7 ms·

Shadowbans are bad for discourse, and here’s why

27 points by rhaksw 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago
Is there a way to see shadowbanned posts? I have "showdead" turned on, I see Evon Latrail's posts every day. Is "shadowban" something different than what happened to Evon?
- c22 4y ago
  Showdead shows all dead posts, both those from shadowbanned accounts and individual posts that have received negative upvotes.
aliqot 4y ago
Given HN is often the enlightened discourse space, while having quite the amount of shadowbans itself, does that mean shadowbans are the avante-garde good? if not, why do we still do it?
- rhaksw 4y ago
  Good question. Discourse forums do not do it, at least not by default. And isn't Mastodon's content moderation reviewable? So there are exceptions.
- sph 4y ago
  Given how many shadow banned accounts keep going on with their tirades well after they've been banned, it means it is good to keep them. I suppose some just need the outlet to write whatever inane idiotic crap passes through their mind even if nobody can engage with them. Every comment from a shadow banned account is one dang doesn't have to waste time moderating.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    You may not want their speech (HN management does not either) but that doesn't make shadowbans good for discourse. It's good to limit speech you do not want sure. But not good for getting alternative views on things.
    - sph 4y ago
      It's not alternative views that are shadow banned. It's people on a Rust post ranting about the current US president, for example. It's Terry A. Davis (may he rest in peace) throwing insults at Jews and black people during one of his fits on this forum. Not all ideas are not all equally worthy. The hard problem always is "who decides what is worth and what isn't?", but "everything is worth something" is too simplistic an answer, in my opinion.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - roflyear 4y ago
        > Not all ideas are not all equally worthy. The hard problem always is "who decides what is worth and what isn't?", but "everything is worth something" is too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. We agree - I'd just like easier to understand rules.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > Given how many shadow banned accounts keep going on their unacceptable tirades well after they've been banned, means it is good to keep them. This position completely ignores the harms that come from non-disclosure of moderation decisions. Note that while the title of this post mentions shadowbans, its discussion is about undisclosed or shadow content moderation.
    - fellowniusmonk 4y ago
      I comment and post rarely but this account has been active for nearly 12 years, I was shadowbanned very early on for unknown reasons and someone vouched for me only in this last couple of years since I was very nearly a lurker, on review I was told there didn't seem to be anything warranting a shadowban in my comment history. Despite this experience, one that you might expect to turn me off from using HN, I am extremely pro shadow ban as a tool to protect this forums utility. Both here and in my professional online life. There are many places online where you can spend nearly infinite time writing and researching thorough rebuttals only to have them washed away in the sea of low content memes. It's nice to have a place where the gold is still in the comments and articles (as interesting as they are) serve primarily as a prompt and conversation starter for deeply knowledgeable people to share. The utility of having a thoughtful and knowledge filled space has been far higher to me then the marginal value of "having my voice heard on this account" during that period.
      - manuelmoreale 4y ago
        I had a similar experience to yours. Lurker for 90% of the time, only comment here and there and never spammed linked unless they were pertinent to the discussion I was commenting on. At some point I got shadowbanned and I only noticed because no one ever replied or interacted with any of my comments. It was easily solved with an email to dang asking if there was a reason why that happened. If I broke a rule, I obviously want to know because I do care about following guidelines here. It got quickly resolved and that was a very pleasing experience. But that's because I was able to ask questions to a human and a human took time to answer them. I still think shadowbanning is a good tool and a necessary one when it comes to moderation, especially because contrary to the real world, here and on most online comunities, anyone can join. IRL no random person can just join your friends circle and become part of the conversation. This is an almost exlusively online issue and all the various forms of banning are the only tools at our disposal to deal with the issue. And letting people think they're part of the comunity while preventing them to do harm is a good compromise. I'll wait for the day when a clever dev decides to use GPT to make a bot whose sole purpose is to engage with shadowbanned account.
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    What proportion of shadow banned accounts continue to do this on any given day though? Conservatively I would put it at half. I'm not suggesting shadow bans are without merit but often you have to look really far back through some comment histories before you have an "aha!" moment. I'm also not fully versed in the way this place works, but people go through shitty periods in life and there should be systems to account for that.
    - rhaksw 4y ago
      > What proportion of shadow banned accounts continue to do this on any given day though? There's an example linked in the post where someone continued posting on Reddit for years before they noticed. It's also quite common for subreddit shadowbans to go unnoticed. And most people never notice the shadow removal of individual comments. > people go through shitty periods in life and there should be systems to account for that. I completely agree. Undisclosed moderation short circuits any ability to forgive. The sanctioned user will never know to appeal. Hiding the punishment is like taking away the judiciary or removing habeas corpus. There is no trial, it's straight to jail and you aren't even told.
      - sph 4y ago
        > Undisclosed moderation short circuits any ability to forgive On here, the vouch feature is a kind of forgiveness, if you will. If you are shadow banned but you say something interesting one lucid day, people will vouch you and engage with you. This is why I browse HN with showdead on.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Given HN is often the enlightened discourse space that's only the byproduct of enforcing herd mentality. Restricted groups of individuals, expressing a restricted group of opinions in a restricted environment where only a restricted set of well defined behaviour is allowed tend to disagree less. But that's not how a discourse usually takes place or what its purpose is. Discourse takes place among different people expressing vastly different opinions in vastly different ways, mostly due to different cultural backgrounds, that generate a lot of conflict, to find a shared common ground. Repressing the conflicting part means repressing the most important part of the discourse, leaving the door open only to the shallow exchange of information. That can be useful, but won't change anyone's mind. It's the reason why cults tend to stick together even in the craziest of situations. They feel they belong to something only they understand deeply, while everybody else is wrong or insane or stupid or corrupted. For example: HN guidelines states "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." But ideological and political are not the same thing, they are, in fact, one on the opposite sides of the spectrum of the other and not as in "two sides of the same coin" but as in "one is bad, the other is the opposite of bad". Asking people to not engage in political debates, it's itself political. It is the oldest political ideology ever existed: hypocrisy.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Great comment thank you for that. Sums up my thoughts on this well. I intentionally seek out people who disagree with me, but I find that people generally do not like talking to those who disagree with them. Hard to find those conversations. On HN those conversations are heated by their nature so you get shut down by mods. Nanny state to some degree. I also believe if you are not allowed to be rude to people they tend to find their positions are tenable when they aren't. I don't mean harassment, but rough dialogue. There is a line certainly.
- c22 4y ago
  Hn allows users to see shadowbanned content using the showdead flag and allows specific comments to be vouched back to life by the userbase that has this feature enabled. I think this dynamic makes a huge difference (and ironically probably keeps those on the borderline from realizing they are shadowbanned at all).
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    All it means is that people with unpopular views are punished without being told. That is neither good for them nor good for the community.
    - c22 4y ago
      I read with showdead on and often traverse a user's post history when I've determined that they've been shadowbanned. In almost all cases the root activity that caused the ban was not an unpopular view, but rather a series of abusive comments. Sometimes it was a brief abberation and many of the user's subsequent posts are acceptable (though often still low quality). More often than not, the user continues to be abusive and break site guidelines. In the realm of non-shadowbanned dead posts I do see a lot of community penalizing of merely unpopular opinions.
      - maxbond 4y ago
        I can corroborate this.
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        Completely disagree. Usually (I'd say 60-40 or 70-30) you find that they generally submit perfectly fine content but once upon a time ago they got embroiled in an escalating flame war and made the mistake of not realizing that when arguing for the minority viewpoint the bar for that constitutes "abusive" and "break site rules" is far, far lower. If I had a penny for every worthless in-group signaling comment, worthless reference rebuttal and worthless assumption of bad faith that gets cut slack because it's in favor of the "right things" when adjacent comments on the other side are not I would be very rich. Edit: I look at unoffensive comments to see why that user was shadow banned and when I see an "out there" comment I go down the rabbit hole to see if that is a characteristic comment or a one-off so I think I get a pretty good spread.
- roflyear 4y ago
  They aren't good. HN does it because they only want very specific speech here on the forum. This is outlined in the rules.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  Many years ago I was rate-limited to five comments a day on HN. It took me ages to figure out that this was a punishment and not a bug; the only indication I had was that comment number six would be rejected with a cryptic error after I wrote it out and hit Send. This was probably because I made some unnecessarily angry comments. Fair enough, that's on me and I would have tried to correct myself if I had been told. I finally reached out to HN support and got a very nice personal email telling me that there was no record of what I did to earn this punishment, but they'd lift it if I promised to behave myself and not do it again. I asked why I wasn't just told that in the first place, and was told that if I had been a deliberately malicious spammer/troll (which I clearly wasn't, whatever my mistakes) then the cryptic punishment would have discouraged me from making a sockpuppet account. So I promised to behave in the future, and received no response and no lifting of the ban. Maybe they lost my email. I honestly don't know if the ban is still in place; I got frustrated and mostly stopped reading HN, so mission accomplished, I guess. Edit: Nope, it is. Just hit it now.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    You can email the mods to appeal such actions. hn@ycombinator.com
pubby 4y ago
I agree with the author that frequent shadowbanning is harmful to communities, but I think he's missing some nuance. First, not every member of a website is trying to be part of its community, so it's unfair to expect the community to care about them in return. Second, most people are not rational, and some people are mentally ill. If you have a person with schizophrenia posting, transparent moderation won't be heeded in the way that you want.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  Upvote for the dissenting view which should be heard. Your two points both came up in the replies to my post, yet no example was ever given. Do you have some intractable cases to share? In my replies I also suggest that shadow removal of a toxic comment can also be perceived by the user as support for their views. I've yet to hear the harms of that possibility refuted.
  - pubby 4y ago
    Looking at Hackernews, some people create accounts solely to promote their own websites, but do not interact or care about the community in other ways. You could call this spam, but I don't think most of the posters think of themselves as being spammers. Still, their presence brings the average quality of the site down. From what I understand, HN typically shadowbans these people from submitting links to their own website, but does not silence them in other ways. They can still share their views and be heard, just not for self-promotion. It might seem like a good idea to tell them this up-front, but keep in mind that most of them do not care about the community, and the ones that do care more about their own self-promotion than HN. If you tell them that they're banned for not participating, do you really expect them to do a good job all of a sudden? Chances are they'll just post low-effort fascimile comments in an attempt to blend in. Keep in mind these are not spambots. Nobody is trying to be malevolent. But working with these people isn't always a worthwhile effort. For a concrete example, I recall r/tabletopgamedesign having a problem of self-promotion (and I was part of the problem!). Lots of the users there post to promote their own board-game business venture. The mods tell them this isn't allowed without participating, so they instead post low-effort comments and self-insert their content when possible. e.g. if you ask them how to do something, they'll start with "Well, when designing (INSERT PERSONAL BUSINESS), I took (APPROACH) and found that (BLAH BLAH). You can read more (AT MY WEBSITE)". This drops the overall quality of conversation. Regarding my second point, someone like Terry Davis is a prime example. Terry liked to post nonsense in threads because of his schizophrenia. He was banned several times, but would always come back with new accounts. Shadowbanning him seemed to be the ideal solution, as he was content with writing comments that would not be seen. Unlike the self-promotion people, he was not trying to be heard. Rather, he was trying to speak, and did not want that taken away from him. It's no different than those crackpots who write pages and pages on their own personal homepages that nobody reads [1][2]. They just wanna write. [1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts [2] https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/
_8j50 4y ago
I have been on HN ~5yrs and only like last week I started getting an auto-ban of sorts about "you are posting too fast" even when I post ~15min+ between posts and then it takes something like 6-24 hours (haven't kept trying to measure it) to reset. Been meaning to do ask hn post about this but that counts against my daily allowance of like two posts (hope this one makes it lol). I think moderation (in general not at HN specifically) should be transparent, truthful and measured. But at the same time, if you don't pay to use a site you have no say in how it is operated. I would like to know if I said things that are not welcome at hn? Or perhaps I broke rules without knowing it? I try my best to be reapectful and kind to others but I also do get angry at some posts and let emotion get the best of me sometimes. But if I did something unacceptable I cannot stop doing it unless I am told what that thing is, so shadowbans work against the moderator's interests if the moderated subject is being cooperative. At HN: the decision to allow political and controversial non-technical posts also means accepting undesirable or controversial views (even if they get downvotes) else you are just creating an echo chamber of ideas. I had a post where every hour or so when I checked it goes upvote then down vote all day long because it was controversial I guess but I thought I simply had a strong opinion on a subject instead of being hostile or posting something irrelevant or invaluable to the discussion when I started noticing the restriction. But like I said, I have no qualms on any moderation decisions on a free to access site. But also, I am very supportive of solutions to scale moderation. I really think paid human moderators can be scaled for many online communities and social networks. Why isn't FB hiring people for $12+/hr to moderate stuff? The idea that it is either humans or ML as opposed to humans working with ML is silly. Or maybe they are already doing that at major social networks. I always wondered why reddit for example doesn't allow subreddit members to have paid subscriptions to support moderators.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Why isn't FB hiring people for $12+/hr to moderate stuff? FB does employ humans moderators, with great mental toll apparently: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382
  - _8j50 4y ago
ericbarrett 4y ago
I have moderated large internet spaces. There are people with severe mental issues who, when confronted with direct moderation, will make it their sole purpose in life to ruin the forum. I'm talking 20 hours a day of spam, ban evasion, doxxing, DDoSes, direct messaging other members, and whatever else an intelligent-but-disturbed human can come up with, solely dedicated to ruining the space the moderators are trying to protect. Shadowbanning is like a dodge—instead of head-butting such an explosive personality, you let them slide by and rant on into the ether. It can be, and is, abused, but it is also extremely effective and time-efficient when dealing with "the weirdos." (Generally they will go away after some time not getting any engagement, positive or negative.) That can make or break a volunteer force, and if it's a paid moderation team the cost reduction is real.
- jokoon 4y ago
  There should be laws that allow to sue and effectively punish those things. Yes, it could be abused by authorities, but it should be possible to sue someone if there are enough proof. Big online platforms might also be able to clean a lot of trolls too.
  - LastNevadan 4y ago
    Probably, people with mental health issues that spam fora with nonsense fifteen hours a day are judgement-proof. They have no assets to attach that would justify the effort of legal action against them.
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    I don’t think that juice is worth the squeeze. Besides, imagine whatever laws you think would help here and now imagine a toxic actor making it their life mission to provoke everyone on your forum but without breaking your imagined rules. You’re back where you started but now you have overreaching laws.
- xg15 4y ago
  Sounds to me, a better approach would be transparent but automated moderation. Automated moderation would need some way to reliably answer the following questions: - are two accounts controlled by the same user? - are two posts talking about the same topic? Then an approach would be to publicly issue a "content ban": User X is prohibited from talking about topic Y. Then use bots to enforce the ban and identity sock puppets or alt accounts if the user tried to evade the ban. I think with the current progress in language models, we have a much better chance to answer those questions with usable accuracy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tengbretson 4y ago
The whole concept of shadow banning has always seemed ethically and possibly legally dubious to me. I understand that it is highly effective and I can't think of a more efficient way to lower moderation burden, but it seems to me like it is a violation of an implicit contract. If a user pays for an online experience (either directly or via interaction with ads) I don't see how the provider is justified in accepting that payment while serving them a counterfeit of the experience they agreed to. If someone is misbehaving in a restaurant you kick them out. You don't get to take their money and serve them sawdust.
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  This is incoherent. Every site has a TOS which is violated by those who were banned. Imagining a fake 'contract' exists because you viewed ads is 'dubious'
  - tengbretson 4y ago
    I understand you may be ignorant to it, but an implied contract is not a concept I just made up. It is not a stretch at all to view the interactions between a website and a user through the lens of an implied-in-fact contract. If you are interested, here is a good place to start reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract Sites have TOS, and users in violation of the TOS should be banned. This is not the same as a shadowban. I don't believe it is within the rights of a site to secretly claim that a user is in violation of the TOS and then punitively altering the user experience they agreed to without giving them any notice.

27 points by rhaksw 4y ago

Is there a way to see shadowbanned posts? I have "showdead" turned on, I see Evon Latrail's posts every day. Is "shadowban" something different than what happened to Evon?

c22 4y ago
Showdead shows all dead posts, both those from shadowbanned accounts and individual posts that have received negative upvotes.

aliqot 4y ago

Given HN is often the enlightened discourse space, while having quite the amount of shadowbans itself, does that mean shadowbans are the avante-garde good? if not, why do we still do it?

rhaksw 4y ago
Good question. Discourse forums do not do it, at least not by default. And isn't Mastodon's content moderation reviewable? So there are exceptions.
sph 4y ago
Given how many shadow banned accounts keep going on with their tirades well after they've been banned, it means it is good to keep them. I suppose some just need the outlet to write whatever inane idiotic crap passes through their mind even if nobody can engage with them. Every comment from a shadow banned account is one dang doesn't have to waste time moderating.
- roflyear 4y ago
  You may not want their speech (HN management does not either) but that doesn't make shadowbans good for discourse. It's good to limit speech you do not want sure. But not good for getting alternative views on things.
  - sph 4y ago
    It's not alternative views that are shadow banned. It's people on a Rust post ranting about the current US president, for example. It's Terry A. Davis (may he rest in peace) throwing insults at Jews and black people during one of his fits on this forum. Not all ideas are not all equally worthy. The hard problem always is "who decides what is worth and what isn't?", but "everything is worth something" is too simplistic an answer, in my opinion.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - roflyear 4y ago
      > Not all ideas are not all equally worthy. The hard problem always is "who decides what is worth and what isn't?", but "everything is worth something" is too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. We agree - I'd just like easier to understand rules.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > Given how many shadow banned accounts keep going on their unacceptable tirades well after they've been banned, means it is good to keep them. This position completely ignores the harms that come from non-disclosure of moderation decisions. Note that while the title of this post mentions shadowbans, its discussion is about undisclosed or shadow content moderation.
  - fellowniusmonk 4y ago
    I comment and post rarely but this account has been active for nearly 12 years, I was shadowbanned very early on for unknown reasons and someone vouched for me only in this last couple of years since I was very nearly a lurker, on review I was told there didn't seem to be anything warranting a shadowban in my comment history. Despite this experience, one that you might expect to turn me off from using HN, I am extremely pro shadow ban as a tool to protect this forums utility. Both here and in my professional online life. There are many places online where you can spend nearly infinite time writing and researching thorough rebuttals only to have them washed away in the sea of low content memes. It's nice to have a place where the gold is still in the comments and articles (as interesting as they are) serve primarily as a prompt and conversation starter for deeply knowledgeable people to share. The utility of having a thoughtful and knowledge filled space has been far higher to me then the marginal value of "having my voice heard on this account" during that period.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      I had a similar experience to yours. Lurker for 90% of the time, only comment here and there and never spammed linked unless they were pertinent to the discussion I was commenting on. At some point I got shadowbanned and I only noticed because no one ever replied or interacted with any of my comments. It was easily solved with an email to dang asking if there was a reason why that happened. If I broke a rule, I obviously want to know because I do care about following guidelines here. It got quickly resolved and that was a very pleasing experience. But that's because I was able to ask questions to a human and a human took time to answer them. I still think shadowbanning is a good tool and a necessary one when it comes to moderation, especially because contrary to the real world, here and on most online comunities, anyone can join. IRL no random person can just join your friends circle and become part of the conversation. This is an almost exlusively online issue and all the various forms of banning are the only tools at our disposal to deal with the issue. And letting people think they're part of the comunity while preventing them to do harm is a good compromise. I'll wait for the day when a clever dev decides to use GPT to make a bot whose sole purpose is to engage with shadowbanned account.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  What proportion of shadow banned accounts continue to do this on any given day though? Conservatively I would put it at half. I'm not suggesting shadow bans are without merit but often you have to look really far back through some comment histories before you have an "aha!" moment. I'm also not fully versed in the way this place works, but people go through shitty periods in life and there should be systems to account for that.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > What proportion of shadow banned accounts continue to do this on any given day though? There's an example linked in the post where someone continued posting on Reddit for years before they noticed. It's also quite common for subreddit shadowbans to go unnoticed. And most people never notice the shadow removal of individual comments. > people go through shitty periods in life and there should be systems to account for that. I completely agree. Undisclosed moderation short circuits any ability to forgive. The sanctioned user will never know to appeal. Hiding the punishment is like taking away the judiciary or removing habeas corpus. There is no trial, it's straight to jail and you aren't even told.
    - sph 4y ago
      > Undisclosed moderation short circuits any ability to forgive On here, the vouch feature is a kind of forgiveness, if you will. If you are shadow banned but you say something interesting one lucid day, people will vouch you and engage with you. This is why I browse HN with showdead on.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Given HN is often the enlightened discourse space that's only the byproduct of enforcing herd mentality. Restricted groups of individuals, expressing a restricted group of opinions in a restricted environment where only a restricted set of well defined behaviour is allowed tend to disagree less. But that's not how a discourse usually takes place or what its purpose is. Discourse takes place among different people expressing vastly different opinions in vastly different ways, mostly due to different cultural backgrounds, that generate a lot of conflict, to find a shared common ground. Repressing the conflicting part means repressing the most important part of the discourse, leaving the door open only to the shallow exchange of information. That can be useful, but won't change anyone's mind. It's the reason why cults tend to stick together even in the craziest of situations. They feel they belong to something only they understand deeply, while everybody else is wrong or insane or stupid or corrupted. For example: HN guidelines states "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." But ideological and political are not the same thing, they are, in fact, one on the opposite sides of the spectrum of the other and not as in "two sides of the same coin" but as in "one is bad, the other is the opposite of bad". Asking people to not engage in political debates, it's itself political. It is the oldest political ideology ever existed: hypocrisy.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Great comment thank you for that. Sums up my thoughts on this well. I intentionally seek out people who disagree with me, but I find that people generally do not like talking to those who disagree with them. Hard to find those conversations. On HN those conversations are heated by their nature so you get shut down by mods. Nanny state to some degree. I also believe if you are not allowed to be rude to people they tend to find their positions are tenable when they aren't. I don't mean harassment, but rough dialogue. There is a line certainly.
c22 4y ago
Hn allows users to see shadowbanned content using the showdead flag and allows specific comments to be vouched back to life by the userbase that has this feature enabled. I think this dynamic makes a huge difference (and ironically probably keeps those on the borderline from realizing they are shadowbanned at all).
- rhaksw 4y ago
  All it means is that people with unpopular views are punished without being told. That is neither good for them nor good for the community.
  - c22 4y ago
    I read with showdead on and often traverse a user's post history when I've determined that they've been shadowbanned. In almost all cases the root activity that caused the ban was not an unpopular view, but rather a series of abusive comments. Sometimes it was a brief abberation and many of the user's subsequent posts are acceptable (though often still low quality). More often than not, the user continues to be abusive and break site guidelines. In the realm of non-shadowbanned dead posts I do see a lot of community penalizing of merely unpopular opinions.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      I can corroborate this.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Completely disagree. Usually (I'd say 60-40 or 70-30) you find that they generally submit perfectly fine content but once upon a time ago they got embroiled in an escalating flame war and made the mistake of not realizing that when arguing for the minority viewpoint the bar for that constitutes "abusive" and "break site rules" is far, far lower. If I had a penny for every worthless in-group signaling comment, worthless reference rebuttal and worthless assumption of bad faith that gets cut slack because it's in favor of the "right things" when adjacent comments on the other side are not I would be very rich. Edit: I look at unoffensive comments to see why that user was shadow banned and when I see an "out there" comment I go down the rabbit hole to see if that is a characteristic comment or a one-off so I think I get a pretty good spread.
roflyear 4y ago
They aren't good. HN does it because they only want very specific speech here on the forum. This is outlined in the rules.
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
Many years ago I was rate-limited to five comments a day on HN. It took me ages to figure out that this was a punishment and not a bug; the only indication I had was that comment number six would be rejected with a cryptic error after I wrote it out and hit Send. This was probably because I made some unnecessarily angry comments. Fair enough, that's on me and I would have tried to correct myself if I had been told. I finally reached out to HN support and got a very nice personal email telling me that there was no record of what I did to earn this punishment, but they'd lift it if I promised to behave myself and not do it again. I asked why I wasn't just told that in the first place, and was told that if I had been a deliberately malicious spammer/troll (which I clearly wasn't, whatever my mistakes) then the cryptic punishment would have discouraged me from making a sockpuppet account. So I promised to behave in the future, and received no response and no lifting of the ban. Maybe they lost my email. I honestly don't know if the ban is still in place; I got frustrated and mostly stopped reading HN, so mission accomplished, I guess. Edit: Nope, it is. Just hit it now.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  You can email the mods to appeal such actions. hn@ycombinator.com

pubby 4y ago

I agree with the author that frequent shadowbanning is harmful to communities, but I think he's missing some nuance. First, not every member of a website is trying to be part of its community, so it's unfair to expect the community to care about them in return. Second, most people are not rational, and some people are mentally ill. If you have a person with schizophrenia posting, transparent moderation won't be heeded in the way that you want.

rhaksw 4y ago
Upvote for the dissenting view which should be heard. Your two points both came up in the replies to my post, yet no example was ever given. Do you have some intractable cases to share? In my replies I also suggest that shadow removal of a toxic comment can also be perceived by the user as support for their views. I've yet to hear the harms of that possibility refuted.
- pubby 4y ago
  Looking at Hackernews, some people create accounts solely to promote their own websites, but do not interact or care about the community in other ways. You could call this spam, but I don't think most of the posters think of themselves as being spammers. Still, their presence brings the average quality of the site down. From what I understand, HN typically shadowbans these people from submitting links to their own website, but does not silence them in other ways. They can still share their views and be heard, just not for self-promotion. It might seem like a good idea to tell them this up-front, but keep in mind that most of them do not care about the community, and the ones that do care more about their own self-promotion than HN. If you tell them that they're banned for not participating, do you really expect them to do a good job all of a sudden? Chances are they'll just post low-effort fascimile comments in an attempt to blend in. Keep in mind these are not spambots. Nobody is trying to be malevolent. But working with these people isn't always a worthwhile effort. For a concrete example, I recall r/tabletopgamedesign having a problem of self-promotion (and I was part of the problem!). Lots of the users there post to promote their own board-game business venture. The mods tell them this isn't allowed without participating, so they instead post low-effort comments and self-insert their content when possible. e.g. if you ask them how to do something, they'll start with "Well, when designing (INSERT PERSONAL BUSINESS), I took (APPROACH) and found that (BLAH BLAH). You can read more (AT MY WEBSITE)". This drops the overall quality of conversation. Regarding my second point, someone like Terry Davis is a prime example. Terry liked to post nonsense in threads because of his schizophrenia. He was banned several times, but would always come back with new accounts. Shadowbanning him seemed to be the ideal solution, as he was content with writing comments that would not be seen. Unlike the self-promotion people, he was not trying to be heard. Rather, he was trying to speak, and did not want that taken away from him. It's no different than those crackpots who write pages and pages on their own personal homepages that nobody reads [1][2]. They just wanna write. [1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts [2] https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/

_8j50 4y ago

I have been on HN ~5yrs and only like last week I started getting an auto-ban of sorts about "you are posting too fast" even when I post ~15min+ between posts and then it takes something like 6-24 hours (haven't kept trying to measure it) to reset. Been meaning to do ask hn post about this but that counts against my daily allowance of like two posts (hope this one makes it lol). I think moderation (in general not at HN specifically) should be transparent, truthful and measured. But at the same time, if you don't pay to use a site you have no say in how it is operated. I would like to know if I said things that are not welcome at hn? Or perhaps I broke rules without knowing it? I try my best to be reapectful and kind to others but I also do get angry at some posts and let emotion get the best of me sometimes. But if I did something unacceptable I cannot stop doing it unless I am told what that thing is, so shadowbans work against the moderator's interests if the moderated subject is being cooperative. At HN: the decision to allow political and controversial non-technical posts also means accepting undesirable or controversial views (even if they get downvotes) else you are just creating an echo chamber of ideas. I had a post where every hour or so when I checked it goes upvote then down vote all day long because it was controversial I guess but I thought I simply had a strong opinion on a subject instead of being hostile or posting something irrelevant or invaluable to the discussion when I started noticing the restriction. But like I said, I have no qualms on any moderation decisions on a free to access site. But also, I am very supportive of solutions to scale moderation. I really think paid human moderators can be scaled for many online communities and social networks. Why isn't FB hiring people for $12+/hr to moderate stuff? The idea that it is either humans or ML as opposed to humans working with ML is silly. Or maybe they are already doing that at major social networks. I always wondered why reddit for example doesn't allow subreddit members to have paid subscriptions to support moderators.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Why isn't FB hiring people for $12+/hr to moderate stuff? FB does employ humans moderators, with great mental toll apparently: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382
- _8j50 4y ago

ericbarrett 4y ago

I have moderated large internet spaces. There are people with severe mental issues who, when confronted with direct moderation, will make it their sole purpose in life to ruin the forum. I'm talking 20 hours a day of spam, ban evasion, doxxing, DDoSes, direct messaging other members, and whatever else an intelligent-but-disturbed human can come up with, solely dedicated to ruining the space the moderators are trying to protect. Shadowbanning is like a dodge—instead of head-butting such an explosive personality, you let them slide by and rant on into the ether. It can be, and is, abused, but it is also extremely effective and time-efficient when dealing with "the weirdos." (Generally they will go away after some time not getting any engagement, positive or negative.) That can make or break a volunteer force, and if it's a paid moderation team the cost reduction is real.

jokoon 4y ago
There should be laws that allow to sue and effectively punish those things. Yes, it could be abused by authorities, but it should be possible to sue someone if there are enough proof. Big online platforms might also be able to clean a lot of trolls too.
- LastNevadan 4y ago
  Probably, people with mental health issues that spam fora with nonsense fifteen hours a day are judgement-proof. They have no assets to attach that would justify the effort of legal action against them.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I don’t think that juice is worth the squeeze. Besides, imagine whatever laws you think would help here and now imagine a toxic actor making it their life mission to provoke everyone on your forum but without breaking your imagined rules. You’re back where you started but now you have overreaching laws.
xg15 4y ago
Sounds to me, a better approach would be transparent but automated moderation. Automated moderation would need some way to reliably answer the following questions: - are two accounts controlled by the same user? - are two posts talking about the same topic? Then an approach would be to publicly issue a "content ban": User X is prohibited from talking about topic Y. Then use bots to enforce the ban and identity sock puppets or alt accounts if the user tried to evade the ban. I think with the current progress in language models, we have a much better chance to answer those questions with usable accuracy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tengbretson 4y ago

The whole concept of shadow banning has always seemed ethically and possibly legally dubious to me. I understand that it is highly effective and I can't think of a more efficient way to lower moderation burden, but it seems to me like it is a violation of an implicit contract. If a user pays for an online experience (either directly or via interaction with ads) I don't see how the provider is justified in accepting that payment while serving them a counterfeit of the experience they agreed to. If someone is misbehaving in a restaurant you kick them out. You don't get to take their money and serve them sawdust.

nh23423fefe 4y ago
This is incoherent. Every site has a TOS which is violated by those who were banned. Imagining a fake 'contract' exists because you viewed ads is 'dubious'
- tengbretson 4y ago
  I understand you may be ignorant to it, but an implied contract is not a concept I just made up. It is not a stretch at all to view the interactions between a website and a user through the lens of an implied-in-fact contract. If you are interested, here is a good place to start reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract Sites have TOS, and users in violation of the TOS should be banned. This is not the same as a shadowban. I don't believe it is within the rights of a site to secretly claim that a user is in violation of the TOS and then punitively altering the user experience they agreed to without giving them any notice.