> It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.

I really dislike "it should be illegal" for things like this. It's itself a lazy solution against a hard problem. It seems to often be used as shorthand for "I don't like this and I want it to stop". But making things illegal isn't a magic "make it stop" button. (Hello, War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, etc).

If you want to involve the Government in solving your problem, you now must also account for:

* What is the exact text of a law against this that could actually make it through any particular Congressional body?

* How will possible violations of this law be reported and investigated?

* How will that law be misused by malicious prosecutors and investigators to hassle and punish anybody they don't like?

* How will all of the actors involved actually change their behavior in ways that you didn't expect in order to avoid being targeted for either well-intentioned or malicious prosecution for possible violation of these new laws?

Example: Say I run a pseudonymous social media site resembling Reddit, and shadowbanning is the only thing keeping it from being a hopeless pit of spam right now. If I can't shadowban anymore, maybe my only solution is to require hard proof of identity for all users at least as strict as the KYC your banks use. Now everything you ever post is hard-linked to your identity. Even if not publicly shown normally, it's vulnerable to hacks, malicious employees, or Government requests. That would obviously benefit the Government, so there's a little incentive for them to implement and enforce any such law in such a way that sites are effectively forced to do this. Whoops, we just made the problem worse.

I don't disagree with you, let's play devils advocate: To be fair to the companies, the amount of work to fight off bots and bad accounts is quite complicated, costly (both financially, quality of site, reputation wise) and similar to all kinds of frauds gets increasingly more challenging as the fraudsters improve their game. Add in managing the people who are purposely incendiary and not bots.

The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small. Should they have a better system to get accounts re-activated? Probably - would make sense that they cast a wide net and then have a relatively easy way out for real individuals who can prove identify. Is that perfect? Heck no.

    > The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small.

I don't believe that this is the case, though. Subreddit mods often seem to use it against counter-narrative type of posts - a single post could get you shaddow-banned for life on 50 subreddits that all happen to be under that mod's control. Happens often enough.

As I mentioned I'm fine with this tool being used against spam.

Off the top of my head, it seems self-evident that we can't assess the effectiveness of the filters without actual data. You may hear hundreds of complaints of 'false positives', but bots rarely complain, so those hundreds of false positives may be the collateral damage from blocking either a single bot or hundreds of millions of bots.

Although I'm not normally massively against using anecdotal data for hypothesis building, in this case, it seems as though without actual data, it'd be silly to comment further.

isn't shadow-banning only something reddit admins can do, not subreddit moderators?

Subreddit mods can do it also, with a little help from the automoderator bot I believe.

ah, now I found the right thing, they set automoderator to hide every post automatically, thus getting the same result.

It should not be illegal to ban someone from a website under any circumstances.

I think he means the practice of shadow banning. Not that I agree there either, but I agree that it is abusive.

What if they just started shadow banning African Americans? Would that be illegal? This is a serious qeustion. If we have no idea on who they are shadow banning how can we tell if they are not being discriminatory?

The practice of excluding by race is not actually illegal.

Think about fraternities. Think about ethnic centers.

People have an expectation that because it's immoral in the obvious case, it's illegal.

It's actually not. Nothing stops anyone from making a group for, say, Chinese American newspaper reporters, or Lebanese car mechanics.

What's actually illegal is turning people down for jobs or housing over race.

The law would only be interested if the website was the only way to get to protected topics like a job board

It's also illegal in the U.S. to turn away customers because of their race. That's more relevant than private club membership.

I'm not talking about regular bans, I'm talking about shadow banning.

In case you're not familiar with the concept: it entails "muting" an account without ever notifying said account of that fact. They can still post, comment, vote, and everything else, but no one will see this content.

Sorry, I should have worded that a little more clearly, but my statement applies to shadow banning as well. In my view, it is totally unreasonable to make arbitrary software behavior like shadow banning illegal.

I think dang might disagree with you there.

Also "illegal" is a little over the top. Are we talking misdemeanor or felony, here?

I totally get it when it's used solely to combat spam(bots), but, at least on Reddit, this tool's use has become too widespread and hits too many normal community contributors.

Edit: I'd just like it to be not allowed by law to hopefully curtail its use. I don't really care about what the repercussions of doing it anyway might look like.

Who cares what dang thinks. He’s petty like the Reddit mods are.

Its a great tool to combat nefarious personae (both bots and humans). Its like a tarpit for smtpd/sshd (spamd on OpenBSD). Reddit is a free service to use, so it stands within reason their support dept. (which you'd contact concerning (shadow)bans) is sub-par. For paid subscribers, I would want my money (and time) back.

    > which you'd contact concerning (shadow)bans

Reddit support does not intervene in disputes involving moderation or moderators - unless it's the subject of some virtual riot.

Shadowbanning seems mostly used to silence slightly different opinions, and that's what I have a problem with.

>whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong.

This is the original intent. As far as I understood shadowbanning was for nefarious actors such as spambots, manual spammers, etc so they'd keep going without automatically creating new accounts.

HN does the same. I messaged Dang about it and he apologized and un-shadowbanned me.

Apparently it was because I had two accounts made from the same IP. On on my laptop and one from my mobile phone.

Looks like you were recently banned, was that what you were referring to, or something different?

I noticed because your comment showed dead.