7 ms·

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 n

by 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

by 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