[iamdbtoo]

My theory for why people think they are being "shadowbanned" or otherwise targeted by a social media company is often because of bugs like this. They are weird and almost like gaslighting in the way you experience them and people who don't understand how these bugs can exist assume sinister motives.

[TeMPOraL]

I remember Facebook around ~2010 would often seemingly delete posts I published, or hide them from some of my friends. Or from me. I could easily confirm that by viewing my profile from another browser that wasn't logged in, or having a friend sitting next to me open my profile.

Of course, it wasn't any kind of UI bug or automated moderation. The experience gave me a visceral understanding of what eventual consistency means - a term I also first learned around that time, during internship in an Erlang company, and connected the dots.

I was one of the first people in my social circle to spot the issue, but as it became apparent over a year or two before eventually getting fixed (or at least made less obvious), I ended up giving a very high level intro to distributed databases to quite a few non-tech people, in order to alleviate their concerns about Facebook gremlins.

This and other experiences using and building software systems make me agree with you. Especially for large web platforms, that weird thing you're experiencing could be some nasty form of shadow ban, but if you just noticed it after doing something, then chances are it's just a transient issue with queues or database consistency.

[nyanpasu64]

Shadowbanning is a very real phenomenon; my current Reddit account was shadowbanned twice because I had created and posted memes which got unusually high upvotes for a new account, and the algorithm thought I was a bot reposting images to farm karma for future spamming. And from time to time I see HN users whose posts are flagged by default. I'm less sure if/how shadowbanning occurs on Twitter.

[kevingadd]

The problem is that while shadowbanning is a real thing, there are lots of bugs that also appear to be shadowbans and might just be a momentary glitch or an unintended interaction between systems. In Twitter's case, there are multiple different penalties that can apply to account and people refer to them all interchangeably as a "shadowban". And some people claim to be shadowbanned when as far as anyone can tell there's no function in Twitter's system to do it, there's just something weird happening in the infrastructure or algorithms (or it's all imaginary, who can say)

[mistermann]

Or it is actually real and it is those who are imagining it to be only imagined who are mistaken. Almost everything we do is composed of substantial imagination, the whole system runs on it.

What I find interesting is the substantial curiosity and effort people will put towards solving questions in video games, but when asked to solve problems in the game of life that we are embedded in, people often seem to have opposite instincts.