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Shadow banning is a form of gaslighting because users expect their comments to be seen and responded to, however they are invisible. This is confusing and an a

• jjoonathan 6y ago
  It's completely fair to stop participating as a result. That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that in small communities admin time is at a premium and gaslighting, even if it's occasionally abused, is a force-multiplier that can make the difference between a community having enough moderation to survive vs spinning off into toxicity and turning into a ghost town. What I object to is that it seems to increasingly be used as a "best practice," to be applied universally without weighing pros and cons, rather than as a shitty reality to be applied minimally. For instance, in the case of youtube, we can place a very low upper bound on the value they're getting out of this tool, because it's being used to enforce an automated blanket policy that everyone already knows about (certainly everyone intent on link spamming, in any case). HN's shadowbanning is going to be good or evil on a per-instance basis, which makes it difficult for me to judge, while youtube's shadowbanning (as it relates to enforcing obvious automated blanket policies) cannot be good and is therefore much easier to judge.