Shadowbans are bad for discourse, and here's why

[simon]

@rhaksw

I can see you are not persuaded by my argument that trolls can sometimes be left alone (that is, via transparent moderation as opposed to shadow moderation)

Maybe I’ve been too cautious with expressing my thoughts here:

@simon

I agree that moderation should be transparent, but I can see how shadow banning would be tempting for dealing with trolls who won’t go away

@simon

I can understand the motivation, but I don’t think it will gain much traction as a moderation technique - if a user is that persistent, it’s just delaying an inevitable conflict.

I think shadow banning is a terrible idea. That said, I have lots of concerns about the future of the internet, but as far as Discourse goes, I’m not concerned that shadow banning or the surreptitious manipulation of a site’s content is something that will catch on. First, as noted above, the functionality doesn’t exist in the core Discourse code and the team have no plans for developing plugins for it. Secondly, I can’t see a valid use case for adding this kind of functionality to a Discourse site - I can’t imagine a case where implementing it would benefit a site’s owners.

@rhaksw

I do agree that promoting intellectual curiosity and diversity is not to be undersold

If there’s one other thing I could promote, it would be the value of disagreement. Promoting disagreement, as opposed to agreement, is the quickest way to pull in all available view points from a group of people.