[HN Gopher] Shadowbanning Is Real
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Shadowbanning Is Real
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 28 points
Date : 2022-12-27 19:02 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| theodpHN wrote:
| The "Shadowbanned User Who Tweeted Wolf" is the new "Boy Who
| Cried Wolf" :-)
| [deleted]
| theCrowing wrote:
| > Elon Musk is right: Social media should tell you when you're
| shadowbanned
|
| Defeats the purpose of shadow banning...
| paulpauper wrote:
| That is why shadow banning works. The troll/spammer thinks he
| is getting less engagement, is being ignored, and quits.
| water8 wrote:
| [dead]
| kelipso wrote:
| Spammers etc have the resources and the know how to detect
| shadow banning. Just use a VPN and perform a trivial check.
| The typical user who gets shadowbanned are the ones paying
| the highest price (posting into a void for years without
| knowing it).
| kbos87 wrote:
| I don't know if it's that simple. If you deliberately
| search for the shadowbanned content, you are going to find
| it. The action being taken is to not serve it in
| algorithmically driven feeds to users who aren't
| necessarily looking for it. There are so many variables at
| play, it can be hard to know if something is truly being
| shadowbanned.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Shadow banning has various definitions. The typical
| definition I encounter is how it works (worked?) on
| Reddit: you could see your own comments and posts when
| logged in, but no one else would.
|
| The "shadow ban" on Twitter that's garnering so much
| attention was manual down ranking of content. I'm not
| even sure if it's productive to call this shadow banning.
| Some content is given more visibility by the algorithm
| than others. Nobody is surprised by this. The main
| distinction in Twitter is that the downranking was
| manual, done to specific accounts. This realistically
| can't be detected, not evaded since abandoning a popular
| Twitter account is not an option. And for famous people,
| the downranking would be applied to their new account
| anyway.
| modshatereality wrote:
| Uhm, it's pretty obvious if you've been shadowbanned. maybe
| for some unknown percentage it works out that way, the rest
| become even more disgruntled and/or radicalized against "big
| tech", "the media", et al for conducting psychological
| warfare.
| version_five wrote:
| If you take your posting seriously it's easy to know if
| you've been shadowbanned. If you're just letting off steam
| and writing offensive stuff that barely gets replies or
| engagement anyway, it may take longer.
|
| Browse HN with showdead on and check out some of the
| shadowbanned posters. You can find many with long histories
| of "dead" comments that keep posting anyway.
|
| On e.g. Twitter you can find all sorts or people saying
| random stuff and getting zero likes. They wouldn't
| necessarily notice either.
|
| And try reading the comments section of a Fox News story.
| No way most of these people know or probably even care if
| they're banned, it's more like a tic than actually engaging
| in a conversation or even real trolling.
|
| Shadowbanning is effective at increasing the SNR against
| essentially casual vandalism. Against deliberate trolls,
| the kind of people who are regularly checking from a logged
| out browser to see if their posts show up, not so much.
| [deleted]
| modshatereality wrote:
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Browse HN with showdead on and check out some of the
| shadowbanned posters. You can find many with long
| histories of "dead" comments that keep posting anyway._
|
| My theory is that the bots keep posting because there are
| enough "legit" bots that pull HN data from the API to put
| into an assortment of search engines and other
| statistical tools that ultimately Google and Bing will
| crawl those links from the secondary sites pulling data
| from HN. I could be wrong but the only other explanation
| is that the bots are just incredibly poorly coded. At
| least I can't think of another reason. I have no idea if
| the _legit_ bots using HN 's API have showdead enabled.
| If they do that could be part of the problem.
|
| I say this having fought bots in the past on forums and
| the bot operators would certainly know if their posts
| were no longer visible to others so they would just keep
| creating new accounts. I would block IP's, then they
| would use proxies. I would block proxies, they would use
| Tor. I would block Tor then they would just create a few
| accounts a day then let them "warm up" with real content.
| This led me to putting people into "ranks" and only
| people that had been interacting with the site could post
| messages that could be read real time, whereas low rank
| accounts had to be moderator approved. I had SQL code in
| a cron job that would delete posts over 30 days old in
| the newbie rank if I did not get around to deleting them
| manually.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| johndunne wrote:
| If they're forced to tell you when you're shadow banned, get
| ready for soul banning...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.vn/xv7LJ
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(page generated 2022-12-27 23:02 UTC)