Ask HN: Thoughts on shadow banning and other dick moves by Silicon Valley? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts on shadow banning and other dick moves by Silicon Valley?

22 pointspacketbs30 comments

I posted a submission about UK police today, and wondered why it didn’t receive upvotes and some interesting conversation. So I logged in from my PC instead of my phone, and realised HN had shadow banned the submission which was a Guardian piece.

This got me wondering… is this dick move an Silicon Valley thing? Have you experienced shadow banning on HN? And if so, what was the story about?

View on HN

I’m not a fan of showbanning in general; it feels unethical to some degree.

But HN has features like Show Dead, which allow you to opt-in to seeing [dead] posts (at around 15 karma I believe). This means [dead] posts and comments are not fully gone.

I browse with Show Dead on, and on the whole, almost every [dead] post and comment deserves to be. If I had seen OP’s post in new I wouldn’t have vouched for it, because (as another commenter points out) it’s not relevant to the site. Similarly OP has several comments in this thread that are [dead] and most of them are not worth vouching for.

From the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

So probably killed because it's almost the definition of off-topic. It's also more likely to spawn a flame war than an interesting discussion. There's plenty of places for that; HN doesn't want to become another one.

I believe that shadow-banning is unethical. It goes against a fundamental human right to "be seen and heard" and should never be done.

*edited to remove the original "public" to clarify the argument

websites/apps are not public

Correct. I'm not arguing that free expressions and actions that can be done on public property can not be curtailed on private property.

I'm arguing against the undetectable curtailment of them. This goes against the human "right of recognition".

humans do not have a right to recognition. why do you feel that is the case?

Articles 6,12, and 19 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Of course they are, just as your comment is.

I suspect your shadowban is related to how new your account was, its de-facto low reputation and its even lower reputation due heavily downvoted comments you made: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=turdistheword

I believe domains can also be downranked/shadowbanned separately from users. Given that this Ask HN post went through OK, I am guessing that is more likely here. And I would agree that articles from the Guardian are almost certainly going to be off-topic based on the guidelines. If the post is on topic, you can always reach out to moderators.

New accounts are only default shadowbanned when created from a known VPN IP or a known "bad" IP for which user creation isn't yet banned. The shadowban expires after a couple months (?) which is why sometimes you'll see accounts making their first visible comment even though they were created some time ago.

Accounts with a high comment flag rate are timed out. New accounts with a sufficiently high comment flag rate are permanently timed out.

Accounts likely operated by known trolls are manually shadowbanned.

Those all seem like decent common-sense policies as long as those users are made aware of the ban/time-out and any applicable time-out-countdowns.

Sadly, there are "known bad" IPs--hell even entire blocks.

I'm relatively new here and, heretofore, had no idea "browsing dead" was even an option.

Did you delete your submission? Hard to say what the issue was without seeing it.

..unless your Guardian-UK-Police was related to e.g. snooping technology, police-and-encryption, or something related to technology, with a UK Police tangent.

In this case we would definitely discuss it, but not to say that "police bad - encryption good" but instead talk about the technical details, slippery slopes, and other areas that would help us think, learn, contribute, grow.

I've been on youtube for, whatever, its 15-20ish years of existence so god knows how many youtube comments I've written since I was a teenager. I comment on a lot of political, murder mystery, homeless situations, military stuff, just whatever in general.

The last 1-3 years, I'm not really sure, but I constantly have youtube comments I leave deleted. I'm clearly auto-modded by some AI that seems like, at some points, its looking for trigger words, and at other points just seems like it's not going to let me leave any commments for day(s). I'm not a 12 year old edge lord but I will go talk politics in firebrand communities and it's really, really frustrating when you're actually having a good convo, as good as you can pull off with yts comment system, and all of a sudden it just stops letting you hit reply. Error. Error. Then your edits just turn to errors. Then you reload the page and all of your replies are gone and it looks like the person is speaking to a ghost when you were just speaking about, say, a genocide in Myanmar or something.

There are "customer sentience" AI systems that gauge how "flamey" conversations are getting for support teams so they can bump pissed off customers up faster and what not and I'm sure its using something like that.

It makes me just stop engaging. I think youtube channels should be able to disable AI/sentience tracking or something. It's catching ridiculous things. People have to write yt comments like tiktok now; like saying unalived instead of killed/murdered, etc while literally discussing a murder.

In HN I keep deadposts on or whatever its called. 99% of the time they have no idea they're deadflagged and they absolutely deserve it in most instance. It's always fun to dig through those.

edit: I completely forgot the word and wrote customer sentience instead of what I mean, but I like that too much to change it.. your customers happy/frustration level not whether or not their brain is ticking

edit2: customer sentiment!

Oh god, turned on show dead to read all your flagged and dead comments, and I just want to thank to all the people flagging and shadowbanning your self proclaimed trolling. I wonder what is it that drives people like you to come to some community and start being a nuisance. Zero humility, all hubris. I hope you are young, to give you a chance to grow out of it.

> This got me wondering… is this dick move a Silicon Valley thing?

It’s a West Coast thing, deriving from a combination of face-saving cultural values and conflict avoidance in (purported) pursuit of in-group collaboration over competition. (You’ll find similar ghosting behaviour in many Asian and Arab cultures. The South has its own spin on it, too.)

That submission is so off-topic here, it wouldn't go anywhere.

Shadow banning exists because if you turn on show-dead and browse 10 threads, you'll come across 10 different users that are constantly posting unhinged drivel. Likely half of them are mentally ill. Shadow banning keeps these people unaware that no one is seeing their stuff so they don't go and create a new account and waste peoples' time flagging it again.

Exactly. One persons shadow ban can mean thousands of others can communicate more effectively. It being a ‘dick move’ is entirely dependent on the context of what is being shadow banned and why.

Until you fall victim to it.

There should be higher "barriers to entry" (time-delay, additional a/a) before a new account can be used and it should cost karma to comment and post.

How else would capital and customers be gatekept? You either raise money from VCs to buy ads or take the gamble of bootstrapping exposure past the latest innovations of banning and filtering. As social isolation becomes more prominent, organic spread becomes harder, allowing the VC connected to be the narrative. The preference naturally becomes profit over social good as social narratives carry little profit but fall trap to the same mechanisms.

Hmm. HN is nothing compared to big media outlets who cry for freedom of expression but turn a blind eye to news that make them look bad. It gets worse and we see worse leaders than Trump

Shadow banning on HN is as random and arbitrary as anywhere else.

The public should decide what’s of value, not some random, faceless dude with too much power.

The same holds true for that ridiculous flagging mechanism used here.

Silicon Valley is pretending to be liberal while behaving dictatorial.

The flagging mechanism here is "the public", not "some random, faceless dude". That is, flagging is done by users, not moderators.

The topic of discussion is shadow banning which is different from flagging. It is applied by the website automatically, displaying [dead] rather than [flagged]

There are several [dead] comments in this comment section even though there's nothing wrong with them.

Both of these are based on arbitrary rules that clearly haven't been thought through.

Maybe, you don't know that. However, we constantly see stuff getting "flagged" on here that is totally fine, like this question we're on.

Only content that goes against the law or the site's guidelines should get flagged, not opinions or articles that aren't to the liking of some folks.

Liberality also means putting up with opinions that don't suit you.

Okay, but this very topic goes against the guidelines, hence why it’s flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The public should decide what’s of value, not some random, faceless dude with too much power.

You mean dang and his team? That's the people behind HN. In fact it's fair to just say dang since the buck should stop there.

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