Personally I'm disturbed at the non-chalant attitude taken towards shadow moderation in this thread. Shadow banning and shadow moderation may make one's job easier but it has a disastrous effect on the forum or community by injecting a definite level of deceit into the moderator/poster relationship.
Any forum where shadow bans /shadow moderation are practiced the moderators by definition can not be trusted.
You say that as if it's fact, but I'm not sure it is. HN has a method of shadow banning that is reversible if you are noticed as posting stuff that contributes and follows the guidelines, and even when you are shadow banned, people can opt into seeing your contributions (I've had showdead on from day one, I think).
There are places in the internet you can go to make sure you are heard and you can say whatever you want. If you prefer to post here instead of there, then some examination on why that is might be warranted, and specifically whether the thing you are complaining about helps or hinders making this place somewhere you feel worth spending time.
How is it not? Shadowbans by definition are deceptive; their whole intent is to deceive the poster into thinking that their message was sent and is readable.
If you post and your message appears to appear on the thread but only you can read it then...you are being deceived. The message board software is lying to you.
Since it is the moderators who decide that then it's the relationship between you (the poster) and the moderators that determines whether or not your post actually successfully completes or if you're being lied to.
That is what I mean when I say that shadowbans inject a factor of deceit into the poster/moderator relationship.
It's possible to argue that it doesn't, but it's also possible to argue that the moon is made of green cheese as well. Neither argument is the truth.
>There are places in the internet you can go to make sure you are heard and you can say whatever you want.
And there are places where if you are banned, you know it; if your comment is removed, you know it. My qualm in this thread is about the deceptive practice of shadowbanning.
> If you prefer to post here instead of there, then some examination on why that is might be warranted, and specifically whether the thing you are complaining about helps or hinders making this place somewhere you feel worth spending time.
May I ask -was it your intent to come off as being condescending and borderline insulting? If not, you ought to be aware that is how that sentence came off. And I'll tell you for nothing that being talked down to after spending 25 years on the internet does NOT contribute positively towards HN being a place worth spending time in.
It's also a hand-wave -meaning a distraction from my primary point which is about shadowbanning and the fact it injects a note of deceit into the moderator/user relationship.
There are pluses and minuses to everything; good points and bad points. Obviously since I will continue posting in HN I see more positive points than negative ones -but that does not change the fact ...and it is a fact... that I believe (and have no reason not to believe) that shadowbans have a negative effect on the larger community that they're practiced on. They make HN a place less worth coming to, and the fact that there are positives reasons to come to HN does not change that.
So -to long didn't read summary; shadowbans undermine posters' faith in moderators and serve to undermine the credibility of moderation as a whole.
This is because the user is not considered part of the community. A shadowban is something you deploy against a user that is presumed to be a malicious actor in the system. It's deceit, but in a similar category of deceit to telling a user the resource is 404 not found instead of 403 or 401 because you don't even trust them enough to let them know that they found a resource that exists. It's deceit with the purpose of stymiing further malicious action.
I think that not getting rid of that content/malicious participants (not community members) undermines faith in moderation.
The question is not whether it's deceptive, but whether "it has a disastrous effect on the forum or community". It is deceptive. Does it have a disastrous effect on the community? It doesn't appear so to me, so I think that needs supporting evidence.
> May I ask -was it your intent to come off as being condescending and borderline insulting? If not, you ought to be aware that is how that sentence came off.
How a sentence is interpreted has a lot to do with the context the person reading it is in. I didn't intend to be dismissive, but I think the point still stands, because I was actually trying to make a point. Why not just use one of the sites that doesn't do shadowbanning or censorship instead? This isn't some sly insinuation you should leave. It's an actual question about what is different here from there in the rules and moderation, and how and why that might contribute to how the community acts at each place respectively.
> It's also a hand-wave -meaning a distraction from my primary point which is about shadowbanning and the fact it injects a note of deceit into the moderator/user relationship.
No, it's a real question that you decided wasn't relevant so then went out of your way to avoid.
> but that does not change the fact ...and it is a fact... that I believe (and have no reason not to believe) that shadowbans have a negative effect on the larger community that they're practiced on.
It hasn't been shown to be a fact. You haven't even really shown how it could be negative to the community, much less provided evidence. "It erodes faith" is both unsubstantiated, and it's also not shown even if it was how that actually results in a problem (I'm not sure there don't exist forums with hated moderators that still function fairly well).
Shadowbanning is censorship and it is deceitful, but it's also aimed squarely at those the moderators think are not part of the community, or at least not productive parts. The whole point of it is to keep those people from realizing their account is banned right away and starting a new account to continue the behavior.
I would argue that for the most part, this has a positive effect. There are plenty of dead posts which you can see too if you want which provide little or no useful contribution to the discussion or the community.
> shadowbans undermine posters' faith in moderators and serve to undermine the credibility of moderation as a whole.
I haven't observed that. I think most people here trust the moderators to use that sparingly, and there's also a system which appears to let the community see and reverse shadowbans in the case it's incorrectly applied or the banned person in question provides more meaningful content later.
I think that might be a pretty good mechanism, all said and done. Someone acts in a way the community doesn't accept enough times they go dead, and then if they act acceptably they start getting people responding and participating to them as they come out of dead status. They only get attention, and positive attention, from acting responsibly.
The canard about what happens when you assume applies in this case. Very much so.
I've moderated forums and I've never had a problem with simply deleting spam out-right when it came up. Same with problematic users and posts.
If you want to waste precious minutes of your life dealing with the mentally deranged for free -- that's your call. But you shouldn't be disturbed by those who don't.
