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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Not to be defeatist, but is ban evasion really solvable? Twitter's been in the news for months for its bot problem, and they had a ton more resources to solve it than this website, which doesn't even require email addresses. How do you stop someone from hopping onto a VPN while incognito and starting new accounts? I guess you can try to infer through whatever limited data you can gather from user agent?

I've never moderated a website so am just speculating. But my layman's perspective is that it seems far more practical just to delete posts because they intrinsically violate site rules as opposed to being suspected ban evaders.

We have some major advantages over Twitter:

  1. We have far less content to moderate. I'd also guess that our ratio of moderators:content is at least two orders of magnitude better than Twitter's, and possibly even three orders of magnitude better.

  2. Most banned users aren't trying too hard. Twitter is a big platform and lot of people want to be on it. This is a tiny tiny platform that only a few hundred people want to be on. We had rdrama users trying to come over for the first few weeks, but consistent banning and removal of troll content mostly solved the problem.

  3. Some of the banned users that are trying hard seem unable to avoid outting themselves. If we ban a user that can't stop talking about a particular topic, and then notice a new user account created the next day that also loves to talk about the same topic ... well things can be pretty obvious.

There might be a group of banned users that comes back under different aliases and successfully hide. And they don't break any of the same rules that got them a ban in the first place. Idk, I guess I feel like "mission accomplished" if that is what happens. We aren't trying to punish people with bans, we are trying to reform, and permabans take place for two reasons: we think you are beyond reform, or we are trying to protect the community from extremely bad behavior (for example we are generally going to nuke any accounts that post CP).