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I've barely touched reddit and cannot speak for them, but I do run large forums and can speak for why I silently ban. Most forum software has the notion of "Se
by buro9 15y ago
I've barely touched reddit and cannot speak for them, but I do run large forums and can speak for why I silently ban.
Most forum software has the notion of "Send to Coventry".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry
I send people to coventry when I feel that they are unlikely to change their behaviour were I to inform them that their behaviour is going to lead to a permaban.
Specifically, if people are spamming and trolling, they get sent there without notification. In my experience, any spammer or troll is simply going to redouble their efforts if they become aware that they're going to be banned... but if they think they are successfully spamming and trolling then they quietly move along.
The harder bit is determining whether a spammer or troll is a spammer or troll.
There are the obvious spammers (penis enlargement, viagra, etc) and obvious trolls (Slashdot has had some famous ones). But what of someone who wants to sell something and is just over-enthusiastic, and lacking in netiquette?
That's where it's harder, but once you get to a certain size and you're dealing with perhaps hundreds of reported posts per day, then you're quite likely to be more heavy-handed, and less polite when you're working your way through the backlog.
That's when you offend someone who actually would've reacted well to just being spoken to.
So that's the why... and the problem is probably more indicative of a stretched set of moderators.
- jerrya 15y agoThis may come off as a bit bitter, but there is an enormous difference between "Send to Coventry" in the wiki schoolyard sense and shadow banning. The schoolyard kids are a lot less cowardly and passive aggressive than you. Ostracism itself is not a passive aggressive act, it's blatant and obvious. (And in some cases, the silent treatment is considered a form of psychological abuse. http://www.google.com/search?q=silent+treatment+psychological+abuse http://www.google.com/search?q=silent+treatment+psychologica...) But shadow banning is purposefully spiteful way to waste your contributors time and energy, precisely because it is not obvious. And so, if you mistakenly shadow ban otherwise good users (and what test does not suffer from false positives) than you can truly have abused and damaged a member of your community. It really isn't something you should take lightly as ha ha, I've sent them to Coventry. It's your community to manage as you see fit, but I think a more ethical way to treat people is to specifically state straight out they've been banned.
- buro9 15y agoAbsolutely. Which is why I outlined that it's important to only apply shadow banning/send to coventry to those who are unambiguously going to redouble their efforts to spam and troll. If in doubt, have a word with the person first.
- jerrya 15y agoI guess I don't have a real problem with the way you implement your behavior, I think my difficulty is that this is not like "Send to Coventry", but something actually much harsher. In Dennehy's case, I would be annoyed with him as a blogwhore, but I wouldn't have classified him as a spammer as reddit did and defended. Reddit and others defend it as "it works", that's an end justifies the means argument and mainly speaks to the woes of our mad skillz, not to the virtue of the method. And since you do speak to the person first, there is no way I can have a problem with that.
- bunderbunder 15y agoI know it's harsh, but that's a spot I'm not inclined to worry much about. Moderating on the Internet can be hard work, and stressful, and is frequently thankless, and almost always unpaid. They generally deserve a lot more slack than they get. I see a lot of unreasonable demands placed on moderators, and one of them is expecting unpaid people to sink their spare time into going out of the way to be supportive of presumptuous efforts to drum up free publicity on someone else's dime. Even if the person in question might respond well to being called out, it's unlikely that the moderators would come to see them as a spammer if there wasn't some sort of presumptuous effort to drum up free publicity going on.