Shadow ban and what it eats
Many of the game developers reddit.com is known as a good means to advertise their game, but not many people know that modern reddit, as well as some other sites, can play a pretty bad joke with them, which eventually results in a lot of lost time. Even if you have never intended to use reddit, but periodically write on the forums, I advise you to read this article in order not to get into the annoying situation in which I found myself.
I created my account on reddit.com about 2 years ago, post it periodically but then for a long time I did not use it. Some time ago I wrote a few topics, after which I periodically answered all sorts of different questions in the subdits / r / gamedev / r / unity3d.
In recent days, a suspicion began to emerge in me: none of my posts received any answers. Neither the topics nor the answers on the forums caused any attention from other reddit users. I understood what happens when, after my detailed answer about the advantages of Unity over Unreal 4, another person wrote, “I sincerely want to know why some people prefer the Unity Unreal Engine?”. Here is how I see this topic on reddit:
')
And here is the link to this article in reddit itself.
Do not try to look for my answers there - they are simply not there. Only I can see them. Only when I log in to the reddit under my username and password. But if I make a log off - I will not see them.
This is called the “Shadow Ban” - “Shadow ban”. This system was created so that spammers and bots could not spoil the presence of air for decent reddit visitors. It works as follows: you see all your posts, topics, comments, but, except for you, nobody sees them at all. As I later learned, it is considered a more effective system than an ordinary ban, because the ban recipient does not understand that he is banned and this prevents him from trying to create new accounts with fake mail. In theory, it is, of course, interesting, but as shown by my own experience, it can simply make an idiot out of a man.
As soon as I became convinced of my suspicions, I immediately created a new account on reddit and wrote the following topic .
If you could follow the link, you will probably find only half of the deleted topic. Fortunately, I managed to make a screenshot of this topic, here’s how it looked:
If you want to know, this is what the mail of the account that was banned looks like:
The third incoming letter in the list (“response to the publication ...”) was received 2 months ago from a robot. It notifies me that the robot suspected that I had posted a link to the screenshot (this is not entirely correct, I posted a link to the news article from the Steam page of my game from the “News” section, the article contained text and many screenshots). In the letter, I was recommended to repost this article in a special topic of reddit and informed me that my original topic was “hidden”. I have a suspicion that it was from that moment that I was banned, but it is believed that my account could simply have been hacked or suspected of being hacked, and for that I was banned. I did not find evidence of this (I was looking through the “my content” section).
But the first letter in the list is a response from the subreddit moderators / r / gamedev to my letter that I am banned, the answer confirms that the “shadow ban” exists and is fully applied to the editor.
My further research showed that “shadow ban” is a fairly common system and is increasingly used on various major social media sites. The system has its own Wikipedia page and a simple search for “shadow ban” in Google returns sites where you can check if you are secretly banned from Instagram as well as on Twitter (but for some reason, the site for checking the latter).
Subsequently, I wrote a post on the gamedev.net forum and asked in the discord of that very site what people think about it. I was told that this is a common practice on reddit and that is why (and for a number of other similar reasons) they prefer to communicate on gamedev.net.
To be honest, I very much doubt the effectiveness of this system, for it’s enough just to find out how it works and from now on you won’t fall for such a trap: just log out periodically and see if you can see your messages. The creators of spam bots can easily write a script that checks this, which also negates the whole point. At the same time, as long as you do not know about this system, an idiot can be made of you quite simply for elementary offense. As for me, this system is much worse than the good old human moderation. It would be, for example, MUCH more effective in the most extreme cases to selectively hide the single posts of people or even selectively change the text of some of the most ardent posts. This is harder to track down and helps solve the problem. In any case, we can only be vigilant and remember that our posts can simply be deleted by moderating sites and forums in just such an insidious way and from time to time it needs to be checked.
I hope that I will help this article to people not to feel like idiots, as it happened to me.
Be carefull!
Continuation of the story in this link.
I created my account on reddit.com about 2 years ago, post it periodically but then for a long time I did not use it. Some time ago I wrote a few topics, after which I periodically answered all sorts of different questions in the subdits / r / gamedev / r / unity3d.
In recent days, a suspicion began to emerge in me: none of my posts received any answers. Neither the topics nor the answers on the forums caused any attention from other reddit users. I understood what happens when, after my detailed answer about the advantages of Unity over Unreal 4, another person wrote, “I sincerely want to know why some people prefer the Unity Unreal Engine?”. Here is how I see this topic on reddit:
')
And here is the link to this article in reddit itself.
Do not try to look for my answers there - they are simply not there. Only I can see them. Only when I log in to the reddit under my username and password. But if I make a log off - I will not see them.
This is called the “Shadow Ban” - “Shadow ban”. This system was created so that spammers and bots could not spoil the presence of air for decent reddit visitors. It works as follows: you see all your posts, topics, comments, but, except for you, nobody sees them at all. As I later learned, it is considered a more effective system than an ordinary ban, because the ban recipient does not understand that he is banned and this prevents him from trying to create new accounts with fake mail. In theory, it is, of course, interesting, but as shown by my own experience, it can simply make an idiot out of a man.
As soon as I became convinced of my suspicions, I immediately created a new account on reddit and wrote the following topic .
If you could follow the link, you will probably find only half of the deleted topic. Fortunately, I managed to make a screenshot of this topic, here’s how it looked:
If you want to know, this is what the mail of the account that was banned looks like:
The third incoming letter in the list (“response to the publication ...”) was received 2 months ago from a robot. It notifies me that the robot suspected that I had posted a link to the screenshot (this is not entirely correct, I posted a link to the news article from the Steam page of my game from the “News” section, the article contained text and many screenshots). In the letter, I was recommended to repost this article in a special topic of reddit and informed me that my original topic was “hidden”. I have a suspicion that it was from that moment that I was banned, but it is believed that my account could simply have been hacked or suspected of being hacked, and for that I was banned. I did not find evidence of this (I was looking through the “my content” section).
But the first letter in the list is a response from the subreddit moderators / r / gamedev to my letter that I am banned, the answer confirms that the “shadow ban” exists and is fully applied to the editor.
My further research showed that “shadow ban” is a fairly common system and is increasingly used on various major social media sites. The system has its own Wikipedia page and a simple search for “shadow ban” in Google returns sites where you can check if you are secretly banned from Instagram as well as on Twitter (but for some reason, the site for checking the latter).
Subsequently, I wrote a post on the gamedev.net forum and asked in the discord of that very site what people think about it. I was told that this is a common practice on reddit and that is why (and for a number of other similar reasons) they prefer to communicate on gamedev.net.
To be honest, I very much doubt the effectiveness of this system, for it’s enough just to find out how it works and from now on you won’t fall for such a trap: just log out periodically and see if you can see your messages. The creators of spam bots can easily write a script that checks this, which also negates the whole point. At the same time, as long as you do not know about this system, an idiot can be made of you quite simply for elementary offense. As for me, this system is much worse than the good old human moderation. It would be, for example, MUCH more effective in the most extreme cases to selectively hide the single posts of people or even selectively change the text of some of the most ardent posts. This is harder to track down and helps solve the problem. In any case, we can only be vigilant and remember that our posts can simply be deleted by moderating sites and forums in just such an insidious way and from time to time it needs to be checked.
I hope that I will help this article to people not to feel like idiots, as it happened to me.
Be carefull!
Continuation of the story in this link.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/348760/
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