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The Frustration Loop

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: The Frustration Loop

#41

Post by cfinke »

throwaway14356 wrote: post #22

Akismet has no working appeal mechanism. What seems like 1000 years ago I got banned by it for posting comments on my own blog. (haha!) If I comment any place using it my comment are silently filtered out. I got banned by disquss too! for posting many useful links in comments on blogs by people I know. They resolved the issue in 2 days and were wonderfully polite about it. Akismet should at least clear wordpress user…

I'm an Akismet developer; the best thing to do would be to email us at support@akismet.com with your info and we can look into why your comments are getting caught.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#42

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

willcipriano wrote: post #19
austinl wrote: post #8

Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is why I think the frustration techniques, or simply account suspension aren't widely used). The field of spam-prevention is fascinating because it's essentially an arms race between companies deploying tactics to detect spam and sophisticate…

Modern spam tools I've encountered accept a second account list to be used for verification purposes for this reason. They can automatically purge shadowbanned accounts by spot checking comments for visibility.

I wondered about that - it seems like an actual spammer would have an easy time checking from other accounts, so it adds at most a minor amount of extra work, while real users who are incorrectly flagged never even think to check.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#43

Post by mc10 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #32
mc10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this concept described as a "honeypot field" before and it works pretty well as you've said. I'm curious how password managers/autofill avoid tripping up though; are they able to detect that the field is not visible?

Password managers typically only fill specified fields - username & password - and leave others alone.

Maybe I'm thinking specifically of 1Password which can store your previously-filled out form fields as well as autofill fields like address or credit card number.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#45

Post by quickthrower2 »

Just make all links nofollow? Only spammers really care about follow links. Maybe you get follow links when you upgrade to a paid plan?

This doesn’t completely solve it since people pay for any kind of link but it might reduce it.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#46

Post by everfree »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45

Just make all links nofollow? Only spammers really care about follow links. Maybe you get follow links when you upgrade to a paid plan? This doesn’t completely solve it since people pay for any kind of link but it might reduce it.

If all blog hosts make all links nofollow, nofollow will cease to be a meaningful signal and search engines will start ignoring it.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#47

Post by jaggederest »

willdr wrote: post #24
qingcharles wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is real humans getting snared. My TikTok account is shadowbanned (anything I post now gets zero views, and my LIVE gets zero viewers). And my Instagram account got permabanned because they said I was impersonating myself. This was worse because I lost the entire account. They even had me send a selfie of myself and the instant I submitted the image was when they did the permaban lol.

I don't mean to cause offense, but maybe you haven't built a following yet? I see plenty of Lives with 0 viewers.

Just out of curiosity, how would you build a following if none of your videos ever receives any views? I'm not someone who uses the tikity tok but it seems like an intractable problem.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#49

Post by tareqak »

kareemm wrote: post #3

This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006. Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the New…

How would this work for something like Twitter/X when accounting for individuals serving the US government? Someone could be flagged as a troll on the backend for unrelated reasons, but now their experience in communicating with someone in government is delayed. I understand that a delay is not the same thing as a block, but I wonder if the damage to the user’s experience is sufficiently similar for a federal judge.
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