I think that ghostbanning is unethical

32 points by mah4k4l 4 years ago | 39 comments

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.

smt88 4 years ago |

Shadowbanning has two obvious benefits for the site:

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.

dennis_jeeves1 4 years ago | |

>I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone.

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

Fatnino 4 years ago | | |

This one showed up

mah4k4l 4 years ago | |

> I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone.

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.

true_religion 4 years ago | | |

Shadow banned people on HN just have their comments automatically killed. If you have showdead on, you still see their comments.

smt88 4 years ago | | |

> I wouldn't consider myself to be a "toxic personality" but being ghostbanned did piss me off a little.

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.

Mandatum 4 years ago | |

I have been.

smt88 4 years ago | | |

Can you link to examples of your comments that got your shadowbanned for censorship?

speedgoose 4 years ago |

It’s extremely effective and reduce the moderators workload a lot, because creating a new account and farming karma again is easy. However many spammers and unwanted commenters never notice that they are ghost banned.

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.

mah4k4l 4 years ago | |

Ok I'll agree upon it being a shades of grey - kind of thing. But why not just outright ban someone when it's clear he doesn't fall into those categories of a spammer, a scammer or a troll. Would be much more polite and straightforward in a kind situation where you just seem to have the "wrong opinions" that don't fit the forum or whatever.

Normille 4 years ago |

I can see the thinking behind it. Why let a spammer know no-one is seeing their junk? They'll just keep creating new accounts.

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.

selfhoster11 4 years ago | |

While shadow banning has some benefits, at its heart it is a form of gas-lighting (claiming that everyone can see your message, while it's actually just you), with good intentions in the case of HN.

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.

yetihehe 4 years ago | | |

> 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.

If some users don't want to act honestly, rest of society should not honour their malice. Honouring malice leads to dissolution of society.

mah4k4l 4 years ago | |

It's kind of trivial to check if you're ghostbanned though via wget script or something for example. I don't think ghostbanning slows down spamming enough to be ethically justified.

codefreeordie 4 years ago | |

The concept might have originated as an anti-spam tool, but now it's just part of narrative enforcement.

janandonly 4 years ago |

  > We're all big boys and girls.

We (as a species) overall do not behave like adults, really. Not on the internet anyway's, or at least not all the time.

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.

mah4k4l 4 years ago | |

> We (as a species) overall do not behave like adults, really.

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.

janandonly 4 years ago | |

In a similar vain, I've noticed that the highest chance of making it into the top 20 posts here on HN depends greatly on the hour of the day.

Posting around UTC15:00+1 seems to get the best results.

isaacfrond 4 years ago |

That this post is [flagged] is of course deliciously ironic.

jacknews 4 years ago |

I agree.

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.

throwaway67743 4 years ago |

Shadow banning is the dumbest, it's so cowardly

onion2k 4 years ago |

If you ban and censor us, why don't you just tell us so?

Because you'll just make a new account.

Bancakes 4 years ago |

It's worse in videogames like Dark Souls or mobile PUBG where they simply send you off to the shadowrealm of "like-minded" players. And there's no going back. It's a sign of understaffed moderation teams.

nathanaldensr 4 years ago |

This is why I always read HN with Show Dead turned on. Often, dead comments are the most interesting and thought-provoking in a thread.

Normille 4 years ago | |

Even there though, the dead comments are rendered in a light grey font which is so close to the background colour as to make them pretty much unreadable [for me anyway]. Even highlighting the almost-hidden text doesn't help much as the highlight colour is similar in brightness to the grey text.

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.

dairylee 4 years ago |

> We're all big boys and girls

Clearly.

pieter_mj 4 years ago | |

Dang surely makes us look that way with his hard work. On hn, everyone is a better version of him/herself. Well, almost.