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I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

daverupert.com

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Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#101

Post by yrro »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #94
bkirkby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ianal, but I think ddg could come back and claim that their service doesn't copy the content or that their abstract is fair use, so a dmca wouldn't apply to them. If that happens I'd use language about the exclusive "public display" right that you have over your work. I'm not aware of this claim being used for a dmca, but I'd like to see how such a claim turned out.

IANAL either, but the DMCA has been used (by the RIAA, MPAA, and friends) to takedown pirate content on Google. I’d assume the same arguments would apply here. It can’t hurt to try.

Linking to a site that infringes copyrights may make the linker liable on the grounds that they are committing contributory copyright infringement. It's cheaper for search engines to delist sites than fight that battle--particularly if their corporate masters also rely on licensing media for distribution themselves.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#102

Post by lapcat »

O1111OOO wrote: post #81
TrueGeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?

> What should you do when another site copies your content like this then? Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts? If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?

I actually did add a Bing authentication XML file to my site, but Bing deindexed me again anyway.

Bing is the problem. It's broken.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#103

Post by Jensson »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #54
ilyt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is difference between "content that is no longer actively promoted by a company" and "the company explicitly put your content on a no-show list". Sure, it's not shadow banning but "just" stealth banning (as you're still not informed that you got banned, or reason for it), but banning nonetheless

Is it even a ban? Your followers can still see it. People that don't follow that go to your profile can still see it. Elon says no one has the right to "freedom of reach" but never describes this concept as a ban.

If you get delisted from search and don't show up on exact match searches then I'd say that they banned you in some way. That is what Twitter does and what Bing did here. We call what Twitter does "shadow ban" since they still show you to yourself, to people subscribing to you and people with a direct link, but nobody else can find you, it isn't a total shadow ban but they are doing something very similar to a shadow ban.

What shall we call that instead, "bubble ban", since it is like a shadow ban for specific bubbles and for everyone else it is as if that bubble never existed on the site?

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#105

Post by rspoerri »

dack wrote: post #75
tasuki wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Unfortunately people increasingly use "shadow ban" to just mean "ban", perhaps it sounds cool?

When you first hear a term used, I think it's natural for people just try to figure out what it means in context without looking up the official definition (I've caught myself doing this subconsciously before). Imo a logical interpretation of "shadow ban" would be when you are banned but they didn't tell you they banned you, and regular "ban" is when they tell you you were banned. It makes enough sense that people do…

Shadow banning is when they are doing extra steps to prevent you from realizing that you are banned. Usually giving you the impression of a working service, while everybody else will not be able to see your contributions.

Banning is just stopping the service for you, wether they tell you actively or not depends ob the service. No search service is actively informing you about the usage of your data, neigther are they telling you they stopped servicing you.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#106

Post by beej71 »

I have exactly this problem. Beej's Guide to Network Programming is indexed just fine. Beej's Guide to C won't index.

The automated tool says it's in violation of some unnamed rule, but I can't figure out which. There's zero SEO, tracking, or ads, and the content is educational and G-rated.

All the other guides index just fine.

I asked for a review and they came back with the same ambiguous message. Eventually I just gave up.

Recently I split the C guide in two. I'll have to check to see if that made any difference.

But it left a bad taste, and now I don't trust Bing or DDG to provide complete results. Google's overrun with spam, but at least my stuff actually shows up on Startpage.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#107

Post by bcrosby95 »

esperent wrote: post #63
donatj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of sites popped up hosting it loaded with SEO garbage and ads. I’d licensed it MIT so while they certainly can, it sure doesn’t feel nice.

I've writing and freely shared a lot of OSS code and I plan to continue doing that. All MIT licensed. But I keep thinking that this is a limitation of MIT. It's written with the purest of good intentions but without any way to prevent bad actors from exploiting that. I wonder if there's a better kind of license that provides a close level of freedom but would prevent some of the most obvious exploitations (e.g. packa…

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of LGPL is that it wouldn't prevent people from doing what they're doing in this scenario.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#108

Post by beej71 »

eps wrote: post #46
mananaysiempre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says in the link it’s specifically the C guide, the rest of the website is fine. Though... yeah, DDG queries like “beej c guide strlen” give reasonable results for me, if with an unjustifiably high-ranked position for the mirror at http://docs.hfbk.net/beej.us . Bing ones only include the mirror and the other guides (and a Scribd-hosted PDF copy, of all things, as the first result below a huge navigation card refe…

https://beej.us/guide/bgclr/ is the 2nd result for "beej's c", with first being site's homepage.

Ah, I was just wondering if splitting the book in two volumes (900 pages is more than Amazon can print!) would impact this.

But it still doesn't index the first volume...?

Thanks for the info.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#109

Post by beej71 »

pseudolus wrote: post #13

You've indicated that you've used Bing's tools to see if your website has been indexed but are silent as to whether you've actually manually submitted your site to be indexed by Bing using their url submission tool [0]. If you do submit the URL and then, after a decent interval, your site still doesn't show up then there might be something to your claim. [0] https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860…

I'm not the OP, but I have a site with the same issue, and I did manually submit. No impact.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#110

Post by gary_0 »

crazygringo wrote: post #65

I may have found the answer, and I've seen this before (it happened to me once). It's when a different spam site copies your content wholesale, and a search engine decides they're the "original" site, and you're the spammy copycat. Because if you put the headlines (in quotes) from two of his recent articles into Bring, e.g. either "Megan Smith explaining the General Magic prototyping process" or "Denialists, Alarmist…

Recently on HN there was "Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952114

It feels like the Internet is a more hostile place than ever for small-time websites. You get squeezed from below by wily criminals, and crushed from above by careless megacorps who want to filter out anything that doesn't make them money.

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