You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wrong sometimes. If there's a chance of that, I'd like to know what we did so we can correct it.
We only use shadowbanning when accounts are new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.
> We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN.
That's a complete contradiction of the explanation you gave at the time. And yes, I asked what had happened when I noticed the account was shadowbanned, and your response was
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Hacker News <hn@ycombinator.com>
Aug 31, 2018, 10:43 PM
to me
Politlcal/ideological flaming; unsubstantive comments; addressing others aggressively. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358383. That's unacceptable and bannable in its own right—and you did a lot of other things along those lines.
You can turn this around by doing the opposite: (1) become less inflammatory, not more, when posting about a divisive subject; (2) make sure your comments are thoughtful; (3) be extra respectful.
Daniel
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(I especially liked that the example comment was from three months earlier. Why didn't I immediately think that far back??@!)
Of course, despite my multiple followup questions, you never bothered to reply again. I'm sure that now you will find the motivation to give an extensive public explanation complete with links of exactly how you really meant that I was "new and spamming or trolling" or "serially creating accounts to abuse HN". It would never work to, say, reply to comments that were 'unacceptable and bannable in it's own right' to say that. Or to follow your previous public explanations of moderation policy, such as
I've taken a look, and this was a case of what I said: we shadowban accounts when they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling. In your case, the account was new and had repeatedly broken the site guidelines (using HN for political battle and being aggressive to other users). That's evidence of trolling, which is one of the situations where we shadowban. I mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358383 by email because that post was what tipped the scales.
I can see why you are angry that we shadowbanned you, because that account went on to make other comments that were fine for HN. Indeed, quite a few were vouched for by other users. That's evidence of not trolling, and that sort of account is not the kind we shadowban—it's the kind where we post moderation replies, and tell people if we ban them. But those later comments didn't exist yet when I shadowbanned you.
Here's the information you need if you want to understand why we do things this way. HN gets tons of new accounts that break the site guidelines and in fact are created for that purpose, which is what I mean by trolling. We can't reply to them all, ask them to follow the guidelines and patiently explain where they're going wrong. If we tried, we'd do nothing else all day—or rather would go mad before getting there. Many of these users know perfectly well what the site guidelines are and have no desire to use HN as intended. If we poured moderation resources there, not only would it not work, it would make things worse, and meanwhile those resources would be unavailable for the rest of the site. For accounts like that, we use shadowbanning, and for the most part that approach works well. But it doesn't work in every case.
When a user emails us about such an account, we have to guess whether they're asking questions in good faith and really want to use the site as intended, or whether there's little hope of convincing them to do so. We don't always guess right. It looks like I guessed wrong in your case. The thing is, though, that when I sent you that detailed explanation of what was wrong with your comments and why we'd banned you, you didn't respond with any indication that you'd received the information and wanted to do something with it. Instead you responded aggressively. I get that you were angry that you had been shadowbanned and didn't know it. But that type of response is correlated with users who go on to be abusers of the site and are not people we can convince to do otherwise, no matter how many replies we give them.
All of this is pattern matching and guesswork. Your original comments and your emails matched patterns that are associated with abuse of the site. With hindsight I see that the pattern matching got it wrong, because your new account has gone on to be (mostly) an ok contributor to HN. (I say 'mostly' because, looking through its history, I still see unsubstantive comments and occasionally worse, but not bannably worse.) But I don't see what I could have done differently in any way that would scale. Our resources are meagre; we're constantly in triage. Patient explanation takes a lot of time and energy—it has taken me an hour to write this so far, and there are many more users demanding explanations than I have hours. Had your emails indicated openness to information or willingness to change, I probably would have replied further. But there are many users who fire multiple angry emails on each reply they get, and we've learned that they are not a good investment, when hundreds of other things and people are clamoring for attention and explanation.
Actually, I do think there is one thing we can do differently that is helpful in such situations: get better at handling anger. There are many users whose every interaction with us is angry and only angry. Often it feels like the intensity of their anger exceeds any of the provocations they're complaining about on HN, even if they're correct on those details. It's as if they're really angry about something else—something more important—but they turn that energy instead onto the extraneous outlet of HN and its moderators, maybe just because it's less important and so in a way safer. I find it difficult to be on the receiving end of this anger. At any moment, there are multiple people doing it. They don't know about each other, so they experience our interactions as individual and demand individual attention, while we experience it as a constant bombardment. It's possible to grow in capacity to handle this—it just requires a lot of personal work. You emailed us a year ago, and I've probably gotten better at this in the last year, so maybe the pattern-matching works a bit better now.
Oh cry me a river. "I couldn't be stuffed making more than a token effort, and here's all the excuses for why I shouldn't have to. We had no way of knowing anything about you! There were only five comments on that account, and it had existed for such a short time, that I couldn't even read the very first couple of comments that said this is the continuation of an existing account! All trolls look like that!"
And wow, give the pop psychology a rest. "I just don't understand why condescendingly shitting on people makes them angry so I've decided they are probably taking out their childhood issues on me." Yea, it couldn't possibly be actually aimed at you.
If you'd just banned me at the time I probably wouldn't be so angry still. The experience of discovering that you had been invisibly fucking with me, probably for months, was absolutely infuriating, and seeing you flat out deny that you pull that shit as a way to manage actual users is unacceptable.
We only use shadowbanning when accounts are new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.