ID:2840583
 
In light of the revelations that Twitter has been practicing secret shadow banning of users, across mainly political lines, and the fact that BYOND practices shadow banning as well, what assurances, besides your word (which Twitter also gave) that your moderation is not also similarily motivated by certain biases? As a conservative, I have concerns, especially after the Discord dogpile and ban I experienced after bringing up my own political stance. I have not been back since. I do not tolerate moderation abuse, period.

So, gurus, What's the truth? Will you even tell it? I have my doubts.

~X
With Lummox in control I think we're good, Now if the mods had a chance at having it their way, it'd be just like Twitter.
I've always found Lommox's hand to be very heavy, so that alone is no real comfort. To be fair, we've never seen eye to eye on this topic. His habit of chasing windmills, I believe, led to the use of Cloudflare and the more recent shadowban policy, an abhorent practice on its face, IMHO. If you need to vet your visitors and decieve them into thinking nobody values their contributions, that illustrates a severe disconnect with the community, and doesn't place much faith in the moderation practices that exaserbate trollish behavior.

Now that I think about it, I don't even know why I brought this up. I certainly don't expect change from this, or even transparency, though that would be best for everyone involved.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
If you need to vet your visitors and decieve them into thinking nobody values their contributions, that illustrates a severe disconnect with the community, and doesn't place much faith in the moderation practices that exaserbate trollish behavior.

You think those kinds of people care about anything besides playing pretend god?
Many of them I still consider friends, so I have hope. False hope, perhaps, but there it is.

[edit] Also, I was a pretend god once, so I understand both sides of the issue. I like to believe I was a benevolent pretend god, but I know there are some who feel about me the same way I feel about abusive mods.
There hasn't been a new forum ban applied in literally years. Nobody cares anymore.
In response to James
James wrote:
There hasn't been a new forum ban applied in literally years. Nobody cares anymore.

I know that's not true, and I care.
If there has been, it's likely just old bans auto-extending. There's very little if any moderation happening outside of deleting spam posts.
I'll take your word on it, then. I have seen some pretty based posts that would never fly on the big media sites.

I still dislike the idea that we use shadow banning. It doesn't allow for appeals, maturing into a responsible person, or informing the punished person that they are actually being punished. Shame is a powerful tool for modulating bad behavior. The only good thing is it effectively removes an individual with a smaller chance of evasion.

There's a lot of old users who wouldn't be here now if this was in place years ago. We cater to a young community who tend to stick around for a time long enough to change as people. Practically permabanning is pretty harsh in that light, and it's decietful. The person is led to believe nobody wants to interact with them because one person took exception to something they did once. It's not true. It also robs the community of that choice. I'd rather decide for myself who is worth my attention. If I am unaware that they even exist, I can't do that.

It's cruel to both the banned and the community they are segregated from. If you need to ban someone, just do so openly and deal with the occasional evasion. Don't be a jerk about it. Especially if it's so rare than it hasn't happened in years. It's a terrible policy, and I will never say it's not.
I'm not sure why you think shadow bans on BYOND are a recent thing, they've been a thing for at least a decade, but I can't even remember the last time one was actually employed. The last actual non-spammer bans in the system are by now quite a few years old.
Had I known about it a decade ago, this conversation would be a decade old, and I'd still be decrying the practice for the exact same reasons.
Had a discord a few years back before the whole Antifa/BLM taking over roads and assaulting drivers ordeal, they had me banned via discord because I mentioned I'd defend myself(lol) and then tried taking it over so I hopped on late at night on my alt and removed everyone from the discord I created, and then later down the road I'm told "Make your own discord, Koz."

They will do whatever they can to have it their way.

Related information: https://www.byond.com/forum/post/2701491

tl;dr - We are just experiments :)
Discord is no place for sane individuals. Their TOS prohibits "disinformation" and "hate speech", the two progressive liberal hammers used to silence dissent. Prohibiting false information means someone has to dictate what is true and what is not. Truth is not something that can be mandated in this way. In practice, moderating "disinformation" is used to supress true information that harms the progressive agenda or narrative, and to promote false information that harms the opposition.

Hate speech is another liberal invention with no living specimens found in the wild. It doesn't really exist. It's a tool to wield against white people who don't accept the new woke paradigm of diversity, inclusion and equity. What we used to call reverse racism, but in actuality, is just racism. Coupled with the rampant misandry in all aspects of culture, DIE agenda claims to promote minority voices, but in practice it serves to dismantle as many cornerstones of American and British culture as it possibly can.

Speaking out against the alarming practice of grooming that puts our children in the hands of sexual degenerates, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, or taking kindergarten kids to gay strip clubs for lap dances (yes, this is happening across all western nations) is considered hate speech against the LGBT community. Antifa stands outside these venues while this happens inside with rifles and body armor, waving rainbow flags and beating or shooting anyone who protests, when they can getvaway with it.

Discord, like most platforms, has bent the knee to the fascist movement the left is shoving down our throats. If you are vocal in your defense of sanity, you will be labeled and summarily dismissed with all the pompous arrogance of an aristocratic tyrant tossing a dirty pleb into the gutter. The insidious leftist disease of "I know what's best because I trust my feelings, and your facts are false, no I won't look at them because I know what's true without needing facts" is quite infuriating to be subjected to.

I was hounded by some kids on the discord servers, and subsequently banned for a day. I could have returned if I agreed to abide by their rules, but upon reading and considering them, I could not abide their woke agenda and blatant tyranical subversion.

Since when is discussing politics "starting drama?" Because liberals can't engage without screaming and nashing teeth, foaming at the mouth like an unhinged lunatic when presented with facts that harm your woke identity? The right doesn't seem to suffer the same insane tribalistic tendencies. We don't burn loot and murder innocent people because some criminal scumbag overdosed in police custody. We don't glue ourselves to the Mona Lisa to scream about how oil is bad. We don't block fucking highways with our bodies to protest climate change, or police brutality, or not letting queers molest kids.

Discord is no place for a sane individual. Best to let the SJWs have their little safe space. I've seriously considered remaking Chatters with zero moderation or language filtering to give people a real platform for free speech for once, but I doubt anyone here would use it, and nobody outside BYOND even knows we exist.
This is now off topic, so I won't be continuing this discussion here.
Hey, BYOND mod here. I can see all recent actions up to about 4 months ago (where they're later pruned to conserve space in the web UI). I'm gonna just chat about what's behind the curtain a bit to dispel any ill-feeling about the moderation here on the forums.

James wrote:
There hasn't been a new forum ban applied in literally years

Pretty much. We basically just delete spam posts and incomprehensible gibberish (example: "sajdnaskjdnajsknggsad")

I banned one hate speech user (literally just spewed a bunch of racist terminology in a big post on an edition of Within BYOND, a post I would have deleted even if it contained no racist terminology based purely on its incomprehensibility) but I didn't shadow ban them. In addition, I only applied a year-long ban, instead of a permanent one. The only other type of moderation I've done in the last year was the editing of a post to remove personal information.

James wrote:
I'm not sure why you think shadow bans on BYOND are a recent thing, they've been a thing for at least a decade, but I can't even remember the last time one was actually employed.

A shadow ban hasn't been applied in years, and users who are shadow-banned haven't posted anywhere in a similar timeframe. I can't even see when the last one was applied because it occurred so long ago (well beyond the several month long admin log limit).

The only other type of ban BYOND employs is a full BYOND ban, which prevents you from logging into BYOND entirely. There's no shadow ban option for this type of ban, and only Dantom-level BYOND moderators/admins can apply this type of ban (i.e. you work for BYOND or are incredibly trusted.) The only currently active Dantom-level admin is Lummox. This ban is only used for extreme abuse of the platform or spammers. I cannot see these types of bans, and I probably don't want to. What I do know about it is that it's used sparingly.

On the topic of moderation here... We don't have enough problems to warrant forum bans for behavioral reasons anymore. The aging userbase seems to have brought with it a sense of maturity in discussion, even in places where tensions are high. The worst thing that happens is we'll lock a post if it starts to get ridiculously derailed, which is something you should expect in any forum. We do still have the forum posting guidelines to enforce but we really don't need to anymore.

Xooxer wrote:
I still dislike the idea that we use shadow banning. It doesn't allow for appeals, maturing into a responsible person, or informing the punished person that they are actually being punished. Shame is a powerful tool for modulating bad behavior. The only good thing is it effectively removes an individual with a smaller chance of evasion.

Yeah, shadow banning is great at ensuring folks don't know they're banned when they've proven that, once they know, they just ban-avoid. Like I said, we don't really use it anymore, and folks affected by it don't participate. If one of those who is shadow-banned feels like they'd like to be un-shadow-banned, I would think reaching out to Lummox at [email protected] could actually be fruitful, especially after such a long time.

Xooxer wrote:
Practically permabanning is pretty harsh in that light, and it's decietful. The person is led to believe nobody wants to interact with them because one person took exception to something they did once.

It's really hard to get perma'd instantly. You've got to demonstrate a trend of pretty nasty behavior (bias or no) to get permanently banned here (nowadays, anyway, can't speak to before-my-time).

Xooxer wrote:
If you need to ban someone, just do so openly and deal with the occasional evasion. Don't be a jerk about it. Especially if it's so rare than it hasn't happened in years. It's a terrible policy, and I will never say it's not.

Shadow bans were really only ever applied when there's an existing trend of ban evasion to begin with. There's only so "sticky" the existing ban system can get.

As to your other more politically-focused statements, I do more broadly disagree, but I do understand where a lot of your frustration with regards to shadow-banning comes from. I'm not going to go into them here because that's more suitable for your other thread, but yeah.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
Discord is no place for a sane individual. Best to let the SJWs have their little safe space. I've seriously considered remaking Chatters with zero moderation or language filtering to give people a real platform for free speech for once, but I doubt anyone here would use it, and nobody outside BYOND even knows we exist.

I would buy a subscription to Chatterz to help with hosting.

In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
Speaking out against the alarming practice of grooming that puts our children in the hands of sexual degenerates, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, or taking kindergarten kids to gay strip clubs for lap dances (yes, this is happening across all western nations) is considered hate speech against the LGBT community. Antifa stands outside these venues while this happens inside with rifles and body armor, waving rainbow flags and beating or shooting anyone who protests, when they can getvaway with it.

I'm highly interested in the source on kindergarten kids being taken to "gay strip clubs for lap dances". Nothing seemed to come up in a quick search of my own.

"I know what's best because I trust my feelings, and your facts are false, no I won't look at them because I know what's true without needing facts"

Just also referencing your line in the next paragraph after that statement, implying that you do indeed have some facts to share.
The notion that shadowbans on this platform in the past have had a political motivation is baseless.

There is a kind of trolling that is highly effective at disrupting online communities, where one user has the power to degrade the experience of that platform for other users to a degree that highlights the asymmetry between genuine and hostile interactions. It is far easier to flood a community with disruptive speech than it is to fill it with genuine interaction.

That's what shadowbans are designed to address. It's a mic cut for people who will not accept (or who do accept, and just don't care) that what they are bringing to this platform is unwanted by its maintainers and arguably degrades the platform. These people are free to take their grievances to other platforms, or even continue to post them here and have them hidden for logged in users by the shadowban filter.

The stories of all the shadowbanned users are pretty much legend at this point. They are widely known, and the harassment and hostility that they repeatedly engaged in for years using this platform are burned into the memories of almost everyone here. The prime example, who received the inaugural shadowban, has repeatedly stated that his entire purpose for posting in this community is to 'see it destroyed'. This is not someone you keep around if you want to build a healthy community.

It's no coincidence that once three or four users were shadowbanned, the forums went from having a reputation for being a "nerd fight club" to being calm. In a community trafficked by a couple hundred people, just three or four users were the target of 90% of the moderation energy. From a moderation and community management perspective, this was unsustainable, as the negative energy that these users poured into the platform resulted in the entire tone of the community souring for every other user. It also attracted and encouraged the same kind of behavior from all angles. The shadowban system put a quick, tidy stop to it, and the community has been much more manageable since, despite the number of times it has been employed being absolutely tiny.

I'd think, that were this a political issue, we'd be seeing it employed against a much wider audience, say 10-20% of the userbase. That it's been restricted to less than 1% of the userbase is a testament to the consideration put toward shadowbans.

Moreover, let's talk about twitter. At one point, 2.5% of Twitter's active profiles were shadowbanned. Approximately 5% of twitter profiles are bots. Approximately 14% of twitter's audience rates themselves as extremely conservative, while 21% rank themselves as conservative as a whole. The accusation that twitter has disproportionately employed shadowbans against conservatives is still, despite conservatives now having all the data, baseless, and the arguments for this conclusion are backed up by nebulous data points, appeals to confirmation bias, and bald assertions, instead of hard data. I find it very believable that shadowbans are disproportionately employed against the hardcore conservative audience of twitter, as the "hardcore conservative audience" is usually how we code Nazis and white supremacists when it's politically convenient for moderate conservative media outlets to use actions taken against hate speech to whip up the mainstream republican base into a frenzy against 'media elites'. I don't have the data, but I'd very much believe that the majority of the 2.5% of shadwbanned users on twitter are bots, spam, and then a small proportion of the remainder are repeat hate speech offenders. If Musk wants to dig into this data and prove me wrong in concert with releasing the data he uses to draw his conclusion for independent verification, I'm all for a read on the subject. But Musk won't do that, because the only data he will release will coincide with his agenda. Anything that doesn't confirm his initial position will either be destroyed, distorted, or buried.
Had a discord a few years back before the whole Antifa/BLM taking over roads and assaulting drivers ordeal, they had me banned via discord because I mentioned I'd defend myself(lol) and then tried taking it over so I hopped on late at night on my alt and removed everyone from the discord I created, and then later down the road I'm told "Make your own discord, Koz."

Correction: The person who took over your discord from you was right wing. You were banned from discord for encouraging political violence, and he tried to keep your discord a haven of free speech after your ban, and then you banned everyone because he decided you were alienating too many people and told you that you needed to knock off ranting about politics and shitposting if the community was going to survive.

Your next attempt to create a discord failed in similar fashion, because no one wanted to be around you.

The leftys just left. We didn't do shit to you. We just didn't want to be around you. It's not because of your politics. It's because of how hatefully, angrily, and mean-spiritedly you choose to express them. It's hard to stomach being around someone who is not able to accept that they are angry, and continues to put up a front of "not giving a shit" to hide the fact that they are acting out against a world that they genuinely are confused by and afraid of, and will lash out hurtfully the minute that someone tries to be vulnerable with them.

You kinda had everyone there, on your side, there for you, trying to get you to chill the fuck out for a hot second, and just vibe with yourself, free of judgement, but then fucked it up due to some weird idolization of the softest, shittiest, most juvenile "alpha males" you're scared that you do a poor job of pretending to be.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
Your next attempt to create a discord failed in similar fashion, because no one wanted to be around you.

Look who's throwing underhanded comments, I didn't put any effort into inviting others, I posted a ad once, once.(ok maybe twice)

Get over yourself.
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