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I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

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Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#171

Post by beej71 »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #118
beej71 wrote: post #106

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…

It is interesting since Beej's guide is probably the most famous C/Unix programming tutorial after K&R.

I don't know if I'd go _that_ far. There are a lot of great books out there.

But I'm pretty sure mine is the greatest that you can't pay money for. ;)

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#172

Post by beej71 »

daflip wrote: post #133
beej71 wrote: post #106

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…

i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site?

Some rando backlink checker says it's about 1300.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#173

Post by beej71 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #158
et-al wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be due to some overly zealous prude filter and the unfortunate coincidence that "beej" is American slang for blowjob (oral sex)?

That's pretty obscure slang, I'm American and have never heard it.

I used to say, "'Beej', like 'B.J. Hunnicutt' from MASH."

But MASH is getting a little too far removed these days. :)

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#174

Post by 3np »

Jensson wrote: post #103
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What shall we call that instead

Deindexed/delisted. Same as we called it before "shadow ban" was widely known as a term.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#175

Post by Jensson »

michaelmrose wrote: post #147
Jensson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no such thing as a total or less than total shadow ban. If you are visible with anyone with a direct link you aren't shadow banned it Bubble ban is also poor verbiage because not appearing in anyone's feed or search results is the default condition not inherently a punishment or redaction. A search is inherently a selection process and it's perfectly valid to say some content isn't fit to appear anywhere in…

> I like reddits choice of "quarantined"

It isn't the same at all, since Reddit tells you about it and it still shows up in search etc. Shadow quarantined, yeah that works. The word "shadow" comes from not telling the user that anything is different, and Twitter doesn't tell you when this happens, it just delists your posts from everywhere except your followers.

Anyway, it is extremely disingenuous to say that Twitter doesn't shadow ban.

Consider this scenario: Person A is shadow moderated by Twitter, has a friend B. A replies to B's tweet, but his friend doesn't follow him, they just talk. And now B will never see A's tweet, and A has no idea that B can't see it, and neither do B, both thinks that they can see each other. What is this if not "shadow banned"? Twitter makes these people post things thinking it will be seen, but it wont, wasting their time and potentially hurting their mental health since nobody responds.

For all intents and purposes this is "shadow banning", when you hurt people like this but say that you absolutely don't shadow ban you are so dishonest that I'd still call it a lie.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#176

Post by beej71 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #143
beej71 wrote: post #106

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…

Wow it's beej. I owe you rather a lot of beers, Guide to Network Programming is directly responsible for my entire career. Sorry for the low value post! :}

Entire career? That's pretty high praise... Well, if you're ever in Bend, OR drop me a DM and I'll start to collect. :)

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#177

Post by PeterisP »

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…

Every open source license will by definition allow packaging and selling the code or reposting it on a site with advertising, permitting to do that is one of the key freedoms; if you're forbidden to use the code for commercial purposes, then that's not an open source license. See https://opensource.org/osd

MIT will allow that, Apache/BSD/Mozilla licenses will allow that, GPL and LGPL will allow that, Creative commons CC-BY and CC-BY-SA will allow that - the only difference is extra conditions e.g. GPL will require the seller/redistributor of the code to keep the same license, CC-BY will require leaving attribution to the author, etc, but all of them will allow someone else to redistribute the code for commercial purposes.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#178

Post by Jensson »

3np wrote: post #174
Jensson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What shall we call that instead Deindexed/delisted. Same as we called it before "shadow ban" was widely known as a term.

Delisted would imply that you wouldn't see your listing yourself, or that when you try to post a new listing they would stop you. Shadow banning is when you post to a listing, it says that your listing was successfully posted, but it wasn't really posted.

Twitter does that, it doesn't tell you that what you post wont be reached by the people you are posting to. Most people don't have many followers, they just reply to tweets and those replies will show up for the original tweeters. Twitter shadow banning you means that the items you post no longer shows up as responses. Sure the small subset that follows you can still see them, but 99.99999% of twitter wont see it, so it is a 99.99999% of a shadow ban.

If they told you that any of this happened anywhere it wouldn't be a shadow ban.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#179

Post by wan_ala »

beej71 wrote: post #171
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting since Beej's guide is probably the most famous C/Unix programming tutorial after K&R.

I don't know if I'd go _that_ far. There are a lot of great books out there. But I'm pretty sure mine is the greatest that you can't pay money for. ;)

The statement isn't too far from the truth ngl. I think it'd probably be in the top 10 most famous C guides out there.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#180

Post by EarlKing »

crazygringo wrote: post #164
EarlKing wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

You may have misunderstood, it doesn't have anything to do with doorway pages which are about presenting extra highly redundant content. I'm talking about, if content on legitimatesite.com includes JavaScript that detects if it's being loaded on any other domain, then erase the entire article's HTML from the DOM. Obviously this is easily defeated by stripping out JavaScript, so it's useful only for very primitive mir…

Hmmm, yeah "doorway page" probably wasn't the term I was looking for. However, that would almost definitely be regarded as some sort of spam or SEO tactic by crawlers and lead to further penalizations, which was my point.
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