep "the community clean" without any explanation whatsoever I guess this is the reason why HN rules are so vague
  - epanchin 7y ago
    I know that as shadowbanning. This is one of my favourite reddit posts on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_just_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
    - r00fus 7y ago
      IIRC hellbanning is a variant of shadowbanning that prevents easy discovery of the banned status by putting all suspect accounts into the same "hell" invisible to normal users. This works well if you have a network of fake accounts from a single "persona" or ring of personas - by all their indications they can't see their own posts are being ignored. Notice: it's almost the exact response to the persona management software problem [1] (aka bots). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
      - Klathmon 7y ago
        This also works incredibly well for cheaters in videogames. Give them their own queue with their own games with other cheaters to play against, and as long as nobody is cheating in a way that breaks the servers, they can play their own version of the game if they want without ruining the game for those who don't cheat.
        sharken 7y ago
        Also used in the excellent TV series Mythic Quest :)
        baddox 7y ago
        This reminds me of someone telling me that they are using cheat sites for an online Scrabble game because they suspected their opponent (a “friend”) was cheating. It’s hilarious to think that two humans are watching two instances of a likely optimal bot play against each other and rooting for their instance of the bot.
      - heartbeats 7y ago
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Yep. And you can vouch for good comments from shadowbanned accounts, just as for manually flagged comments. Being rather paranoid, I check this account occasionally via Tor.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    > deplorables Isn't this a pretty mean thing to say? Just making an account from tor is enough to get you shadowbanned in hn.
    - dang 7y ago
      That's not true. Software filters sometimes kill such comments, but the accounts themselves are unaffected, and moderators review the killed comments and unkill the clearly good ones, and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters. Also, users often vouch for comments that have been killed in this way, which restores them.
      - dependenttypes 7y ago
        My main issue was with the deplorables comment. I actually quite like the HN system of vouching. > and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters I remember seeing you restore a post from someone who made their account via tor and their comments were auto-deleted. Their next post was autodeleted in the same way, so I presume that this feature is buggy (or was, as this was quite a while ago).
        dang 7y ago
        There might be other explanations. For example, if an account shows signs of being connected to previous banned accounts, we might unkill a good post, but not immunize the account overall, until it establishes more of a track record. I'm glad you like the vouching system! I still feel like it's the best single change we've made to HN since pg retired.
  - dang 7y ago
    We only do that when an account doesn't have much history on HN and there's evidence of spamming or trolling. For established accounts, we tell people we've banned them and why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadownban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - xorand 7y ago
    Let me check it. If you see this pls vote or reply.
    - ajscanlan 7y ago
      ack
- squizzeak 7y ago
  I always referred to this practice as “tarpitting”, I was surprised to see nobody else here does!
  - manicdee 7y ago
    “Tarpitting” is a specific type of network-layer defence which is not related to degradation of service. A tarpit will typically stretch out response time to network-layer and some application-layer communications in order to waste wallclock time of spammers.
blantonl 7y ago
Yes, I run a large Xenforo discussion forum for my online community, and the term used here is called marking a user "discouraged" The system "slows down" the user experience, and also introduces random timeouts and other unpleasant user experiences.
ijidak 7y ago
Wow! That's a clever solution. I can see it only working when users don't know it exists. But when secret, I imagine this would be INCREDIBLY effective, as they'll blame the experience on the software, not their behavior.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here (hey, it is hellbanning, right?) What if a user pays for the content directly? Indirectly, they pay via ads. And if applied to networking with say QoS it is suddenly net neutrality though
  - codebje 7y ago
    Net neutrality doesn't apply to content providers differentiating service, because they're not common carriers.
naravara 7y ago
That's pretty neat. It seems like it would be a perfect response to trolling, in particular, since a big part of that is the emotional high they get from getting a rise out of people. Slowing down that process would be sure to dull the dopamine hit. I can even imagine it tamping down "reply wars" and long arguments since you get more decompression time between impressions.
nebalee 7y ago
Another sinister way of doing this is having users solve captchas in order to comment and keeping a badness score of the troublemakers. Then pretend they failed the captchas at a rate proportionally to their score.
- hanoz 7y ago
  If that's going on then what on earth have I done to offend Google?
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Are you blocking their tracking and fingerprinting? Do you sit behind a massive CG-NAT?
  - chillfox 7y ago
    Adblock? I ended up switching mine off just to make the internet usable.
  - Tenoke 7y ago
    Not using Chrome?
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Is it just me or has the web's compatibility with Firefox taken a nosedive recently? It used to just be my employer's HR software that was chrome-only, but in the last year my power utility website, apartment complex website, and even major websites like https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ (which I was trying to visit just 10 minutes ago) have broken in Firefox but not chrome. Badly, too. These aren't "the layout is different in FF and nobody noticed" bugs, they're "site infinitely redirects" bugs or "login button doesn't submit" bugs. Debug steps: turn off bitwarden, my only extension. Never helps. Ctrl+Shift+Del cookies. Never helps. Sigh, open chrome. Works first time. Is it just me or did the web up and dump firefox just when it started to get good? :(
      - 7y ago
jsjddbbwj 7y ago
Pretty sure this was used years ago here since it happened to me. If it happened to me now I would slowloris the hell out of the site. But years ago I didn't know better. :P (Yes I know I'm banned with this account as well)
jedberg 7y ago
We did the same thing at reddit. If someone was abusing the site we would redirect them at the load balancer to a single server with an extra sleep in it.
- youerbt 7y ago
  Then you did the same for your mobile users, degrading their experience until they use an app or leave.
  - kick 7y ago
    'jedberg hasn't worked at reddit for years, it's pretty ridiculous to use "you" and "your" there. Further, he was never in marketing, he was basically just a sysadmin. There's really no charitable interpretation of your comment that isn't just "Hey, let's yell at a guy who isn't currently and has literally never been in a position to where he might have been responsible for Annoyance!"
    - youerbt 7y ago
      I just wanted a jab at reddit, cuz this week I can't even browse it because "this community is available in the app" (after years of marke... mental abuse of asking me to use an app). Nothing against the guy, he used "we", I used "you", I'm sure he is a cool guy, and I hope its the charitable interpretation.
      - jedberg 7y ago
        FWIW, I feel your pain as a daily user of the site myself. I hold no ill will against you for taking it out on me. When I left I specifically said that users can continue to blame me for all problems. :) I wasn't aware that some communities are now limited to the app only. I haven't run into any yet. But that sucks.
        sharken 7y ago
        Try with every community, Reddit must really dislike mobile users. I do wonder if this scheme was introduced to monetize users, either way it sucks.
agumonkey 7y ago
I often wondered if one could slip some brain teaser in the process. Messengers made everybody wrte liek this .. but it you made the UI a bit difficult unless the author spells right. Maybe we'd see some global gain ?
anw 7y ago
This reminds me of the old VBulletin plugin "Miserable Users"[0]. We also had a community suffering from this problem (during the early 2000's). Bans would take care of a lot of problem users, but would just give energy to those truly out for blood, troll, bored, or very immature. We had one user get banned over a dozen times while we tried banning IPs, name regex or anything else we could think of. Finally, like you, we found that if we annoy them first, they get bored and shuffle off to some other, lower barrier place. Some of the nice features from that plugin (via the site) were: 1. Slow response (time delay) on every page (20 to 60 seconds default). 2. A chance they will get the "server busy" message (50% by default). 3. A chance that no search facilities will be available (75% by default). 4. A chance they will get redirected to another preset page (25% & homepage by default). 5. A chance they will simply get a blank page (25% by default). 6. Post flood limit increased by a defined factor (10 times by default). 7. If they get past all this okay, then they will be served up their proper page. * [0] https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258 https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258
- cbd7f73 7y ago
  This sounds pretty terrible when you think about how arbitrarily websites can determine you're a "bad user", but then again I like the idea of doing this programmatically for sites I myself want to stop using. Either that or a plugin to encourage productivity. Don't block social media sites, just turn them all into slow ineffective shitty websites.
  - 300bps 7y ago
    If you don't already, you should browse HN with ShowDead turned on. There are people who have been banned for years and blissfully post comments several times per week completely unaware that almost nobody is seeing their comments. Often, the comments they're posting into the black hole are indicative of why they were banned in the first place but if I see a comment that is dead and it does add to the conversation then I vouch for it which un-deads it.
    - kcvv 7y ago
otakucode 7y ago
This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong. Because of clustering, removing the most-connected nodes results in almost no change to the general connectivity of other nodes. Nodes which are actually important are 'bridge' nodes that provide a means of moving between mostly-disconnected groups. I started wondering what these ideas looked like in an actual social graph, like society. What would 'bridge' nodes look like, and what would eliminating the connection to them look like and what effect would it have? I think a social bridge node would be something like a biker whose main social group is his motorcycle gang, but who also participates in his elderly aunts knitting circle once a month. He provides a means through which ideas and concepts and information can flow from biker gangs, and those connected to them, to a group of elderly ladies and those they are connected to. They are, almost by definition, tenuous links. Ones which, if someone had influence over the communication networks they were using, it might be very easy to disrupt. What consequences would there be to breaking those links on a large scale? In the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' situation, you can get the average number of links needed to get to Kevin Bacon up over a dozen by only removing a couple handfuls of bridge nodes. I think doing such a thing on a real social graph could be very quiet, possibly undetectable (drop messages from rarely-connecting pairs of users... they rarely connect, so how many of them will go through the trouble to re-establish contact? Have bridge nodes have something go haywire and they have to be issued a new phone number, 'their facebook got hacked', etc). And the consequence would be to freeze most things in place, or at least radically slow down any kind of large-scale social change. Disruption of the status quo on the scale of regime change in a government, say, requires buy-in from large and very mostly-disconnected segments of the population. If only pockets of people are interested in change, it doesn't matter how intensely they want the change to happen, it only matters if they can join forces with very disparate compatriots. If you had high-level control of communication networks and a vested interest in guarding the status quo against large-scale social upheaval, you could probably do it very quietly and without really needing anything more than the metadata of connectivity. No need to find out what ideas are being spread, you could just make sure ALL ideas remain trapped in their own little bubbles or that their spread is greatly contained.
martin_a 7y ago
Nice solution! This always reminds me of the "Trolldrossel" (troll throttle), which was/is a funny piece of science and technics to reduce spam and troll comments. It's in German, but maybe auto subtitles and DeepL can make you understand it: https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnisse-der-empirischen-trollforschung/ https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnis...
msla 7y ago
"You're doing that too quickly. Please slow down."
b0rsuk 7y ago
This is clever and an effective way, but has a downside: it's like death penalty. You're giving the person no chance to improve, and there's risk ruining experience for someone who didn't deserve it.
- blackearl 7y ago
  But it's not life and death, it's like a private club. There's not much to be gained by assuming someone will change their ways and then become a member of the club who gives back.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    There isn't much to be gained by simply hoping someone will magically decide to change there ways, but private clubs often have complex initiation rituals with the goal of pushing possible new members to conform to their standards of behavior. In this analogy though, HN "proceedings" are public, and membership is hardly exclusive as the barrier to register a new, undead account is low, so it's not like a private club, either.
  - b0rsuk 7y ago
    Not necessarily assuming, but giving a chance. A person may have a bad period in his life. Silently banning someone is as cool as reviewing a person for a job then giving him no feedback. It's ghosting. Or gossiping behind my back. Or downvoting me without explanation. You can do dick moves against me, but if I find out I'm going to badmouth you and tell everyone what a loser you are.
elevenoh 7y ago
Brilliant.

by Antwan 7y ago

marksomnian 7y ago

Not an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/

kortilla 7y ago
No, he calls it slowbanning. Hellbanning is when you let them keep posting but other people can’t see the posts. Hackernews hellbans as well and you can see the comments from the deplorables if you turn on “showdead” in your profile.
- tylerchilds 7y ago
  I've always thought people might catch on, since no one is engaging with their takes. I'm curious if letting bots do some markov responses might keep them in the dark a little longer.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - atoav 7y ago
    I think nowadays you might catch on because the culpit might not be identified to your site with both their phone and their PC or something among these lines.
  - phpnode 7y ago
    I see it far less frequently now (thanks @dang!), but a few years ago it wasn't uncommon to see shadow banned HN users continuing to post for years, talking into the void. Sometimes I'd look into their post history and so many of them had been banned for utterly trivial reasons, it was pretty sad.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      If I see an account that's been shadowbanned for years, and has consistently posted appropriately for maybe several months, I report it via the contact address.
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      Would you have a profile or two handy that I can take a look at? I left showdead on for a while but found it useless in terms of coming across interesting comments from such users. Thx.
      - jquast 7y ago
        I seem to remember being pretty upset when I found out Terry Davis of Temple OS was being shadowbanned. Maybe it was just temporary for a short period or a single comment, but I didn't like it. I found this (related?) poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
        phpnode 7y ago
        Terry was permanently shadow-banned, the subject came up quite often. He suffered from schizophrenia and would make racist and paranoid comments about 80% of the time, but his remaining posts were often pretty technical / insightful. As the victim of an illness it seemed unkind that he was banned, but at the same time a lot of his output was obviously very offensive.
        redis_mlc 7y ago
        I only lurked on his comments, but I remember some to be very interesting and thought that his unique approach to OS design was food for thought Somebody should make a shrine of his lucid and technical posts. And also a book. Anybody know of such things?
- downerending 7y ago
  I think of myself as hard-nosed, but I don't think I could be this cruel to someone.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Reading said comments may convince you otherwise.
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  Oh wow! Thank you! The setting was on for me. (By default? Or maybe I turned it on.) I just turned it off. Thanks for this suggestion.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    Even if it was accidentally set on, one sees [dead] against shadow-banned, greyed-out comments.
- asjw 7y ago
  And that's the reason why arts don't follow these rules. Imagine Van Gogh on HN...
  - chinesempire 7y ago
    Unfortunately I can't upvote you I agree with the sentiment, shadowbanning is a passive aggressive way to hide communities problems under the carpet by hiding them from the public Banning is legit if done publicly with reasoning, so people can make a clear idea of what happened and why, like > you broke rule number 3 not when it is done just to keep "the community clean" without any explanation whatsoever I guess this is the reason why HN rules are so vague
- epanchin 7y ago
  I know that as shadowbanning. This is one of my favourite reddit posts on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_just_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
  - r00fus 7y ago
    IIRC hellbanning is a variant of shadowbanning that prevents easy discovery of the banned status by putting all suspect accounts into the same "hell" invisible to normal users. This works well if you have a network of fake accounts from a single "persona" or ring of personas - by all their indications they can't see their own posts are being ignored. Notice: it's almost the exact response to the persona management software problem [1] (aka bots). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      This also works incredibly well for cheaters in videogames. Give them their own queue with their own games with other cheaters to play against, and as long as nobody is cheating in a way that breaks the servers, they can play their own version of the game if they want without ruining the game for those who don't cheat.
      - sharken 7y ago
        Also used in the excellent TV series Mythic Quest :)
      - baddox 7y ago
        This reminds me of someone telling me that they are using cheat sites for an online Scrabble game because they suspected their opponent (a “friend”) was cheating. It’s hilarious to think that two humans are watching two instances of a likely optimal bot play against each other and rooting for their instance of the bot.
    - heartbeats 7y ago
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yep. And you can vouch for good comments from shadowbanned accounts, just as for manually flagged comments. Being rather paranoid, I check this account occasionally via Tor.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  > deplorables Isn't this a pretty mean thing to say? Just making an account from tor is enough to get you shadowbanned in hn.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's not true. Software filters sometimes kill such comments, but the accounts themselves are unaffected, and moderators review the killed comments and unkill the clearly good ones, and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters. Also, users often vouch for comments that have been killed in this way, which restores them.
    - dependenttypes 7y ago
      My main issue was with the deplorables comment. I actually quite like the HN system of vouching. > and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters I remember seeing you restore a post from someone who made their account via tor and their comments were auto-deleted. Their next post was autodeleted in the same way, so I presume that this feature is buggy (or was, as this was quite a while ago).
      - dang 7y ago
        There might be other explanations. For example, if an account shows signs of being connected to previous banned accounts, we might unkill a good post, but not immunize the account overall, until it establishes more of a track record. I'm glad you like the vouching system! I still feel like it's the best single change we've made to HN since pg retired.
- dang 7y ago
  We only do that when an account doesn't have much history on HN and there's evidence of spamming or trolling. For established accounts, we tell people we've banned them and why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadownban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- xorand 7y ago
  Let me check it. If you see this pls vote or reply.
  - ajscanlan 7y ago
    ack
squizzeak 7y ago
I always referred to this practice as “tarpitting”, I was surprised to see nobody else here does!
- manicdee 7y ago
  “Tarpitting” is a specific type of network-layer defence which is not related to degradation of service. A tarpit will typically stretch out response time to network-layer and some application-layer communications in order to waste wallclock time of spammers.

blantonl 7y ago

Yes, I run a large Xenforo discussion forum for my online community, and the term used here is called marking a user "discouraged" The system "slows down" the user experience, and also introduces random timeouts and other unpleasant user experiences.

ijidak 7y ago

Wow! That's a clever solution. I can see it only working when users don't know it exists. But when secret, I imagine this would be INCREDIBLY effective, as they'll blame the experience on the software, not their behavior.

Fnoord 7y ago
Playing devil's advocate here (hey, it is hellbanning, right?) What if a user pays for the content directly? Indirectly, they pay via ads. And if applied to networking with say QoS it is suddenly net neutrality though
- codebje 7y ago
  Net neutrality doesn't apply to content providers differentiating service, because they're not common carriers.

naravara 7y ago

That's pretty neat. It seems like it would be a perfect response to trolling, in particular, since a big part of that is the emotional high they get from getting a rise out of people. Slowing down that process would be sure to dull the dopamine hit. I can even imagine it tamping down "reply wars" and long arguments since you get more decompression time between impressions.

nebalee 7y ago

Another sinister way of doing this is having users solve captchas in order to comment and keeping a badness score of the troublemakers. Then pretend they failed the captchas at a rate proportionally to their score.

hanoz 7y ago
If that's going on then what on earth have I done to offend Google?
- Avamander 7y ago
  Are you blocking their tracking and fingerprinting? Do you sit behind a massive CG-NAT?
- chillfox 7y ago
  Adblock? I ended up switching mine off just to make the internet usable.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  Not using Chrome?
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Is it just me or has the web's compatibility with Firefox taken a nosedive recently? It used to just be my employer's HR software that was chrome-only, but in the last year my power utility website, apartment complex website, and even major websites like https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ (which I was trying to visit just 10 minutes ago) have broken in Firefox but not chrome. Badly, too. These aren't "the layout is different in FF and nobody noticed" bugs, they're "site infinitely redirects" bugs or "login button doesn't submit" bugs. Debug steps: turn off bitwarden, my only extension. Never helps. Ctrl+Shift+Del cookies. Never helps. Sigh, open chrome. Works first time. Is it just me or did the web up and dump firefox just when it started to get good? :(
    - 7y ago

jsjddbbwj 7y ago

Pretty sure this was used years ago here since it happened to me. If it happened to me now I would slowloris the hell out of the site. But years ago I didn't know better. :P (Yes I know I'm banned with this account as well)

jedberg 7y ago

We did the same thing at reddit. If someone was abusing the site we would redirect them at the load balancer to a single server with an extra sleep in it.

youerbt 7y ago
Then you did the same for your mobile users, degrading their experience until they use an app or leave.
- kick 7y ago
  'jedberg hasn't worked at reddit for years, it's pretty ridiculous to use "you" and "your" there. Further, he was never in marketing, he was basically just a sysadmin. There's really no charitable interpretation of your comment that isn't just "Hey, let's yell at a guy who isn't currently and has literally never been in a position to where he might have been responsible for Annoyance!"
  - youerbt 7y ago
    I just wanted a jab at reddit, cuz this week I can't even browse it because "this community is available in the app" (after years of marke... mental abuse of asking me to use an app). Nothing against the guy, he used "we", I used "you", I'm sure he is a cool guy, and I hope its the charitable interpretation.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      FWIW, I feel your pain as a daily user of the site myself. I hold no ill will against you for taking it out on me. When I left I specifically said that users can continue to blame me for all problems. :) I wasn't aware that some communities are now limited to the app only. I haven't run into any yet. But that sucks.
      - sharken 7y ago
        Try with every community, Reddit must really dislike mobile users. I do wonder if this scheme was introduced to monetize users, either way it sucks.

agumonkey 7y ago

I often wondered if one could slip some brain teaser in the process. Messengers made everybody wrte liek this .. but it you made the UI a bit difficult unless the author spells right. Maybe we'd see some global gain ?

anw 7y ago

This reminds me of the old VBulletin plugin "Miserable Users"[0]. We also had a community suffering from this problem (during the early 2000's). Bans would take care of a lot of problem users, but would just give energy to those truly out for blood, troll, bored, or very immature. We had one user get banned over a dozen times while we tried banning IPs, name regex or anything else we could think of. Finally, like you, we found that if we annoy them first, they get bored and shuffle off to some other, lower barrier place. Some of the nice features from that plugin (via the site) were: 1. Slow response (time delay) on every page (20 to 60 seconds default). 2. A chance they will get the "server busy" message (50% by default). 3. A chance that no search facilities will be available (75% by default). 4. A chance they will get redirected to another preset page (25% & homepage by default). 5. A chance they will simply get a blank page (25% by default). 6. Post flood limit increased by a defined factor (10 times by default). 7. If they get past all this okay, then they will be served up their proper page. * [0] https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258 https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258

cbd7f73 7y ago
This sounds pretty terrible when you think about how arbitrarily websites can determine you're a "bad user", but then again I like the idea of doing this programmatically for sites I myself want to stop using. Either that or a plugin to encourage productivity. Don't block social media sites, just turn them all into slow ineffective shitty websites.
- 300bps 7y ago
  If you don't already, you should browse HN with ShowDead turned on. There are people who have been banned for years and blissfully post comments several times per week completely unaware that almost nobody is seeing their comments. Often, the comments they're posting into the black hole are indicative of why they were banned in the first place but if I see a comment that is dead and it does add to the conversation then I vouch for it which un-deads it.
  - kcvv 7y ago

otakucode 7y ago

This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong. Because of clustering, removing the most-connected nodes results in almost no change to the general connectivity of other nodes. Nodes which are actually important are 'bridge' nodes that provide a means of moving between mostly-disconnected groups. I started wondering what these ideas looked like in an actual social graph, like society. What would 'bridge' nodes look like, and what would eliminating the connection to them look like and what effect would it have? I think a social bridge node would be something like a biker whose main social group is his motorcycle gang, but who also participates in his elderly aunts knitting circle once a month. He provides a means through which ideas and concepts and information can flow from biker gangs, and those connected to them, to a group of elderly ladies and those they are connected to. They are, almost by definition, tenuous links. Ones which, if someone had influence over the communication networks they were using, it might be very easy to disrupt. What consequences would there be to breaking those links on a large scale? In the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' situation, you can get the average number of links needed to get to Kevin Bacon up over a dozen by only removing a couple handfuls of bridge nodes. I think doing such a thing on a real social graph could be very quiet, possibly undetectable (drop messages from rarely-connecting pairs of users... they rarely connect, so how many of them will go through the trouble to re-establish contact? Have bridge nodes have something go haywire and they have to be issued a new phone number, 'their facebook got hacked', etc). And the consequence would be to freeze most things in place, or at least radically slow down any kind of large-scale social change. Disruption of the status quo on the scale of regime change in a government, say, requires buy-in from large and very mostly-disconnected segments of the population. If only pockets of people are interested in change, it doesn't matter how intensely they want the change to happen, it only matters if they can join forces with very disparate compatriots. If you had high-level control of communication networks and a vested interest in guarding the status quo against large-scale social upheaval, you could probably do it very quietly and without really needing anything more than the metadata of connectivity. No need to find out what ideas are being spread, you could just make sure ALL ideas remain trapped in their own little bubbles or that their spread is greatly contained.

martin_a 7y ago

Nice solution! This always reminds me of the "Trolldrossel" (troll throttle), which was/is a funny piece of science and technics to reduce spam and troll comments. It's in German, but maybe auto subtitles and DeepL can make you understand it: https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnisse-der-empirischen-trollforschung/ https://linus-neumann.de/2013/05/die-trolldrossel-erkenntnis...

msla 7y ago

"You're doing that too quickly. Please slow down."

b0rsuk 7y ago

This is clever and an effective way, but has a downside: it's like death penalty. You're giving the person no chance to improve, and there's risk ruining experience for someone who didn't deserve it.

blackearl 7y ago
But it's not life and death, it's like a private club. There's not much to be gained by assuming someone will change their ways and then become a member of the club who gives back.
- fragmede 7y ago
  There isn't much to be gained by simply hoping someone will magically decide to change there ways, but private clubs often have complex initiation rituals with the goal of pushing possible new members to conform to their standards of behavior. In this analogy though, HN "proceedings" are public, and membership is hardly exclusive as the barrier to register a new, undead account is low, so it's not like a private club, either.
- b0rsuk 7y ago
  Not necessarily assuming, but giving a chance. A person may have a bad period in his life. Silently banning someone is as cool as reviewing a person for a job then giving him no feedback. It's ghosting. Or gossiping behind my back. Or downvoting me without explanation. You can do dick moves against me, but if I find out I'm going to badmouth you and tell everyone what a loser you are.

elevenoh 7y ago

Brilliant.