Shadowbans are bad for discourse, and here’s why
meta.discourse.org
meta.discourse.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
First, no language model (or human judgement) will ever be perfect. Therefore you will eventually have a false positive, and a respectful contributor will be banned.
Now you must either:
a) Provide an appeals process—which takes time and effort, and will surely be abused to the maximum extent possible by the maniacally aggrieved.
b) Or, if the judgement is final, you have implemented undisputable algorithmic perma-bans (Google's much-hated approach).
So you're not really solving the original issue, which is the amount of time and resources that disturbed individuals can consume when confronted.
Second, this approach does nothing to prevent external issues like legal harassment, doxxing, real-life staking, and so forth.
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.
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.
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.
What about false positives? If I post a link to an interesting article somewhere deep inside a discussion and the system flags it as self-promotion, I have no way to react to this if the system goes out of its way not to tell me.
I don't want to ban you, partly because people will inevitably go "omg they banned $account for talking about shadowbanning" (and then I have to go "no, people talk about that on HN all the time and it's fine", blah blah blah) – but more because you're obviously sincere and a good user. But can you please use HN as intended?
That means posting on a variety of topics that you personally find interesting, and not treating it as a target for an agenda. This applies regardless of what the agenda is and how worthy it is [2]. It's predictable, and predictability and curiosity are disjoint.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The issue with this is that who gets decide what these people think?
I think communities need rules, but on HN for example they are extremely strict. Essentially, "no politics, no controversy" ???
Hacker News seeks a specific culture and a high bar of content quality and it aggressively curates and moderates towards that end, with freedom of speech being secondary to the goal of reducing entropy, and thus the slide into Eternal September.
If you don't like that you can make your own Hacker News with blackjack and hookers elsewhere, or just go to Reddit or 4chan and find all the politics and controversy you want. Both approaches have value, and there's room on the web for both.
Your line may be really close to dang's, so maybe you think everything is OK, because your judgement has been sound. Mine clearly has not been, tho I haven't TRIED to step on any toes, but I can't post here much b/c I upset dang.
I am not saying HN shouldn't be allowed to limit things this way, I'm saying I think it's stupid.
> Hacker News seeks a specific culture and a high bar of content quality and it aggressively curates and moderates towards that end
But HN doesn't do this. HN moderates and curates to what they want, there's a lot of judgement involved. There's plenty of low quality posts here. The issue is what I think is low quality is not what HN mods think is low quality (that isn't an issue because I think it, but the concept is the problem).
What I think is low quality is not what you think is low quality, etc... this is OK: it's only bad, in my opinion, when a select few people get to decide that for everyone. Maybe a certain portion of the rest of the users will agree with it and it will be OK for them, but... it's just not a just system.
I'm not talking about people spamming porn or something to the forum, btw. But "porn" has a pretty clearly defined meaning, and you can also just say "no NSFW posts" - which I also think is fine! As long as people understand the rule!
The rules I have an issue with are "no politics" when in reality it is "no politics that we think may upset people, or something - we don't tell you exactly what we mean, we'll figure it out and never tell you, but don't step on the landmine!!"
You can see that is a problem, no?
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.
FB does employ humans moderators, with great mental toll apparently: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382
And the depths to which some people can go are pretty awful.
I've only had modest experience with this myself, but have memories well over a decade out, from a site that would be small by today's standards.
> But at the same time, if you don't pay to use a site you have no say in how it is operated.
Is your expectation that if you were a paid coustomer then you'd have a say in how a site is operated? I'm genuinly curious because never in my life I held this expectation when it comes to services I pay for.
> I really think paid human moderators can be scaled for many online communities and social networks.
You think is possible that a major issue is, in fact, the scale? For example, you mentioned reddit. What if there was a hard cap for the size of a community? What if you design a site to forcefully stay under a certain size? Would that help in your opinion?
Every comment from a shadow banned account is one dang doesn't have to waste time moderating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I find users I think are unfairly shadowbanned I vouch for their posts, try to inform them they are shadowbanned and/or reach out to moderators with an ask to reconsider.
I'm not fully comfortable with this system, but I don't think it's bad in the way you're saying it's bad. I'd encourage everyone who's concerned about moderation on HN to read a few pages of dang's comment history.
These people must not hold any views reddit tries to censor. I make a lot of anti-vaxx comments, and on HN my account has never been shadowbanned. I'm able to say what I want even though it might be downvoted and eventually become hidden.
On any mainstream subreddit there's a 90% chance I'll be banned for life. And 10% chance I'll get a shadowban - and 0% chance if a mod sees an anti-vaxx comment they won't remove it. On reddit you post in a sub mainstream mods don't like, and I get automated messages that I'm banned for /r/pics, /r/news, /r/cats automatically without even interacting with them. The only subreddits I can talk freely are removed, quarantined or don't have enough users for any site-wide mods to notice. Compared to HN it's an authoritarian hellhole over there.
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.
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.
Imagining a fake 'contract' exists because you viewed ads is 'dubious'
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.