secondimpact asked:
I just want to thank you for the automatic tag on Frank’s blog when someone inappropriately flagged by the spam filters sends her an ask. I was “shadow banned” for a while, and didn’t understand why/what happened until I saw the automatic tag, and read the post linked.
nostalgebraist answered:
Glad to hear it helped!
It’s amazing how many people are “shadowbanned” / spam-filter-afflicted / whatever the approved term is.
In that post (from about a year ago), I back-of-the-envelope estimated it as 1% of the user base. I haven’t re-run the same estimate since then, but subjectively, I feel like I’ve seen the issue at about the same rate over the last year.
Taken in aggregate, it’s a pretty big usability problem with Tumblr. I’m not sure what to do about it, though, except encourage people to file support tickets.
^ this is why i'm annoyed whenever people trot out that old "shadow-banning doesn't exist" canard. like yeah maybe it's not a classic forums hellban but the symptoms are close enough as to make very little difference.
it makes a significant difference to me, because the technical implications of what's commonly referred to as "shadowbanning" on places like twitter are just not what we do on tumblr. there are cases where a blog can be erroneously considered a spammer by our automated tooling, and hidden within very specific feeds, but those are one in a million in the grand scheme of tumblr. the number of times when someone actually triggers any of those mechanisms is very rare, so most of the time when somebody thinks they're "shadowbanned", they're not.
more often than not, i've found that the people thinking they're shadowbanned are actually just misunderstanding other filtering mechanisms we have in place -- they are not shadowbanned, but perhaps their post didn't meet the criteria they thought it should. 99 times out of 100 when somebody says "my post isn't showing up in the tags" it's not because they're "shadowbanned". those are the more confusing situations, because it has nothing to do with somebody's account status at all, but it's too easy to draw that conclusion given the absence of information.
and that's the real problem: the opaqueness of the whole system, which is necessitated by spam in general. i wish i could show you the code that defines what gets seen and filtered and ranked and whatnot, but then people would take advantage of it and weaponize it faster than any of us can do anything good with it. maybe someday though! that's what we're all trying to achieve.
but my general point is that tumblr does not often follow the same logic as other social media platforms. sometimes to our detriment, honestly.