Comment by ReggieJJJ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReggieJJJ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you may be underestimating this issue. It is leading to one of the most heinous and vile things someone can do on an internet forum, shadow banning, akin to putting them in an isolation cell; only worse worse, basically transporting them there without even letting them know they are/were put there and users keep commenting and contributing while being essentially locked away and lost in an authoritarian prison cell where no one can hear them. It's downright sick and depraved and one of the worst practices of the tech sector today for which there is zero justification regardless of what unapproved things were said.

There is a real sickness on the net today where "moderators" have come to think of themselves as the thought police, but even worse, not just thought police of an authoritarian regime, but a kind of self-anointed little dictator that rules over the user rabble at will and upon whim.

If you want to silence people, at least have the spine of any other run of the mill authoritarian and tell users their fundamental human right to speech and expression was taken from them … don't just silently transport them to digital purgatory. Again, it is a vile act that only the most depraved people would excuse, let alone endorse, no matter what unapproved things were thought and said … which are only words/characters on a screen that can be dismissed and ignored.

Ok, I've said my peace. It's a sick and depraved practice and I cannot stand by just not say something when the topic comes up while digital regimes like HN, reddit have, what are essentially digital version of hellish totalitarian regime isolation cells that "mods" disappear people/accounts to.

We don't typically shadowban accounts that have much history on HN; we tell them we're banning them: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Shadowbanning is for spam accounts and new accounts that are egregiously and/or repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, especially if they show evidence of being serial trolls. That's a fundamentally different case—there are many users who simply create new accounts as we ban their older accounts and carry on posting as before. It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all. These users know perfectly well when we've banned them; it's a cat and mouse game and not at all an "isolation cell".

It's certainly true that there are a few good-faith users who get shadowbanned because we mistook them for bad-faith users—people who didn't realize that they were breaking the site guidelines and could have reformed if we had explained and asked them. But there are orders of magnitude fewer of these than your comment implies. I'd prefer that there not be even one such lost lamb, but it's just a hard problem to solve. Software can't distinguish these and moderators can't read intent correctly in every case.

You do shadow rate-limit good-faith users, though. Quite frequently, I believe, as far as it's possible to tell.

And yet, here you are, validating the very criticism of your heavy handed authoritarian nature. You make the very same kind of authoritarian claims of "evidence" (where is it, show it and provided it for public scrutiny and audit then) and you weigh that "evidence" against arbitrary (yet comically inline with your own self-interest) measure against ambiguous rules. It's the authoritarians' playbook 101, regardless of whether the authoritarians are competent enough to recognize it, let alone self-are enough. (pro tip: you guys never are … never)

Just try to reflect on the authoritarian and supremacist mentality you have with language like "It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all"; yet your expend resources to censor and control and rule with an iron fist anything that is not to our liking.

No one is talking about obvious spam or any kind of illegal language like credible threats of violence or stalking or bulling, but if you were at least honest with yourself you would acknowledge that it has nothing at all to do with "good use of resource" and all to do with control. Because it is irrefutably true that if it were about "good use of resources" you would wholeheartedly avoid censorship of legal language and not violate what what has been deemed a human right, free speech.

You types, people with the authoritarian supremacist mentality you clearly have, are always quite to rationalize why it is fine that you be the arbiter of right and wrongthink, but it never avails you of the inherent evil exhibited by controlling speech and expression, no matter how much beneath you or inferior and unworthy you decree that speech to be.

You're arguing for a style of moderation that has never applied on HN, because this isn't that kind of site. Rather than complaining about that here, it would be in your interests to find a different forum that is more aligned with the kind of moderation you want to see.

There's room for lots of different kinds of internet forum. It's good for different sites to make different choices about how they operate—that gives users get a richer set of communities to choose from. The thing to realize, though, is that there are tradeoffs. For example, you can't both have a site that's dedicated to intellectual curiosity and allow aggressive comments and flamewars. If you try, the flames will burn out the curiosity. That has significant consequences for moderation on a site like HN, where curiosity is the core value. In order to preserve HN for its intended purpose, we have to respect that reality.

It isn't "authoritarian supremacist mentality", or any of the other things you describe, to want to maintain a particular kind of internet forum. If your job was to maintain a public garden, you wouldn't allow drag racing in the flower beds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com