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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

#91

Post by lapcat »

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…

It's not clear that this is happening with all of the (many) sites that are mysteriously deindexed by Bing. See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389279

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#92

Post by reaperducer »

teekert wrote: post #24

M$ is such a black box. At some point getting on their spam list, for no reason and still I’m not 100% certain, is the reason I stopped self hosting email.

Blame SpamCop.

I recently discovered that one of my services is on stage MS email naughty list, and found out it's because MS uses SpamCop.

I contacted SpamCop and it was very responsive. Unfortunately, the solution SpamCop suggested was to move the entire project to a different provider.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#93

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#94

Post by colejohnson66 »

bkirkby wrote: post #87
colejohnson66 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those cases, you can send one to DDG and Bing, which are in the US. It won’t affect the actual website or other search engines, but it’s better than nothing.

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.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#95

Post by InspiredIdiot »

extheat wrote: post #37
causality0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shadow ban" would be a good term to use for that if it didn't already have a meaning that was different. But it does.

Hence why I said silently. If I’m posting something and it appears to me as usual on my feed but not others, by all means that’s a shadow ban.

Nope. Still wrong. I understand there is some way it feels like that from your perspective but DDG and Bing don't own your feed. So they are hiding nothing from you. They are 100% ~up-front~ (edit) consistent about not choosing to show your site (ban it) and the fact that they don't control your feed doesn't make it any more accurate to apply the word "shadow" to their ban.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#96

Post by InspiredIdiot »

JadoJodo wrote: post #85
supermatt wrote: post #4

This is not a shadow ban. A shadow ban is when it appears to you that you are not banned, but from others perspective you are.

I suspect OP used it in the way that “I believe all my posts are showing up in the places that they should, but unbeknownst to me, they are being suppressed.” In this instance, I could see a “search engine shadowban” being an appropriate moniker.

I think a good test of whether this application of the term makes any sense is: Could any search engine ban ever not be a shadow ban? We already have a term: ban. Let's just use that one and stop conflating things and being unnecessary imprecise and incendiary. It helps certain parties' (edit plural possessive) agenda but does not help us clearly communicate.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#97

Post by crazygringo »

TrueGeek wrote: post #69
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…

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

Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked).

The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#98

Post by edgyquant »

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)?

No we’ve gotten to the point where Bing and DDG need disrupted. The answer is that these companies are ruining things not that DNS and simple search is wrong

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#99

Post by edgyquant »

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…

This… this is not a logical interpretation of shadow ban, at best it’s a random guess. Interpretation implies some understanding of the data

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#100

Post by InspiredIdiot »

InspiredIdiot wrote: post #95
extheat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why I said silently. If I’m posting something and it appears to me as usual on my feed but not others, by all means that’s a shadow ban.

Nope. Still wrong. I understand there is some way it feels like that from your perspective but DDG and Bing don't own your feed. So they are hiding nothing from you. They are 100% ~up-front~ (edit) consistent about not choosing to show your site (ban it) and the fact that they don't control your feed doesn't make it any more accurate to apply the word "shadow" to their ban.

I have become what I hate most. Someone who didn't read the article. I've heard too many instances of the term being misapplied and jumped to a conclusion based on the discussion.

If you use Bing webmaster tools (a logged-in account for the use of the domain owner/content creator) and you can see indications that Bing indexed the content and no indications that errors preventing it from being eligible to show then it is certainly at least closer to a shadow ban than I originally thought.

Still, any reference to a "feed" entirely misses the point unless Bing is the one also serving that feed. I can't see any evidence that Bing displays a feed to the poster.

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