If you ban and censor us, why don't you just tell us so? We're all big boys and girls.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
> We're all big boys and girls.
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.
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.
Posting around UTC15:00+1 seems to get the best results.
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.
Because you'll just make a new account.
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.
Clearly.