Why are we now seeing a rise of shadow banning and shadow muting as a form of moderation? What changed about the internet that made it start to become a common thing?
The first place I can remember doing it was Reddit for political wrong thinkers. They would shadowban IPs so people didn't know they were being censored.
Is this going to be the future of online moderation where moderators hide behind shadow moderation? Is there any way to change the culture around admins and mods to force it back to an honest "u r banned faget" message or are the passive aggressive types now in charge to the point where this is all we'll ever see.
Just leave those retards revel in their shit and piss, it's not worth fretting over platforms that want to suppress and shape their users in the first place. They'll go away eventually, I barely even hear people mention facebook anymore.
Michael Stewart
women's liberation -> single mothers -> generations of increasingly broken men -> this kind of passive aggressive faggotry. patriarchy always wins... but honest bans in the future may not be "u r banned faget"; it might be " "
It's not cowardice, it's laziness. IP bans aren't effective because you can circumvent them without even getting up from your chair. That means that if you ban someone, they'll just make a new account. But if you ban someone and they only notice it a month later, they don't make a new account for a month.
Angel Miller
Even a small and cohesive community can have trouble identifying a sufficiently bright banned user that came back. As a userbase grows and diversifies, the problem gets worse. At the scale of Something Awful, despite the :10bux: premium, it's close to impossible to track re-registrations. Facebook, Leddit, Twitter and the likes are in a league of their own. They likely adopted shadow banning as a cost-cutting measure since their moderators don't do it for free. Even assuming that shadow bans keep banned user "off" for no more than one measly day, that would surely amount to thousands of dollars saved a month in labor. In reality, I'm sure that shadow bans end up saving them tens if not hundreds of thousands a year, not even counting how much more attractive it makes the site to advertisers.
Mason Peterson
Same for reddit as well. I occasionally here people complain about 'The_Donald' (the subreddit), but most people know that the site on the whole is a cancerous wasteland with a scattering of still ok places if you can find them.
Charles Miller
there are reddit bots that can tell you if you are shadow banned saw it while redditing fellow redditors so you can trust me
Dylan Barnes
Reddit is a goldmine for bizarrely dumb ideas. Clicking on a username, let alone typing something into the search field, is "doxing". Clicking a link to another post on the same site is "brigading"
Christian Gonzalez
Some less retarded than average mod noticed that old trick and started using it, others followed.
Despite what most of this thread seems to think, Reddit was far from the first site to do shadowbans: it was the first really big and succesful social network to clearly say they did them, but shadowbans were fairly popular even back when IRC was all the rage.
False, the issue is that admins can (and will) enforce additional/stricter rules only on some communities as they see fit, so they might decide that on a certain sub posting usernames is forbidden or shit like that. The admins don't even know what they mean by brigading, and the case you mentioned often doesn't qualify but sometimes does because fuck you. Of course, brigading itself is such a bigger annoyance that nobody cares much about the fine details.
You only have yourself to blame for going to sites that are against free speech, and yes, it is totally legal for them to silence you. You should be relatively free to shitpost here.
Andrew Ward
Yes, we should just let them silence every moderately right-wing idea. Let's take it like faggots!
Thomas Reyes
People started waking up to the kikes, overt bans serve to wake even more people up, so they devised shadow-bans in a desperate attempt to regain control of the discourse before they get Shoah'd for real this time. It continues to fail.
Meguca mods often censor posts and ban people here.
Isaac Barnes
Shadow muting had long been a feature of the Internet. Usenet networks have had this feature for decades.
Cooper Flores
Who owns Facebook, do you? Who owns the company serving Gab for that matter? For a supposedly intelligent board, there sure are a lot of idiots posting.
Eli Stewart
nothing, it was always full of fags
you're from the Zig Forums generation, newfag. in 2000 i got banned for saying "nigger" in every game aside from ut99
Jacob Cox
Welcome to my killfile, sucker! *plonk*
Christopher Wright
Yes, and private companies that have monopolized the domain/registering system of the Internet have a moral obligation to destroy our first amendment rights so they can police "Nazis" (Trump supporters) on what can and cannot be said. Wait, that's retarded, and in violation of Marsh v. Alabama.
Jack Jenkins
On the left there is no discussion, there's no debate, there's no consideration of alternative views. There's only unanimous, full throated support for the suppression of speech and the crushing of dissent. And they don't want to achieve this through reasoned argument or an open exchange of ideas. They don't want balance. They have no consideration for the protection of minority opinion and this is an ominous development. The left is using its institutional and corporate power to restrict access to communication and information mediums, thereby insuring a contrived consensus through non democratic, supra political means. They can bypass the issue of rights and constitutional protections when the power to control behavior and speech is in the hands of private corporations and a swarming mob of hive minded private citizens. This is a problem with a much wider scope and more troubling implications than whether or not the country is currently overrun with "Nazis" who need to be defeated or whether we will choose love or hate or some equally asinine conflict. For an increasingly thoughtless and swelling rank of people, freedom of speech is secondary to enforcing correct speech, which is a narrowly circumscribed set of inane opinions, platitudes, banal slogans, and scathing contempt for caricatured enemies on the right. In the headlong rush to outfit themselves with the symbols and employ the tactics of failed European ideologies, people are forgetting about genuine American political traditions and ideals, one of the most important of which is free speech. The clash between alienated communists and fascists in our midst is obscuring a deeper disconnect from what distinguishes American politics and institutions from European totalitarian tendencies. We need to remember that American political ideals uphold the value of freedom of speech and the protection of minority opinion and dissent. Sure, most people don't like what neo-nazis have to say, but circumventing the law and withdrawing infrastructural support from certain groups to prevent them from communicating with each other subverts the structure of an open space where perspectives are balanced and individuals are empowered to put forth challenging, even odious ideas. We're all free to reject speech we don't like; we can not listen, direct our attention elsewhere, or directly criticize it. But there is a tendency right now of people preferring power to right, and the power that certain movements are amassing to silence opposition is overshadowing the right of all of us to speak freely.
Er, no. The type of muting pioneered by the Usenet killfile was a decision by the end user that they preferred not to see any more of a particular user's posts. This is a very different scenario to recent types of shadow-bans on Twitter and elsewhere, where server admins make the decision to censor a users posts, preventing others from seeing them without having any choice, or even knowing they exist.
Matthew Ward
Yes, killfiles were more like filtering tripfags/IDs on this site.
Jonathan Diaz
crossboarders, so like /intl/ RIP /intl/ and nama-sensei
