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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006.

Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively.

1- http://mikeindustries.com/blog/

2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine

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By that standard, I think that the new Reddit mobile UI must consider everyone a troll.

Everyone who doesn't just replace www with old

There used to be i.reddit.com for the old mobile UI but they shut it down

Actually still accessible: https://reddit.com/.i

Clicking on any post leads to the new design. :(

Appending the .i to any link works - it's clumsy, but still less so than the new design.

Just stop using Reddit instead of fighting it

Sounds like an idea for a webextension

I built a custom stylesheet which makes old reddit mobile friendly (basically to look like an app). I'll throw it up if anyone is interested, I was going to build a webview app which just uses old reddit to provide an app-like experience.

I'm interested!

How would this work for something like Twitter/X when accounting for individuals serving the US government? Someone could be flagged as a troll on the backend for unrelated reasons, but now their experience in communicating with someone in government is delayed. I understand that a delay is not the same thing as a block, but I wonder if the damage to the user’s experience is sufficiently similar for a federal judge.

Don't use Twitter for government comms I guess? It's a private system with its own rules. They can degrade the experience as much as they like if the system flags one as a troll, regardless of their being part of an organization.

Well, here is the thing: maybe a troll can use the idea that a comments on a government official's account is a public forum and demand that the third party remove the troll flag, or demand that the troll flag be ignored for government accounts.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president's account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc TWTR.N users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-twitter-idINKBN1KV...

In the above case, the block was executed by the account holder who was a government official. Having the service provider flag a user as a troll and degrading their experience might be acceptable for comments on non-government accounts, but if a federal judge "flags" government accounts as public forums in a US court of law, then the service provider is now creating additional friction for a user participating in a public forum.

We have had political candidates and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing AMAs on Reddit, so what I am describing is not a far-fetched hypothetical: https://old.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/6ftvhu... .

Surely the solution then is to block government officials from the platform. Bad for engagement but keeps your "no, really, this is a private forum" status.

(Rather like how lots of non-US banks block US nationals from having an account even if they're resident in the bank's country, because of the paperwork overhead)

It's really useful for fast moving emergent stuff like wildfires where there is patchy information from multiple sources (some people report smoke, some fire etc.)

You'd be probably slapped with a law banning exactly that, which I'm surprised if it doesn't already exist.

It's not the same thing as a bank in another country refusing to open an account to an average Joe because of too many hurdles involved with reporting your balance the the IRS.

Twitter/X bans people outright. Surely that's a bigger issue for communication than lag.

It isn't. When you're banned, you know you're banned. Thus, you know you can't expect to use your account for communication anymore. When you're shadow-banned, you don't know you are shadow-banned, and will continue to attempt using your account for communication, and believe it's the other people who are just ignoring you.

What type of shadow ban are you talking about? Are you talking about being unable to post (e.g. The Frustration Loop) or about other people being unable to see your posts? Then yes, I agree that's worse than being banned. But if we're talking about a 10-60s lag (as I mentioned in my comment and the previous posters were talking about), I say that's better than being banned, because communication can still take place.

Right, my mistake. I was talking about both shadow-bans and error-bans/The Frustration Loop. The common thing here is that you're being gaslighted by the service.

Twitter has been doing things worse than that for years. They seem to even have different levels of shadow banning.

The practice is fundamentally malicious because innocent people get caught in it all the time. The two main problems both stem from the fact that they don't admit to doing it.

The first is that you're posting interesting things but nobody ever sees it because you're shadow banned, and then what you should really do is create a new account and start over, but you don't know why nobody ever sees it. "Maybe you just don't have much of a following yet." But you never will with that account. An innocent person is subjected to the penalty meant for a spammer -- and suffers longer for it because they have no reason to expect they're being punished when they haven't done anything wrong.

The second is that even if you figure it out, they still don't admit to doing it, the consequence of which is that there is no appeals process. So if you have an account with a significant following and then get shadow banned illegitimately, you're much more likely to notice this because your engagement falls off a cliff, but there is no process for undoing it other than to abandon your account and start over from scratch.

idk if some of those things are "shadowbanning" per se but more like limiting reach and promotion.

there's the confusion (unaware or intentional) between 'getting actually shadowbanned, as in, your posts actually do not appear to anyone else but you' and 'not getting free promo, free algo boost, free views from the platform, if it either doesn't choose to promote you, or chooses to not promote you' (these two are subtle but different as well). 'not getting the extra boost from a platform' - or just really 'having a piece of content fare for what it is, just by itself'. these kinds of mixups lead to kinda inane takes like 'i'm not getting as many views -> the platform has shadowbanned me', which are particularly weird to actually see, as a post, that is very much up and visible (and not "shadowbanned").

there's almost a vague sense of entitlement to getting views, getting an audience from a platform, in bulk and for free, and for whatever it may be. when a platform really just may choose to not extraneously promote something. or have a more sophisticated way by which some piece of content 'bubbles up', as it gets engagement and moves up in ranks of reach and virality. or it may downrank something, which still isn't a "shadowban". but lo and behold, "shadowbanning" now has its meaning so diluted, you'll just get talking heads throwing it around, and very visibly so - almost as if they're unencumbered by it and just saying a buzzy word.

That's what I mean by different levels of shadowbanning.

"Well, the algorithm just isn't promoting you, that's not the same thing."

The algorithm is sorting a feed containing millions of posts. There is no mathematical difference between a penalty and the removal of a bonus that similarly situated accounts get. They both cause your posts to be not seen by people who would otherwise have seen it. You can easily be blocked from 95% of your audience and still be able to find people in the last 5% who occasionally see your posts.

The thing that makes it a shadowban is that it's a hidden penalty applied to your account, regardless of what you subsequently post or how the people who do see it respond to it.

how is something that _isn't_ shadowbanning, somehow a "level" of "shadowbanning"?

no, a platform not promoting posts, and a platform hiding posts and making them not visible to anyone else at all, are not the same thing.

see, it's going as far with complaints about "shadowbanning" as to say "well maaaybe 5% might see it - But it's still a shadowban!" - that's the part that makes the complaints sound like bullshit that they are

> how is something that _isn't_ shadowbanning, somehow a "level" of "shadowbanning"?

How is it not shadowbanning? They're not showing your posts to people they would otherwise show your posts to because of an opaque penalty tag on your account. This can obviously be done to varying degrees ranging from not putting your posts in anyone else's feed, to not showing your replies even when viewing the post it's a direct reply to, to not notifying the person you replied to that they have a new reply because it was you who posted it.

These are all forms of shadowbanning. Meanwhile a given post might still be visible via some other means even when they're being applied.

> no, a platform not promoting posts, and a platform hiding posts and making them not visible to anyone else at all, are not the same thing.

This is a kind of pedantic reasoning where if you hide a post from very nearly everyone you want to call it something else because "very nearly everyone" and "everyone" theoretically isn't the same thing even if it's practically the same thing. It's like saying well, you know, technically we didn't remove you from the search results, we just put you on page 50384.

> see, it's going as far with complaints about "shadowbanning" as to say "well maaaybe 5% might see it - But it's still a shadowban!" - that's the part that makes the complaints sound like bullshit that they are

I've no dog in this fight, but this seems deliberately obtuse. You could call "traditional" shadowbanning "100% shadowbanning" and what you've just described "95% shadowbanning". They're extremely close.

The Twitter shadowbanning that I saw was that if I was one of 10 people who replied to a tweet, someone using another account would not see my reply among them.

And of course with the way the service functions, plus the bloated UI, for the first couple hours they keep the plausible deniability of "eventual consistency".

I loved Newsvine. It seemed so innovative and inviting.

Spam and trolling even happens on a physical newspapers/radio/tv/books/magazines. Its just that you have to pay to do it.

The rich/ceremonial/leisure classes have through out history been constantly spamming everyone with whatever shit occurs to their 3 inch brains, because they can afford to buy the largest amount of attention.

To bad there is not enough attention for anything anymore cause production of content is happening at volumes that dwarf Consumption of content.

If 99% of comments and links on HN are not read by anyone, do you think the great geniuses who run HN will tell you that? Whats the use of such systems no one asks. They want to just keep it alive like some dumb engineers in the control room of Jurassic Park after the children are lost and the T Rex is loose.

The platforms, without knowing what the fuck they are building, have made it Free for everyone to Broadcast. So its now not just the rich who are spamming and trolling. Its everyone. For free. All you get is noise. Read the UN Report on the Attention Economy.

One dimensional software engineers now have capability to build and scale systems quickly. Thats the only reason we have these dumb fucking mindless systems wasting everyones time and energy.

Spam filter idea: posts with bad interpunction are likely content-free angry ramblings!

Yeah, but in the long run (or very soon), you might have to use grammar misstakes as a captcha, to seperate bots from humans.

> misstakes > seperate

I see what you did there.

Please never implement that idea though, it would be like the opposite of https://xkcd.com/810.

I am pretty sure, it is already in use.

But of course it would be trivial to modify the llm output, to include random misstakes, if this ever would become a standard way of dealing with bots.

> Spam filter idea: posts with bad interpunction are likely content-free angry ramblings!

... or written by non-native speakers.

What I want is a "content condensor" tool. Something OSS and mathematically pure that can just take all the signal, drop the noise, and run some NLP to "condense" the information for me to effectively wade through it. Yes, there's a lot of bullshit content now, but there's also a lot of valid content. To be proficient today, we need to be able to swim effectively through the sea.

What's screwed up right now is we are currently forced to rely on 3rd-parties to filter for us, and they do so often poorly by just dropping content that's not "popular" which results in biased sampling, or worse, they select based on some kind of profit motive. Why can't we own our own "social media algorithm" or something? Why do I have to spend so much time consuming? Give me the IV drip, and filter out the unhealthy portion, please. Ideally, I should be able to trust the filter, too.

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