Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
It wastes bot’s time
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.
For example, if I said “I believe people have a right to healthcare”, you might correctly respond “people do not have a legal right to healthcare” (in America at least). But you’d be missing the point, because I’m speaking morally, not legally.
I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
My comment was:
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
Now, are you going to answer my questions or are we just going to end the conversation here?
I think private platforms that do this are acting in an unethical manner. Lots of things that are perfectly legal but of dubious morality. Like fucking a 16 year old as a 40 year old man in Georgia or used car dealerships.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments.
There’s a sub to test if you are shadowbanned. The mods set it up so automod automatically approves any post there, so that way even if you’re shadowbanned you can post.
Then a bot goes through and scans to check your comments and sees if they show up.
When shadowbanned, people can still see your comments if they go onto your profile. They just won’t see it in the thread.
You ever seen a thread that says something like “3 comments” and you click and only see 1? 2 people commented that were shadowbanned.
I’ve gone through the sub and browsed through profiles of people who were shadowbanned. Some of them posted nothing controversial to warrant a shadowban.
So just don’t commit thought crime against Big Brother and you’ll be good?
When a platform gets to a certain size, we need to consider its effects on society as a whole. Hiding undesirable content and promoting desirable content can be a monopolistic practice for the org to get outsized impact on things it finds important. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” depends on how closely that org’s interests are aligned with the average person.
I, for one, do not think Meta’s interests are aligned with my own, so I think it’s bad that they have so much sway that they can steer the public discourse through their ranking algorithm. Shadowbanning is just another way for the platform to get their desired message out.
Instead of trying to restrict yourself to only posting what the platform wants you to post, you should be seeking alternatives that allow you to post what you think is valuable to post.
That’s a good solution for you, but some of us don’t generally bend over to assholes.
And that’s not serious. You’ll get shadowbanned for any kind of stuff somebody with that ability wants to shadowban you for. You won’t know the reason and what to avoid.
I got shadowbanned on Reddit a few times for basically repeating the 1988 resolution of the European Parliament on Artsakh (the one in support of reunification with Armenia).
Don’t hang out in spaces that don’t align with your beliefs.
I was on reddit for 15 years and never caught a ban and I’m not exactly a demure person. If you go to an anti vax thread (this is an example since i know nothing of armenia) and post stuff about vaccination, even it’s 100% factual, it’s not surprising when you catch a ban.
I usually go to places which (on surface) align with my beliefs in what the end goal should be, and generally on the means.
I
'm willing to drop some of my beliefs on the means if that makes the goal closer. And no system of belief is perfect, so it seems sane to argue on details of achieving something.
Which is when the reality hits that most people don’t care about end goals. They just want to join some crowd.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.
If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.
I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.
The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
They never said shadow bans reduce the number of bots on a platform Classic straw man.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
You are wrong. You have no right to a voice on a private platform.
Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.
For example, if I said “I believe people have a right to healthcare”, you might correctly respond “people do not have a legal right to healthcare” (in America at least). But you’d be missing the point, because I’m speaking morally, not legally.
I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
More if you own Ticketmaster, and you decide you’re going to freeze out a particular artist from every venue you contact with.
And yes. Absolutely censorship.
Changing the scenario doesn’t answer my question.
I came up with a scenario directly related to your previous post.
I can only imagine you are changing the scenario because you realize what I said makes what you said seem unreasonable.
Then why did you change the scenario?
I didn’t. I responded to your comment:
My comment was:
Now, are you going to answer my questions or are we just going to end the conversation here?
I think private platforms that do this are acting in an unethical manner. Lots of things that are perfectly legal but of dubious morality. Like fucking a 16 year old as a 40 year old man in Georgia or used car dealerships.
Then how did you see them?
There’s a sub to test if you are shadowbanned. The mods set it up so automod automatically approves any post there, so that way even if you’re shadowbanned you can post.
Then a bot goes through and scans to check your comments and sees if they show up.
When shadowbanned, people can still see your comments if they go onto your profile. They just won’t see it in the thread.
You ever seen a thread that says something like “3 comments” and you click and only see 1? 2 people commented that were shadowbanned.
I’ve gone through the sub and browsed through profiles of people who were shadowbanned. Some of them posted nothing controversial to warrant a shadowban.
It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.
Which sucks just as badly.
Don’t post shit that gets you shadowbanned. Problem solved.
Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies
So just don’t commit thought crime against Big Brother and you’ll be good?
When a platform gets to a certain size, we need to consider its effects on society as a whole. Hiding undesirable content and promoting desirable content can be a monopolistic practice for the org to get outsized impact on things it finds important. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” depends on how closely that org’s interests are aligned with the average person.
I, for one, do not think Meta’s interests are aligned with my own, so I think it’s bad that they have so much sway that they can steer the public discourse through their ranking algorithm. Shadowbanning is just another way for the platform to get their desired message out.
Instead of trying to restrict yourself to only posting what the platform wants you to post, you should be seeking alternatives that allow you to post what you think is valuable to post.
That’s a good solution for you, but some of us don’t generally bend over to assholes.
And that’s not serious. You’ll get shadowbanned for any kind of stuff somebody with that ability wants to shadowban you for. You won’t know the reason and what to avoid.
I got shadowbanned on Reddit a few times for basically repeating the 1988 resolution of the European Parliament on Artsakh (the one in support of reunification with Armenia).
Don’t hang out in spaces that don’t align with your beliefs.
I was on reddit for 15 years and never caught a ban and I’m not exactly a demure person. If you go to an anti vax thread (this is an example since i know nothing of armenia) and post stuff about vaccination, even it’s 100% factual, it’s not surprising when you catch a ban.
I usually go to places which (on surface) align with my beliefs in what the end goal should be, and generally on the means. I 'm willing to drop some of my beliefs on the means if that makes the goal closer. And no system of belief is perfect, so it seems sane to argue on details of achieving something.
Which is when the reality hits that most people don’t care about end goals. They just want to join some crowd.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.
If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.
I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.
The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.