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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

I get it, you want to fuck with telemarketers. But "Heaven Banning" [0] is a terrible terrible thing, and I don't like where this is going.

[0] https://archive.is/hPoAo

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Why is it so terrible in particular?

Regarding information safety on the Internet, I think the cat is long out of the bag now. Forget AI, information is already weaponized at scale. I mean in the way like in this Wiki collection [0]. AI is, while probably powerful, just another tool in this toolbox.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades#Opinion-i...

To preface it's a strong gut feeling that I don't know where exactly it is coming from. So I'm trying to understand it myself.

I think the reason I feel so opposed to it is because human connection is one of the most beautiful things. Forming friendships. And heaven banning counter-acts that and counterfeits that. If you find out your friends were fake, in a very literal sense, enough times you may stop trying to find friends. You may fall into a learned helplessness and isolation, where you must scream but there is no real to hear. Only fake phantoms feigning sympathy, gone tomorrow and replaced with new faces.

Thanks, I think I understand. I think the people in the world could do with more compassion. To stay with the example of telemarketers, my issue is that whoever benefits from the operation is not the one bearing the consequences, the externalities of the deed - I mean, they are not the ones yelled at by the desperate people on the other end of the line. So the operators effectively outsource this misery to the pawns that are the telemarketers. We as a society do this thing often, with everything we don't want to face directly, like the butchering of the animals that we consume.

The proper way to go about it would be regulation, I think. For example, to ban telemarketing altogether.

"Heavenbanning" isn't going to be a thing, because it's no more effective than hellbanning while being drastically more expensive for platforms to implement.

The article describes it working though. It was able to string along some salesman for 5 minutes, much longer than he would wait if someone picked up the phone and said nothing.

The only reason it works in a telemarketing context is because "hellbanning" doesn't exist for phones, it's a synchronous medium where you need to keep them on the line somehow, as you note. That's not a concern for asynchronous mediums like forums.

In addition, banning someone in the context of a forum is the responsibility of the operators of the platform, but stringing along a telemarketer is the responsibility of the individual users of the platform. It's not equivalent to a hellban, it's the equivalent of trolling, but now automated. If it ever started happening in large numbers, the platform operators (the phone companies) would change their terms of service to make it illegal, because having machines trolling each other indefinitely uses up their network capacity for no reason.

Are you really advocating for the plight of these poor scammers?

I think it's worth taking a stand early on, before the tactic is inevitably expanded to include more groups of people.

Personally, I take bigger issue with the people who hire the telemarketer. While I can imagine a person revelling in their telemarketing position, somehow I suspect most people working are just trying to get enough money to not starve before next months paycheck.

Regardless of the reality, I get the sentiment. Hey we built this system that can trap humans in an infinite social loop requiring either superhuman willpower or outright sociopathy to escape. But don't worry, we only use it on the bad people.

Part of the justification I’ve heard for wasting the scammers time is to limit the number of people they can interact with in a day. If wasting a scammer’s time prevents another innocent person from scammed then there’s a net benefit.

It’s unfortunate that some people need to do bad things to make a living but it’s an explanation of bad behavior, not a justification for it.

Mind you, I’m also sympathetic to the ways in which this practice could be abused.

>infinite social loop requiring either superhuman willpower or outright sociopathy to escape

Or, you can just hang up if you have your suspicions. I don't see this kind of banning particularly useful. If it gets sufficiently popular, telemarketers will just work around it in their scripts.

You can always come to HN in order to find contrarian views.

Heaven Banning is hypothetical, it's not real. At least not yet.

If you look closer at the date in the screen shot of a NYT article in your link, you'll see that the date was deliberately chosen to be in the future (i.e. August 8, 2024).

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