The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.
Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.
I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
It wastes bot’s time
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don’t really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I’m explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there’s a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of “popular” content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that’s entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting “unboxing” videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that’s converged on “Oops! All Ads!” and is steadily making its way to “Oops! All scams!” as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
In business, it’s described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you’re working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic “unsolved problem” of social relationships.
have you contracted police to, well, police your area?
Sadly, I’ve been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.
Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power
All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.
Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.
Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.
Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.
The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.
Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.
I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
You are wrong. You have no right to a voice on a private platform.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
More if you own Ticketmaster, and you decide you’re going to freeze out a particular artist from every venue you contact with.
And yes. Absolutely censorship.
Changing the scenario doesn’t answer my question.
I came up with a scenario directly related to your previous post.
I can only imagine you are changing the scenario because you realize what I said makes what you said seem unreasonable.
Then why did you change the scenario?
It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.
Which sucks just as badly.
Don’t post shit that gets you shadowbanned. Problem solved.
Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don’t really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I’m explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there’s a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of “popular” content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that’s entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting “unboxing” videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that’s converged on “Oops! All Ads!” and is steadily making its way to “Oops! All scams!” as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.
In business, it’s described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you’re working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic “unsolved problem” of social relationships.
I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.
Sadly, I’ve been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.
No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.
Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.
Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.
Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.
I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.
Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.
Internal Affairs. Yes. Internal to the Russian Communist Party.
The NKVD weren’t Jew-hunters, engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing.
You could say the same thing about Ayn Rand.
You definitely sound very knowledgeable