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Hacker News does it. Reddit does it sitewide. Individual moderators do it sitewide. Shadowbanning is an essential tool for moderation, for dealing with trolls,
by graeme 5y ago
Hacker News does it. Reddit does it sitewide. Individual moderators do it sitewide. Shadowbanning is an essential tool for moderation, for dealing with trolls, spammers, abusive people.
You can argue the tool is being used too widely by Facebook, but it is silly to pontificate against the practice as a whole.
You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet.
- omginternets 5y ago>You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet. Respectfully, speak for yourself.
- lmilcin 5y agoPeople don't seem to understand the ramifications. I prefer truth to being enslaved into conformance by "the algorithm".
- strictfp 5y agoI think the anonymous internet was way better. People tend to group anyway, so it's not like everyone is forced into the same room.
- seattle_spring 5y agoIf the_donald proved anything in 2015 and 2016, the loudest most malicious folks intentionally ram themselves into all communities. The suggestion that bad actors will keep to themselves is the absolute opposite of reality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rtkwe 5y agoEvery platform that tries "we're 100% free speech no censorship or moderation" winds up learning the same lesson which is that their problem isn't with moderation it's that you don't like the kind of moderation decisions that are being made. Parler ran this gauntlet on fast forward [0], Gettr did it too [1], places that have tried holding on to the free speech absolutist position eventually burn to the ground in one way or another like the various children of 4chan. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle... [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210825/17204647438/trumpist-gettr-social-network-continues-to-speed-run-content-moderation-learning-curve-bans-then-unbans-roger-stone.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210825/17204647438/trump...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rubyist5eva 5y agoPeople use these things as alternatives to SMS or even the telephone (for audio chat). It would be absolutely ludicrous if telecoms started shadowbanning their customers, if Facebook wants to act like one it should play by the same rules.
- lmilcin 5y agoHold your horses. It is not "the internet". It is private chat. You need to understand difference between communication that is meant to be public from one that is meant to be private. Law makes clear distinction.
- cmeacham98 5y agoFacebook is not an outlier in this case: Reddit shadowbans affect DMs too. Not sure why you brought the law up, as far as I know what FB is doing is 100% legal.
- lmilcin 5y agoDo you not understand what private communication is and how it is different from Reddit?
- cmeacham98 5y agoSerious question: What's the difference, for your definition of "private communication", between a FB Messenger message and Reddit DM? I can't think of any reason one would be considered private and the other not.
- lmilcin 5y agoSame way I can expect my phone operator to not change meaning of my texts between me and my wife but allow me to block messages from strangers I don't want to be bothered by.
- cmeacham98 5y agoThis doesn't answer my question, which I will restate: Why is FB Messenger 'private' while Reddit DMs are 'not private'?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoFacebook is not a common carrier. You aren't having a private conversation on any of its properties. You're communicating with Facebook and they relay non-public messages to recipients.
- pope_meat 5y ago>You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet. Respectfully disagree. Watching things get disappeared on Reddit sent me in to an anxiety spiral. I'll take goatse links over that shit any day of the week.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoGoatse links would be the least of your problems. I’m imagining my Gmail account without the spam filter. Everything showing up in my inbox, not just the stuff in my spam folder, but also all the stuff they silently drop that I don’t even see. Email would be unusable.
- account42 5y ago> I’m imagining Imagination often does not match reality. I have a (non-Gmail) account that is littered over the web, in git repositories and in multiple leaks. I don't silently drop any emails - the only server-side anti-spam measure I have a regexp to reject the usual spam subjects at submission time, which for normal senders will result in a notification to the user. The amount of spam is hardly at a level that would be anywhere close to making Email unusable.
- bobmaxup 5y agoI can't think of any direct messaging applications that moderate content.
- slackfan 5y agoI miss the uncensored internet, before it went all 2.0-shaped.
- Longlius 5y agoNo, I actually really would. I grew up with the uncensored internet and it was, on the whole, less abusive and manipulative than today's internet culture.
- stouset 5y agoIt’s way more likely to me that this is simply because the Internet used to be the (nearly) exclusive domain of people who were culturally like you: educated, technologically sophisticated, libertarian-leaning affluent white males. Not that you’re necessarily any or all of these things, but if you were around for “the uncensored Internet” you likely felt comfortable with that as your cultural in-group. I say this as someone who is many of these things, and was also around in the “good old days”. These days people of every cultural background get a seat at the table. That changes things. And that’s to say nothing of the advent of professional, anonymous astroturfing and disinformation campaigns. Going back would be an abject disaster.
- ionwake 5y agoYou didn’t make a point in your reply.
- stouset 5y agoYou may have missed it in your rush to downvote me.
- dcow 5y agoI think I missed it too. I didn't even downvote.
- stouset 5y agoConversation at dinner with a group of your friends and their friends is going to function a lot more smoothly than one at a table of atheists, christian fundamentalists, Jews, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Americans, Russians, Chinese, Tibetans, Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, liberals, conservatives, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, fascists, anarchists, environmentalists, trans people, cis people, homophobes, racists, sexists, “the woke”, narcissists, sociopaths, frauds, manipulators, trolls, geniuses, average people, and imbeciles. The Internet might have seemed “better” back then and like it didn’t need moderation. From many people’s perspective it probably was. But that was likely a function of the reality that most people on the Internet at the time had a lot in common with one another. We don’t get the benefit of that luxury today.
- rnd0 5y ago>You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet. I remember the uncensored internet -it was vastly superior to what we have now. Vastly.
- HeckFeck 5y agoFor one, you could tell idiots (whoever you decided they were) exactly how they felt, without fearing retribution IRL. Keeping online identities separate from the real world worked both ways. It protected rational critics, trolls and shitposters alike. The problem never was anonymity or freedom of expression. No. Social media is when life online went into freefall. Curiously, a pillar of its business model is melding real life with internet identity.
- uniqueid 5y agoSo were the people who used it. Times have changed. Maybe the last time you went to a bar you saw the bouncer eject some hulking meth-head, drool dribbling down his bib, for getting handsy with strangers and throwing a bottle at the bartender. Well, that meth-head has a social media presence today too.
- rnd0 5y agoNot really -usenet of old had stalkers and harassers; that's how the killfile was invented. That is a very, very good analogy, however. The internet of old had a wider variety of establishments that you could go to. If you wanted a rough-and-tumble dive bar experience it was there. If you wanted a polished experience it was there too. The effect facebook and other social media has had on the internet is the same effect that walmart had on small mom and pop stores -you can still find one here and there but no, not really. Incidentally, for all of the censorship and increased barriers to entry (for creating forums) your drooling meth head still presents a danger in the form of doxxing, inciting riots (Jan 6th, any one?) and harassing people.
- uniqueid 5y agoSure, Usenet had its antisocial users, and quite a few seedy groups, too. My point is that it's worse today... much worse. In the early 90s the net was mostly students, profs, tech workers and professionals. Think of the scariest person you've ever met (really, take a moment and actually do it) and ask if he or she would have been online in 1995; the chances are they would not. But they are now.
- kortilla 5y agoThis is private chat. Get off your high horse.
- atok1 5y agoI am sorry, but the uncensored internet is the only type of acceptable internet. Anything else is just gov or corp interests.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoAn uncensored internet would become an unusable cesspit.
- skissane 5y ago> Shadowbanning is an essential tool for moderation Does it really work? A lot of people have no trouble working out that it has happened to them. The theory is that a troublemaker won't realise they've been banned, and so will continue sending their trouble into the void instead of coming back as a new account to cause more trouble that everyone else can see. In practice, it doesn't take long for the troublemaker to work out what is going on, so this only slows them down slightly at best. For some major sites, people have even created shadowban detection tools, so even troublemakers who are too clueless to work it out for themselves can discover it. This site only really has half-shadowbanning. A lot of people have showdead on, read the dead comments too, and vouch for interesting/constructive ones. Maybe that works for this site; but even if that is true, it doesn't really tell us how well a pure shadowban implementation, without showdead, works. Very few sites with shadowbanning have an equivalent to showdead.
- malwarebytess 5y agoSurprisingly yes. It does work. There are some who figure it out eventually, but not before they have spent months wasting their time and saving mine. I reserve it for people I believe will ban evade or have in the past.
- Dylan16807 5y agoSecretly blocking specific messages is very different from a shadowban, though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]