I think that ghostbanning is unethical
I think it is a childish and offending policy and am still surprised that HN does that. I mean *who* does that? To make it look to you as if your post got published, but really it didn't? Is that your way of being polite, perhaps? Or your way to maximally offend someone by pretending to be polite? [EDIT: wish I wouldn't have written that next sentence (was a bit pissed off) but too late to erase now with people commenting it] What a slimy and cowardly tactic. What a manifetation of the worst part of human nature.
If you ban and censor us, why don't you just tell us so? We're all big boys and girls.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadClearly.
But having been on the end of it myself with other accounts here -just for disagreeing with people who were obviously more 'in with the in crowd' than me- and without even receiving any warning first, I think the way it is sometimes implemented is pretty childish.
I don't know that it shouldn't be used just because of philosophical objections, but it certainly messes with the idea that a system is meant to either obey or refuse the command given by the user, and do so honestly. Lying to the user that yes, the post is published, while it's intentionally hidden, breaks the assumption that a system will behave consistently.
If some users don't want to act honestly, rest of society should not honour their malice. Honouring malice leads to dissolution of society.
What I meant is that shadow banning is, by design, an invisible punishment - and therefore, you cannot see that you've been caught up into it as a false positive and punished. This doesn't happen on systems without shadow banning in place.
1. Don't ban users
2. Ban users and tell them
3. Ban users and don't tell them\
4. Don't allow free accounts
Unless you know a better solution, we have to accept shadow banning as a speed bump. And like speed bumps, they unfortunately sometimes catch good-willing users, but make life better for thousands of other users.
It’s better to correct one’s behavior if one knows what the hell they are correcting. Correction and rehabilitation can’t have progress if you just put them in their own echo chamber.
Shadowbanning could go away if people were actually ostracized, which means expelling from community. Currently if you ban someone, you only ban a single account and they can create another one. Some people are banned not because they don't know what they do, they are banned because they are intentional on destruction of society. They won't learn anything from banning them. That's where shadowbanning comes in, they can shitpost all they want, but rest of us doesn't have to listen to them.
This is still assuming good faith on the commenter's part—some people don't want to correct their behavior. Maybe they're doing it for money, or for attention, or maybe they just like annoying others.
And even if you are someone that might be willing to correct your behavior, it's not HN's responsibility to guide you to rehabilitation, when it comes at the cost of making the conversation worse for everyone else along the way.
I agree that it’s not nice to them, which is acceptable most of the time for most people because the ghost banned members are not really nice community members. It is an issue when someone is ghost banned for bad reasons or a bit too fast.
1) Increases the time it takes trolls to realize they need to create a new account.
2) Pacifies angry, malicious users who might escalate their bad behavior when instantly banned.
I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone. The people who are shadowbanned all seem to post unhinged, profane, off-topic, content-free rants.
Personally, I think it makes the community better. If you find it slimy and cowardly, perhaps you should vote with your feet and visit other communities instead. There are millions of other message boards.
Maybe it was the ones you didn't see? Bacause they were shadowbanned?
My post was about ethics, trying to be formal and simple about the question what is it to do the right thing. Basically it was about this: sometimes good is right, sometimes evil is right, so good can be wrong and evil can be right, and we have four things of which the main question is the question of right and wrong.
I wouldn't consider myself to be a "toxic personality" but being ghostbanned did piss me off a little. More than pacify me. I am pointing out a real ethical issue, not "escalating my bad behavior" by posting this comment is how I see it.
[Edit:]I love HN, it's one of the best sites I know. I'm just pointing out an aspect of it that I don't like. I might use different language now that I'm not as pissed anymore, but I would post it.
Being pissed off is a very reasonable emotion to being shadowbanned.
I'm sure you don't consider yourself toxic, but it's possible you were posting things that trolls or shills often post, and that resulted in you getting banned.
For example, there may be people astroturfing anti-vaccine misinformation on this site. Given public opinion polls and the revelations about all the money that goes into that movement, it's likely most anti-vaccine activism on the internet is made up of bots and paid astroturfers.
But if you're someone who genuinely believes the conspiracy theories, a site may end up banning you because you're indistinguishable from people are not sincere and not acting in good faith.
Any filter is going to have false positives, but that doesn't mean we should throw out the filter.
I have been. ( I would be surprised if you did see this message). Profile of the banned account is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dennis_jeeves
While I appreciate the complexity, effort and pains of what Dang and PG are doing there is some evidence that they are sensitive souls, and cannot stand even polite personal criticism. I cannot be sure of this however.
I looked at your comment history, and my guess is that you were banned for certain rants and health conspiracies, like this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28100359
But here is the thing: @dang is trying to keep peace and order. He is not trying to be evil or nice. He is "managing" us. Literally. And this path of the least resistance seems to be working fine-ish.
Personally, I hate having a great article be "flagged" or immediately down-voted. It is more worrisome that posting a similar article some hours later will make it into the top 10 for the same unfathomable reasons. It appears that being up or down voted is more or less emergent (and random?), and that saddens me a bit.
Posting around UTC15:00+1 seems to get the best results.
Ok fair enough. Still there's some sort of a social expectation to that effect. And when you don't behave then you'll get the social sanction given by the community. I can dig that this is the internet and that it's hard work to keep up the standard. You seem to see the two sides to this stuff as well.
Because you'll just make a new account.
It's one thing to shadow-ban an obvious troll.
The problem is, just like censorship, where do you stop?
For example, I'm an infrequent commenter on Youtube, and then mostly perfectly agreeable, but just this one time I posted a scathing comment on a video. And just this one comment was shadow-banned, I'm guessing at the request of the video author. I tried to show my comment to a friend, and the comment simply did not exist for them, or for several other accounts.
I find this kind of selective ghosting, 'invisibly' deleting any critical comments, to be extremely pernicious.
That smacks of churlishness to me. 'You can choose to show dead comments if you want, but the site will still make it difficult for you to read them'.
I always mean to add something to my *monkey scripts to render the dead comments in a visible colour. But it's not the most motivating issue in my intarwebs browsing. So I've not bothered yet.