[zzzcpan]

> Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.

> It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.

[dang]

> I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN.

That can't be true. We couldn't care less whether people criticize Rust.

[pmiller2]

I've seen accounts with green usernames that seem to have been shadowbanned for less. Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things. Getting flagged for the unreasonable things can really kill a brand new account with under 10 karma.

[dang]

"Seem to have been shadowbanned for less" than...criticizing Rust? come on you guys. That's not even close. Perhaps you saw an account that was affected by a software filter, especially if it's new. We try to review the affected posts and immunize legit accounts against the software, but we miss some.

> Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things.

Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. If one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire, "the majority of things I did were reasonable" is not much of a defense.

It's hard to speak in the general case though. People routinely overinterpret what they see based on what they assume is happening. If you haven't specifically asked and we haven't specifically answered, the explanation is probably wrong. It's not hard to get an answer if you try.

[pmiller2]

Yes, "seem to," as in, I have no idea why, because nobody tells me and it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works.

> Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. Suppose one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire. It's not a defense that the majority of things I did were reasonable.

I'm not talking about "set someone's house on fire" though. I'm talking about a comment that triggers a handful of people to mash the downvote or flag link. Specifically, this account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbecker which, obviously someone else noticed as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585354

That user's subsequent comments have not been great, but, at the time that I encountered them, they had something like 10 karma. Note how I wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out why they were shadowbanned?

[dang]

> it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.

New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.

[pmiller2]

So, you're saying that both bans and shadowbans are manual interventions? I did not have that impression regarding shadowbans. What I, and the comment I linked to earlier saw was a combination of green username (new account) and every comment after a certain point marked as [dead]. If that's not "shadowbanned," I don't know what it is. This user also seems to attract downvotes to fairly reasonable comments for some unknown reason.

That said, yes, this user has some questionable comments, most of which seem to have come after the point where I initially noticed. I don't see any reason why posting about racial statistics, China, immigration, and lynchings is a big red flag, especially the way 2020's been going so far. It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however.

[nonbirithm]

It's possible you could have been shadowbanned for other reasons. I really wish the mods at least sent a notification that you were shadowbanned at all with the reason; it would clarify things so much better.

I was personally shadowbanned when I made a new account, but I believe the reason was because I posted a link (to Imgur) in my first post. I emailed the mods and they fixed it for me, but only because I noticed my post wasn't visible after logging out.

To be clear I still don't know the exact reason, but it was apparently made in error.

[eindiran]

That defeats the entire point of shadowbanning someone. Shadowbanning is used primarily _because_ it is opaque to the person who is banned. If you told them, they might then make a new account, rather than thinking that people aren't engaging with them and moving on. If you give them a notification that they have been banned and why in the interest of transparency, its no longer a shadowban.

[pmiller2]

Or, maybe the first ban shouldn't be a permanent shadowban. Maybe actually telling people what they're doing wrong would get them to not do it.

There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.

[eindiran]

I 100% agree, and think that in general shadowbans are a gross idea. But my point is that if you send out info about why you banned someone, then you are explicitly not shadowbanning them, by definition. The whole concept of a shadowban is that it must be opaque to the person being banned; if you change that then you aren't shadowbanning them.

Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.

[pmiller2]

I don't disagree with shadowbanning as a concept; rather, I disagree with HN's implementation of it. Being shadowbanned should be a last resort, after a warning and a more transparent ban. Once you've gotten a certain amount of strikes within a certain period, then I have no problem with a shadowban.

I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.

Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.

I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

[dang]

We tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:

it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.

This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.

This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at [e-mail].