I personally like the concept of hell-banning. what I think is more important is thinking about the limitations placed around this ability. How often can a user be hell-banded? what happens to their posts after the ban has expired? can other users choose to view banned posts? these kinds of questions are what need to be considered when placing a community regulated system in place.
Is the Wired (clueless software developers @ http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-04/st_thompson) link broken?
Not so sure how well hellbanning would work in an online forum, but I’ve always thought it would be a particularly effective in online gaming; For example, make Xbox Live trolls end up always matched with outher trolls, a “Kiddie Pool” of sorts.
As for message boards, there’s one particular problem I’ve seen with a lot of forums that would seem to be completely immune to this type of moderation: Snobbery. For example, I used to semi-regularly visit a particular popular food and cooking board, and in general, I found it to be highly moderated, but at the same time there was very little of what could be identified as trolling taking place on the board, and what little did make it there generally got taken care of quickly. At the same time, the amount of snobbery going on this board is so ridiculous as to make the board completely and totally useless. Looking for some feedback on a recipe? Get ready to be told that you’re eating pig slop, and that you should really be making (recipe that contains all sorts of ingredients costing twice as much and takes twice as long.) Looking for a restaurant in your neighborhood? You’ll be told that everywhere but (some place 20 miles away costing twice as much) is the only place you should be going. And don’t you dare admit to liking any chain restaurants or any leading national brand products or you’ll be denounced about twenty-seven different ways, none of which actually infringe the rules of the board, but basically make the place unwelcoming to anyone outside of the hippie-organic-megabuck clique that “runs” the place.
Oh, and I thought the Oracle forums were just crappy jive software.
In my opinion, these techniques are as recommended in online communities, as torture is in real life: not at all!
stackoverflow is rubbish these days. no one ever answers my questions, it takes forever to load, and I keep getting random error messages
It seems to me that this problem has had a solution which has stood the test of time for millennia. Shunning. Whether it was ancient Babylon or 19th century London the act of shunning someone (for specified periods of time, even life) has achieved the goal of weeding out undesirable individuals from the group.
All that is needed in the web world is a point system for members (which you already have). Members which contribute the most have the most points. These people’s opinions count the most. If a high point user shuns another user, that shunning counts severely against the shunned. Also if a high point user is shunned the shunning counts less against them. High contributing members may be attacked or maligned at random and sometimes this means the user is actually doing a good job. In other words, the users held in high regard are protected more from random shunnings.
When a user hits a predefined threshold of shun points vs. Their esteem points they are shunned by the entire group for a preset period of time and told so. The shunned are always overtly ignored. With each subsequent shunning more time is added until a shun threshold is reached at which point they are excommunicated.
The shunned and excommunicated always have at ther disposal the petition system. They may ask for forgiveness (or point out the error of the shunning like “someone stole my account.”). The petitions are sent to those that did the shunning and they may decide to not shun them anymore.
This process works orit would not still be in use by churches and organizations around the world.
Just a thought.
Paul
About the whole issue of having to ban users being “time-wasting”.
The link between this and the real-world issues around customer-complaints-procedures, workplace dismissal policies, police/judicial system is hardly tenuous.
I think if you want to be part of any community you have to accept that some people will inevitably waste your time and just try to deal with it as best you can.
In recent decades I’m most impressed with the growth of victim support/reconciliation committee-style judiciary. When the waster is confronted in public by the victim, they have more chance of repairing the damadge they have done to themselves as well as that victim.
Too bad “helbanned” is not an entry in either Wikipedia nor Wiktionary.
…I think I just stumbled into the matrix.
I generally give them a permanent ban then they dispute their ban. If they sign up again they get more actions taken towards them. Works for me.
I’ll just leave this here. I hope hellbanning won’t catch on. http://toway1234.tumblr.com/post/16021243707/hacker-news-hellbanning-is-unacceptable
@Thesledgehammer.wordpress.com I find this issue extremely common on a lot of forums and communities. The core users will generally become cliquish and snobbish and the place becomes extremely hostile to new users. What’s more, the website owners start to be worshiped as some sort of super humans, and he will be one of the main people who drive new users away. Very very common problem. Give people the power and they eventually abuse it,
What would you think about a temporary hellban? That would avoid things like the redditor that was hellbanned for 3 years without noiticing. - link
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Or, maybe, just don’t be a terrible person, and you don’t have to worry about finding ways to avoid bans.
Still an issue!
and
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Checking if you’re shadowbanned is as simple as logging out of the site and trying to view your posts. I also have friends make dummy accounts to double check for me periodically. I change my MAC and IP every week and change my posting style completely every month. You will never keep me out and I will NEVER recognize your authority.
(unless the post above is a joke) Why may I ask? I don’t see why you browse the internet in fear that the rare website may have shadowbanned you. If you don’t cause trouble, you shouldn’t have to worry about that kind of thing.
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Hi, I’m the author of Reveddit, a site that brings transparency to content moderation on Reddit. Did you know that all removed comments on Reddit appear to their authors as if they’re not removed? I’m not sure whether or not that was true when this post was written. I launched Reveddit in 2018 when I realized it was happening.
On Reveddit.com, you can look up your account’s history, or the history of a random user via /r/all/x. Over 50% of accounts on Reddit have removed comments that they likely do not know were removed.
Shadow removal is not rare. It’s extremely common in comment sections across the internet. Facebook gives every page manager a “Hide comment” button that does the same thing. Media outlets call it a “bozo filter”, perhaps named after the popular bbPress plugin for Wordpress that an earlier comment mentioned. It’s also been called selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, disguising a gag, a shadow ban or cave the trolls.
This is a prisoner’s dilemma (see TED-Ed on youtube: /watch?v=emyi4z-O0ls). Everyone is acting in their own interest because they think another platform is going to use shadow moderation to acquire more users and gain the upper hand. Fortunately, every day we get a chance to make a different decision in what the TED-Ed video calls an infinite prisoner’s dilemma at 2:25.
See also my post Shadowbans are bad for discourse, and here’s why.
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