Re:FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
by malwarebytess on Sunday September 05, 2021 @01:08AM
(#28421785)
Surprisingly yes. It does work. There are some who figure it out eventually, but not before they have spent months wasting their time and saving mine.
I reserve it for people I believe will ban evade or have in the past.
Does it really work? A lot of people have no trouble working out that it has happened to them. The theory is that a troublemaker won't realise they've been banned, and so will continue sending their trouble into the void instead of coming back as a new account to cause more trouble that everyone else can see. In practice, it doesn't take long for the troublemaker to work out what is going on, so this only slows them down slightly at best. For some major sites, people have even created shadowban detection tools, so even troublemakers who are too clueless to work it out for themselves can discover it.
This site only really has half-shadowbanning. A lot of people have showdead on, read the dead comments too, and vouch for interesting/constructive ones. Maybe that works for this site; but even if that is true, it doesn't really tell us how well a pure shadowban implementation, without showdead, works. Very few sites with shadowbanning have an equivalent to showdead.