Echochamber.js

[unethical_ban]

So many one-liner garbage comments, no way to downvote.

Let's start by saying: cool, it's satire, and learning technologies through novel applications is the heart of hacking. I ain't even mad.

But no, shadowbanning is not cool. It was originally for spammers, not for real people you don't like. It's inconsiderate, because if effective, it wastes peoples' time writing comments they think people can read. Comments they believe contribute to the conversation. And it's not cool.

And to be clear to jMyles: This is trickery.

Disclaimer: I was shadowbanned many moons ago (hence the name now) for one comment out of hundreds I'd made on this site. That one comment was rude and terse, but not something unequivocally hateful or harmful. For that, I posted for weeks without knowing my comments re: the technologies and news I care about were being blocked. It's not cool.

[krapp]

You're lucky, some people don't find out for months, or years. Of course, actual trolls just make puppet accounts and bots can't be properly humiliated.

But I suppose that is the price we must pay for intellectual purity.

[pablasso]

You need more reputation to be able to downvote.

[etherealG]

how did you eventually find out about the ban out of interest?

[STRiDEX]

At least send the http request to https://devnull-as-a-service.com

[nacs]

It doesn't degrade gracefully on my Lynx browser and doesn't use any form of encryption when submitting comments, making it vulnerable to 3-letter agency interception.

[mjrbrennan]

Richard Stallman is that you?

[phn]

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but you realize it doesn't actually submit anything, right?

[itsnotlupus]

Is this that PoC I heard about for a highly-scalable distributed successor to Reddit?

[strangecasts]

To be fair, this commenting model does ensure everyone's opinion gets equal reach.

[krapp]

You know what would be cool?

Something like this for a forum that simulates an admin panel, so when someone hacks in, they think they're causing all sorts of mischief.

It could be called a hellevator.

[nicolewhite]

It'd also be neat to populate it randomly with other "users'" comments for further trickery.

[sleepychu]

Had a quick google, couldn't find a corpus of spam blog posts. Surely somebody has one?

[tdicola]

Also use a chatbot script to randomly reply to the user's comments.

[jMyles]

Part of the ethical construct of the current form is that there is no trickery. The user sees the real, unadulterated data.

[ethana]

So this is like Reddit's shadowbanning.

[kennywinker]

The idea of a shadow ban predates reddit by quite a bit, but yeah it's a little bit similar

[phn]

This is fantastic, I have been pondering about the usefulness of comments in the age of twitter/facebook/social media in general for a while. Not being exposed to the ramblings of random individuals would be a blessing.

[piyush_soni]

On the other hand, a lot of times, I am only interested in comments, as the article itself is junk.

[neilellis]

Do I need to point our the irony?

[fuzzywalrus]

Quite amusing, but do you really want the trolls to feel engaged?

[ForHackernews]

So they send the link to their outraged friends and you get the sweet sweet outrage click-revenue. Duh.

[neilellis]

If you think you're a victim of shadow banning on Hacker News can you leave a comment here ;-)

Hey downvoters, get a sense of humour - sheesh.

[fineline]

Finally, effective decentralisation of the vacuous inane gossip that is the currency of our golden information age.

[joeblau]

Hacker News needs to implement this in the comments for selected users.

[nacs]

They do already.

Some users' comments aren't visible to the public unless you have the "showdead" setting in your HN user preferences enabled.

[jotux]

HN already shadow-bans users.

[jimmaswell]

That's basically Reddit's "shadowban"

[helmett]

So if you posted would you see other people's comments or only your own? Can someone setup a demo of this so we can test it out? seems intriguing

[Nadya]

Only their own - as they wouldn't have access to any other users' local storage. That's the point.

They aren't actually commenting - they're saving data into their browser's localStorage which is getting read and fed onto the page when they view it.

Since they aren't actually commenting - there's no way of showing other people's comments.

[nicolewhite]

Only your own. The comments are written to your LocalStorage.

[aass]

Test comment

[curiousjorge]

Troll level is over nine thousand. This is hilarious yet super effective. Would love to see this on YouTube comments, especially after it makes it on Reddit

[AdrianRossouw]

perfect social engineering.

[bbcbasic]

SEO's are gonna love this.