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Ask HN: Do you agree with HN's shadow banning certain submissions?

• r721 4y ago
  It looks like this domain was submitted by spammers before: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aimmeghna https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aimmeghna https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Leemarose https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Leemarose ("showdead" setting should be set to yes, as all their posts are marked as "[dead]")
• mindcrime 4y ago
  It's not hard to figure out why. Just look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=analyticsindiamag.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=analyticsindiamag.com It's obviously the domain that's at issue, not you. And the reason the domain is apparently blacklisted is most likely because the mods judged a previously seen pattern of incredibly frequent submissions by a very small group of users to be spam. I mean, I'm just guessing as I'm not part of YC or anything, but based on past comments by the various principals here, and extrapolating a little bit, it seems pretty straightforward. But if you really want to know, I'd say go with what the guidelines[1] say: Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • unknownaccount 4y ago
    You're wrong, it's not obvious at all. Users here really do get shadowbanned from posting ALL links including ask HN posts. I know this for a fact because I'm one of them.
    • dang 4y ago
      mindcrime isn't wrong—he was talking about the OP's submissions, not yours. Submissions can get autokilled for lots of reasons. Sometimes it's that a domain was banned for spamming, which mindcrime correctly pointed out. Your account lost submission privileges for a different reason: you were posting a plethora of unsubstantive Ask HNs that users were flagging (and in fact repeatedly complained to us about).
      • unknownaccount 4y ago
        >your account lost submission privileges for a different reason: you were posting a plethora of unsubstantive Ask HNs that users were flagging Well that's a convenient explanation. But doesn't make any sense. On the day I "lost my submission privileges" I hadn't posted any Ask HN which had been flagged or could even be remotely considered unsubstantiated for at least 11 days. I already stopped talking about those topics entirely. (Not that I believe any of my posts were unsubstantiated, as they all affect internet users and the future of the internet at large) I lost it directly after posting a story critical of the US government(which got 80 points) and then was retroactively punished for posts I made in the past. Is that how this works? When you want to take someone out you look through their history for something they submitted weeks ago in the past and use it as your justification to ban them in the present?
        • dang 4y ago
          It's simpler than that. We got complaints about your posts being unsubstantive, took a look at your submission history, saw that the complaints were correct, and removed submission privileges from your account.
      • unknownaccount 4y ago
        Furthermore, if all it takes for you to take away someone's posting permissions is a few flags/complaints (That anyone with a bot farm who operates multiple accounts can submit) you should really grow a fucking spine. Thanks for confirming that government operatives can infact silence any user here, just the mechanism is a little different than I originally hypothesized, instead of having a backdoor throttling permissions all they need is a few proxy accounts instead, amazing!
• unknownaccount 4y ago
  They also shadowban your whole account from posting submissions entirely. After posting a controversial story about the former world chess champion being tortured in an American jail I am not allowed to post any link anymore period.
  • Grimburger 4y ago
    Not being able to post isn't "shadowbanning", in fact it's the opposite, being able to post but generally not realising that it went to /dev/null Have you considered emailing and asking about why this is happening?
    • unknownaccount 4y ago
      Im able to post but it doesnt appear for other users. the link appears on my profile when Im signed in but others cant see it. the posts dont have a "discuss" button or unique url at all. I havent asked yet, but the timing does seem awful fishy, immediately after posting a popular controversial submission.
      • behnamoh 4y ago
        That's exactly my point in this thread. This shadowbanning needs to stop.
        • unknownaccount 4y ago
          • dang 4y ago
            No government operatives have permissions of any kind on HN. We don't know any government operatives nor have we ever heard from any*. I assume HN is much too small a fish for them to fry. You're overestimating HN's real-world impact by a long shot (but underestimating page views btw! it's more like 8M hits a day - maybe 10M if you include the API). Plenty of posts on HN are critical of megacorps, government, status quos, and/or media narratives. You might be closer to the mark with your phrase "sowing resentment", though—that sounds like ideological battle, flamewar, and other low-quality internet noise, and those are indeed things we don't want here. Not because we're trying to preserve status quos—we aren't—but because we're trying to run a forum for curious conversation, and resentful rallying poisons that utterly. * other than from law enforcement on rare occasions - maybe once every 2-3 years, if that - in connection with some investigation or other. Never anything political or ideological though.
• superchroma 4y ago
  It's definitely not the system I would build. There are certainly valid anti-spam concerns, but I think shadowbans aren't an accessible or appropriate way to go about addressing these concerns, and, based on the anecdotes I've seen, this approach affects a number of legitimate users. Additionally, I see a lot of throwaway accounts, which doesn't inspire confidence in the system as it is.
  • dang 4y ago
    What do you think would work better than shadowbanning for spam? > this approach affects a number of legitimate users Yes it does, but so will any such system. They all have false positives. Perfection isn't an option, especially because it's beyond impossible to manually review everything. The best we can do is try to correct those cases as much as we can. Usually accompanied by a sincere, hand-typed apology. As for throwaway accounts, people create those for lots of different reasons—some legit, some not so much.
• techdragon 4y ago
  Just weighing in as someone who has submitted next to nothing, but also who dislikes dark patterns generally. I don't think this is the sort of situation where hiding the reality of what has happened makes sense (point 2). If your spamming HN you probably have the smarts to also automate checking if your spam account has been banned (shadow or otherwise) by also automating a check that loads HN when not logged in. I personally, don't see the point in hiding this from a submitting user. I wouldn't like it if it happened to me, and I wouldn't expect it to be an effective technical countermeasure to much spam (though I concede there may be evidence to the contrary on this that represents fact instead of my opinions) As to point 1, I don't know how hard it would be to expose some of the information. I don't expect the moderation team (hi dang! keep being so awesome!, this isn't even sarcastic, what you manage to do genuinely awes me, I know I couldn't manage to moderate HN.) to have the time to post individual comments about every ban, but it does feel like something that could perhaps be made less opaque. If you know it was banned/auto-dead due to a specific rule, then thats better than just having no idea. With that information I know I would feel slightly less intimidated asking hn@ycombinator.com in an email why my submission was dead/banned, that email goes from "why my did you block my thing" to "I see my submission ran into this rule that has nothing to do with me personally, I just thought it was cool and wanted to either know why, or if my cool thing could get given a second chance" ... which feels a lot less confrontational to me. I try to think about the "ops burden" with this sort of thing, there may be good reasons why things ended up the way they are, but that doesn't mean things couldn't improve and so its at least worth the discussion from time to time like this, even if the original reasons hold and for whatever reason, the current behaviour is still the optimal one for now.
  • dang 4y ago
    > If your spamming HN you probably have the smarts to also automate checking if your spam account has been banned (shadow or otherwise) by also automating a check that loads HN when not logged in. That's very far from the case. It's still an effective, indeed indispensable countermeasure. Without it HN (or at least /newest) would be overrun with spam. A minority figure it out and email us, and then we explain to them what happened. Sometimes they promise to change their behavior and we unban them. Sometimes I ask them first to send an example of an article they would like to post that they think is substantive and on topic for HN. Then, oftentimes, I have to find a polite way to explain to them that it's still spam. Usually that's something like "our readers are looking for something else; it's not in your interest to post this sort of article because they will flag it and use unkind words like 'spam'". I hate having to answer those emails because I hate having to reject people (or rather their work) over and over again, but I do it on the principle that every sincere inquiry deserves a response. Dropping shadowbanning for spam would massively increase those emails. That would probably break me.