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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, this is a good thing.

Lack of transparency when it comes to moderation is a bad thing. If a user is getting punished for breaking rules, they should be shown exact the message that led to the action, so that users can't claim they got banned for no reason or for some vague reason about community standards.

Also, I've never been a fan of immediately going nuclear and banning people for their first rule violation unless it's especially egregious. A simple "Hey, we don't do that here" and a short period of time-out can be a lot more effective for changing behavior.

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It also seems really, really smart about long-term planning for their target growth audience (e.g. teenagers and college students) in a way that I haven't seen from any other social platform. If a platform wants to be the center of social life for people that age and keep them long-term, it absolutely needs to be able to handle the statistical nigh-guarantee that most teenagers will break any reasonable TOS at one point or another.

Discord permanently banned every single user who was present in TheDonald community Discord server after January 6. Every single person. Even if they had never said a word, even if they joined several years earlier and muted the server and hadn't opened it since.

Discord is as transparent as mud. Now that it's difficult to sign up to Discord without a phone number, my money is on the only reason they're doing this being user retention.

This sounds a lot like the quality of moderation on many subreddits.

> “We believe people, especially teens, have the ability to change when given the opportunity, so we want to offer those opportunities,” says Badalich

Quote from the article. Teenagers are well known for testing boundaries. If you ban them for doing their natural behavior they will either leave and never come back, or just create a new account.

I think I understand what you're getting at, but of course if you permaban anyone for any reason they'll have no choice but to leave or make a new account.

I had written a sentence along the lines of "the timeout should increase teenage retention and engagement" but felt it was so obvious based on my previous two sentences. I think now a good summary would have been along the lines of "This can provide a teaching moment to teenagers and improve their experience." Even though this feels like an obvious inference based on the rest of the post, it does provide a nice summary and drives the point I was attempting to make.

That some bullshit digital chat channel company should give itself the right to morally judge when and how people should or shouldn't change is itself an idiotic idea to take seriously. I really do hope more people reject this nonsense over time and actively work to punish companies that assume themselves arbiters of correct behavior. Sure, community standards and moderation are necessary, but MANY digital companies today take that basic concept and stretch it into all kinds of puritanical parochialism. It's almost ironic how much we regress to village shaming standards as we move forward into a global communications future.

Bad take, IMO.

Companies have every right to dictate what behavior they allow on their platform, full stop.

What's egregious to you? I personally don't mind if doxxers, racists, or criminals(war thunder leak?) get the ban hammer immediately.

It's stupid and egregious to ban someone for "breaking TOS" or "sharing harmful information" and not telling them exactly what they did and where they did it, no matter what you see them as.

Only from the perspective of the person getting banned. From the perspective of the person paying the bills, you're paying someone to spend time explaining why you kicked them out, and then you're paying them to discuss the reasoning, and then you're paying them to discuss the reason with hundreds of users that don't think there's anything wrong with calling someone [some word].

Not only that, you're doing that to satisfy the curiosity of someone you've decided you don't want anywhere near your site. I'd be on board with your line of argument if it involved a payment of $X to cover out-of-pocket expenses and the hassle of dealing with BS.

Nobody wanted to "have a chance to explain themselves". I just wanna be told what got me banned, not a complex request.

>I just wanna

However in this instance they (Discord) would have no reason to care about what you want, so saying that you want something is really no argument.

Off topic but I can't resist: happens to a lot of people accused of sexual harassment at work. They get permabanned from work, and don't know what they said or did, nor when, where, or to whom.

Let's look through your post history. How many comments before we can come up with a reason to ban you that would be widely accepted in most contexts? 3.

> I worked with a well know hacker

Holy shit, we've got a confessed security risk on our hands! Ban immediately, before bastardoperator hacks us all!

I love how you left out the "/author"... I'm sorry, where are we again?

That's the whole point. Permabanning on the first offense ignores the reality that these large-scale moderation systems (automated or human) tend to lack nuance and context-awareness, leading to false positives. A system of escalating warnings adds slack to protect good-faith users from those sorts of moderation failures.

So if someone shares CP on discord you think they should be given a warning and not permabanned? The justice system isn't going to give them any slack so why should a private entity? Where do you draw the line? I asked in my initial comment, "What's egregious to you". No one will answer that...

> So if someone shares CP on discord you think they should be given a warning and not permabanned?

"Think of the children" is consistently used as an escape hatch to avoid actually doing due diligence in enforcement and moderation. You aren't protecting anyone by lazily granting root to content moderation / surveillance / whatever system is under discussion. You're just making those systems worse.

Here's a better example.

Say I post a picture of my young child running around in a diaper to a family/close friends discord channel.

It gets flagged as CP because algorithms lack nuance.

Should I be permabanned for this?

Are we just not allowed to share photos of children online at all unless they are clothed head to toe? Maybe that's our current cultural norm, but that seems like an excessive measure for a society where most people aren't child predators.

You say "CP" like it's a clearly evil category, but there's people out there that insist that fanfic about characters in a kid's show kissing is in that category. So, no, I don't really trust moderators to permaban that.

That said, yeah, actual CP should still be a permaban. We all agree on that. But treating it as a cut-and-dried example illustrates exactly what hnaccount141 was saying when they said "these large-scale moderation systems (automated or human) tend to lack nuance and context-awareness, leading to false positives"

Sure, as long as they're told why they're banned.

They were banned for doxxing 13 year olds in call of duty lobby and calling them the N word... I'm sure everyone feels so much better now. That's what you need? Really...

Doxxing, threats of violence, CSAM, for sure.

Dropping a racial slur? Nah, I'd let that be a 1-hour timeout that begins the next time you try to send a message.

As someone else said, teenagers like to test boundaries and be edgy. Show them where the boundaries are and let them have a chance to correct their behavior.

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