Comment by modshatereality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modshatereality | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

modshatereality

using a site the way it was designed to be used is vandalism? HEH. just banning the account and providing a logical reason for the ban would be effective as well. this gives mods the ability to just ban whoever they want and provide no reasoning. if i were to speculate on the real reason why it's a common tactic now i'd say probably to limit any potential legal liability (edit: from wrongful account termination, but also it helps contain the damage if user doesn't tell others they were banned without any sound justification. also the site can say they never banned the user only hobbled their account).

it harms the site as well, not only it's users. just look at whats happened to the ghost town formerly known as reddit.

You don't have to speculate. Shadow banning was created because banning with explanation results in users engaging in ban evasion.

Detecting user's ban evasion is to engage in a costly cat and mouse game between evaders and detectors. Shadow banning, however, is easy to implement and cost effective. Platforms that do it save resources compared to those that don't.

Your comment reads like you don't like that platforms have more power than users and you resent that it's not an even playing field. That's a fair point, but it would be easier to say that if that's how you feel.

Shadow banning was originally used to stop spammers who didn't really care about engaging with anyone. At least, that's what the forums I was moderating back when it was new were doing with it, we were just trying to dump the people who were spamming about herbal Viagra.

Using it on actual people was never recommended, because it was always very obvious to anyone who actually engaged with the site. They'd go back to the same old threads on another computer and find their posts were gone, which was incredibly obvious. This just created more forum controversy, e.g. back when pj of Groklaw started doing it back in the day to suppress differing opinions on that TurboHercules controversy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com