• teft@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I think people have a right to be heard

        You are wrong. You have no right to a voice on a private platform.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            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?

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              So if I own a cafe

              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.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.

      Similar to vote obfuscation.

      Which sucks just as badly.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.