Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.
Sometimes these people need a hard truth. I’d say most times. They usually won’t “get it” in the moment, but the only way they can ever get it is if someone respects them enough to say it.
These sorts of bans aren’t just good for the community. They’re also good for the recipient. (I’d only say that in the short term, depending on the person, there could be a danger of self harm and people should always be kind and careful.)
It doesn’t feel good. But that pain you feel is you caring about that person. Understanding that makes it easier.
"someone respects them enough to say it." "They’re also good for the recipient."
I've never seen anyone learning anything from being permabanned from anywhere. This is just post-facto justification to make yourself feel better for removing those people - but don't believe it even for a second that you've helped them in any way. Helping the community? Could be. Helping the banned person? Hell no.
I was banned from a Discord server for reasons like these, and I found it really helpful for knowing for sure that I needed to change my behavior. I think it fundamentally comes down to the person; I have struggled with knowing how to “read the room” and when something is acceptable or not, and it was a very clear “it’s not” after the ban.
To the degree that anything is 'wrong', it's your argument. You haven't experienced a thing even indirectly, therefore, you conclude, anyone else who claims to have experienced this thing must be lying (at least to themselves) to make themselves feel better about bad actions which harm others. This is just cynicism.
Your argument also requires the hidden assumption that the person making the claim you disagree with (specifically me), was the person performing the action rather than the recipient of the action. While it is true I have ended relationships (including permabans), it was by being the recipient of such endings that I came by my knowledge so this assumption in a practical sense is false.
This is the difference between banning in the aughts versus now.
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
I find blocks are almost necessary for me to be able to stand to use Mastodon.
There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.
One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.
So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.
You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.
While I can relate to that, as that's how I made Twitter tolerable, is that really as much of an issue on the Fediverse which doesn't have algorithmic recommendations? I only have to see posts from the people I follow and I don't follow anyone who has a tendency to like "rage post"ing so I basically never see that sort of stuff unless I look at the global feed.
I think people have misconceptions about algorithmic feeds.
You can measure what inflames people or you can predict what inflames people, measuring is always going to be more acccurate.
… and you can do that measuring by counting boosts or (on HN) taking the ratio of comments/votes. 0.5 is about the median, articles that go above 2 are well in the danger zone.
In my mind the chronological feed with boosting is pretty toxic on its own, an “explore” feed based on what is getting boosted is even worse.
YOShInOn’s main feed I look at every day is based on (1) clustering and (2) prediction of my upvotes and downvotes, I don’t particularly upvote toxic articles, in fact, I make a point to down vote them so my feed is calming and low in sensationalism. (Though there was a time I was into articles from The Guardian about how the UK is going to hell…). So that kind of algorithmic feed is not inflammatory.
If you use “boost count” or judged sentiment or the like you could make a model that amplifies or diminishes angry content. The thing is voting and boosting is not all bad, I post a lot of flower pics to Mastodon because they get boosted, up to a point discussions on HN are a good thing, If you used a sentiment model to suppress angry content in a voting/boosting process that might be very good.
Sometimes I think about making an “angry toot” model but I can’t stand the thought of looking at 5000 angry toots (well, i have thought about testing a weight loss plan based on inducing a psychogenic fever and maybe that would work…)
People have got worse, there are far more of them than in the early days, and the online/offline boundary has collapsed. And I think as we've all got older we become accustomed to the sad truth that misbehavior slides seem to rarely be recoverable. People lean in to their awfulness, until something terrible and offline happens.
> Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.
Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.
Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.
> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.
And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.
> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.
Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.
Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?
>Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
The issue with blocks as implemented on reddit is that they effectively work as moderation tools that instead of following some community norms are in the powers of individuals who are happy to abuse them. In at least one Reddit community it was enough of a problem that they made ot a rule that blocking someone was a bannable offence. Blocks should just be mutes for those blocking them. not an effective unilateral ban for whoever gets there first.
Check out rule 11 on https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/about/ (they have relaxed the rules a bit because Reddit doesn't provide for a non-abusable block, which is important and useful functionality). But essentially it's disruptive because you can simply block most of the active members of a subreddit and get an unchallenged soapbox, which in a community which wants to correct misinformation is not desired (I think they fixed this particularly stupid idea but for a while you could just block all the moderators and it would be quite difficult for them to even notice you)
But by virtue of blocking most of any given subreddit to get "an unchallenged soapbox" I mean... you will get that, but:
1) Your post will get very little traction or engagement, which means it'll be buried in New quite quickly
2) You won't really be a bother to the community at all, because of 1. Like, if someone posted something that was incredibly offensive to all in a given community but then hid it from everyone... like, is it even really posted? Isn't that just basically shadowbanning yourself?
I'm legit trying but I'm having a hard time picturing what purpose this would be used for, on the part of the poster. Seems like a huge waste of time to be honest.
