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?
Every comment from a shadow banned account is one dang doesn't have to waste time moderating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.