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I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

daverupert.com

191–200 of 205 posts

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#191
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age." One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT. It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?

It had some use. I'm pretty sure IE used to support client side transformations when rendering XML that linked an XSLT file. I know one SaaS used to do that before they rearchitected their front end. But XSLT was not fun work with.

IIRC all browsers supported it, I played around with it back then. I just wondered about in-the-wild use. Though the others comments say there is/was some.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#192
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age." One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT. It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?

Well, I'm having the ... pleasure ... of learning it now, as much of CheetahMail's templating system uses it (at least as initially configured by their professional services team. The company I work for just switched over and had them do the initial implementation). Just a data point.

We are using a mail system that uses a special version of VbScript. Not sure you’d want to trade ;)

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#193
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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.

It does not. Delisting = removed from list. Deindexed: removed from index.

Banning implies denying access. There's an important distinction there with Twitter (user authenticates and publishes through Twitter) vs Google Search (indexes public sites). If Google silently stops showing your Google Ads and doesn't inform you, that would be more appropriately described as "shadow banning".

There's no "user" or "account" in a web search engine so the term doesn't really fit.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#194
post #116

HN taught me first hand on how horrible shadow banning is. You all tolerate this here so it's mighty hypocritical of you to criticize Bing. I'll say it again: It comes down to how you treat people. Treat others the way you want to be treated. No one wants to be shadowbanned and we can all agree it is a decidedly cowardly and cruel thing to do. And you can't use "quality" or anything short of being coerced as an excus…

HN's "shadow bans" aren't hidden and allow you to keep posting. Isn't that more tolerant than most other forms of banning? I have showdead turned on. I see fresh accounts that are automatically dead on each comment which are legit contributions, probably because they're using Tor or a widely abused VPN; that's the only common miscarriage of HN moderation I regularly see, and I vouch for house comments. Those accounts…

Dead comments are not shadowbanned, just banned. I wasn't referring to that. And the problem with shadowmoderation is it happens without attempting to tell the person to change behavior so people who will cooperate don't get a chance to do that. If someone does not cooperate and acts with bad or false intentions you should ban them explicitly. I never suggested universal tolerance I only suggested transparent moderation.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#195
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's "shadow bans" aren't hidden and allow you to keep posting. Isn't that more tolerant than most other forms of banning? I have showdead turned on. I see fresh accounts that are automatically dead on each comment which are legit contributions, probably because they're using Tor or a widely abused VPN; that's the only common miscarriage of HN moderation I regularly see, and I vouch for house comments. Those accounts…

Dead comments are not shadowbanned, just banned. I wasn't referring to that. And the problem with shadowmoderation is it happens without attempting to tell the person to change behavior so people who will cooperate don't get a chance to do that. If someone does not cooperate and acts with bad or false intentions you should ban them explicitly. I never suggested universal tolerance I only suggested transparent moderat…

The only people I've seen get banned without warning are transparent trolls (usually people who make an account to make each comment, with that comment being trolling or hate speech, because they understand that that will be banned). People who aren't purely trolling do seem to get a public message from dang. Does your experience differ? How?

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#196
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nowadays, when I search for things, the results are often clearly pages that have come from a program scrapping sites and then merging them into one page. You can tell because the pages are not really coherent and quickly start to repeat themselves. I assume they are getting money through ads on the pages, though I never actually see the ads because of my blockers. I wish there was a button in the browser that I coul…

I don't think it reports to any other search engines, and am not sure it affects any but your own subsequent results, but Kagi has a feedback scale on each result: "block", "lower", "normal", "raise", and "pin".

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#197
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.

Took me a while to figure it out, but yeah - seems "Beej" is pronounced as "(Bee)(j)", which matches the pronunciation of "BJ". But I don't think it's relevant to site indexing, unless search engines started to take homophones into account.

EDIT: but maybe they did, ever since voice assistants became a thing?

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#198
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

C? I don't know, I never heard of it. Network programming guide, on the other hand, is arguably the most famous out there.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a button in the browser that I could click to report the page as spam to all search engines. The spammers would use that offensively to destroy the original content creators with that system

The way it should work is that the spam reports are used only to filter the results you see.

That's precisely why I started to use and pay for Kagi - it fetches search results from Google and Bing, but allows to prioritize, deprioritize, pin or block specific domains in your search results.

I'm still surprised no one else seems to be offering this feature.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indexed, but only returned if the search query was explicitly and unambiguously about porn.

Not true, I've had pages of x-rated results with SafeSearch on, with DDG and Bing, a couple of times. The search only needs to be sufficiently weird. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334670

Where "weird" involves words like "licking" and "party" (not saying it's not a bug, just that it's a statistics vs actual language understanding bug in a feature and not absence of that feature). I bet there's no way to compose all of the words "spatula", "serotonin", "pion" and "deconstruction" along with words like is/a/an/of/how/what/when that would turn safe search off, despite any query of this format would pretty weird.
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