I think that ghostbanning is unethical | Hacker News Reader

I think that ghostbanning is unethical

32 pointsmah4k4l39 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.

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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.

>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

This one showed up

Thanks Fatnino for confirming it showed up.

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've personally criticized dang and he has responded without banning me. PG is an arrogant clown, and I've criticized him many times without incident. He seems to have nothing to do with this site anymore.

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

If you are indeed correct, surely they think that the average HN user is an idiot that needs to shielded from my 'stupid' post. Either that or I'm adding too much noise to the discussion in which case I suspect that technically it may be challenge to add a feature where an individual reader can have the ability to "mute" comments from people that he/she does not wish to see, but others may continue seeing it.

I don't think you got banned for writing stupid posts. It's that they hinted at easily-disproven conspiracy theories, which (as you mentioned) is noisy. But on top of that, your tone was often curt, condescending, and not particularly curious, which I'm sure made other users hostile to you and inclined to flag your posts.

> 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.

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

Thanks for the advice; just put mine on. The world of the dead fascinates me.

I like dead posts. Always interesting to see what offends people.

I did not know this option exists. Thanks. Maybe.

> 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.

I have been.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I don't mean to imply that shadow banning hurts abusive users' feelings, and even if it does, I couldn't care less because being malicious is a choice.

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.

Yeah, we can argue all we want, but it is only implemented as a result of users able to use free resource to mess with others by creating new account when they know that they are banned. Possible solutions:

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 like being blackballed. I often wonder if people knew they were blackballed in Hollywood during the red scare. They were Shadowband. A lot of people have been unfairly “shadow band” in real life. In my humble opinion it is most certainly unethical. If someone is to be ostracized, to be banned so to speak from whatever activity that is, they deserve to know why.

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.

> If someone is to be ostracized, to be banned so to speak from whatever activity that is, they deserve to know why.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

  > 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Shadow banning is the dumbest, it's so cowardly

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

Because you'll just make a new account.

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.

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.

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.

> We're all big boys and girls

Clearly.

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

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