> You completely ignored the question. How can you know that shadowbanning did not negatively effect this community?

You're the one maintaining that it does. Why try to force me to prove a negative, when you've not supported your own assertions in the first place?

> But, I'll let you move the goalposts. HN is not nearly the size of FB however.

No goal posts were moved by me. If someone takes a specific situation and makes s statement about it that generalizes across everything, I think it's pretty clear that's when the goal posts are moved, and claiming the goal posts were moved later when people actual use examples from the wider world is just a rhetorical tactic to cover that up. If you don't like having to defend the claim against a wider set of cases, simply back off that portion of the claim and say maybe it doesn't apply to everything, and don't defend it. It's simple, it doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're willing to revise your argument to be more specific and stronger in the fact of facts.

> Pressure was exerted, censorship continues.

Presumably it wasn't enough to matter then? Should one customer control a service? Should one percent?

> Given that no login is required one could argue it is public, given that recent scraping judgement.

Publicly available is not the same thing as a public resource, but if you want to actually use that as some sort of evidence, some indication of what you're referring to would be useful, as I'm not going to google "recent scraping judgement" and assume we're working off the same facts and referring to the same thing. I would read a provided link though.

> You didn't change the outcome, we're all still the same.

I don't think so. Your claim is now that aligning everyone (on behavior, since I clarified that obvious point and you stuck by your statement) means everyone is the same. That's obviously wrong. Just because you and I agree not to yell epithets at each other here and converse in a respectable manner does not mean we are the same, as is obvious by how we disagree on things.

> Like censorship? Yea that would certainly streamline things.

Yes. One of the definitions of censorship is the prohibition of extreme things. I suspect there are a great many places you support censorship, as almost everyone does. I don't let my children speak to me or their siblings in certain ways in my house. I would be disappointed in them if they did so outside my house, and depending on which child and their age, might enact some punishment. I am censoring them, and I believe it's both for their own good and for the good of those they interact with. I would argue the vast majority of parents do this. Every community does this in some manner (even if punishment is just ostracization).

The problem with taking a hard stance of "censorship is bad" is that then you feel compelled to think of something as bad when it's called censorship and is censorship but when viewed on its merits isn't actually bad. It's similar to how "ads" have been so vilified today, that people take nonsensical positions because to them the word embodies something. Names above of business above and on doors are also advertising, but it's clearly useful and informative advertising of what's inside. Similarly, there are types of censorship, such as a community enforcing its norms, which often but not always are mostly beneficial, at least for the community overall.

Does this result in some people feeling like they've been targeted unfairly? Yes. Were they actually targeted unfairly? That depends quite a bit on the circumstances, which includes personal responsibility of the person and what the community is trying to enforce. Whether a person that's breaking the rules of a community get to do so regardless of their wishes should depend on the behavior and the norms. Breaking codes of conduct in a purely opt-in community, where it was a choice to do one thing over another? That sure seems like someone abdicated their own personal responsibility to me. Being punished because of some aspect of your birth such as gender and race? That seems like a problem, unless the community's purpose is a place for people such as that and you don't belong.

> What you're going to end up with is a bunch of people who can't think for themselves who require someone telling them exactly what to do and think.

As if shadowbanning is mandatory across all aspects of life and everyone will use it with the same criteria? That seems fairly far fetched given what we're talking about.

> It's been known for a while that the left wants the population following exactly everything they say.

Please, don't even start with assigning blame to one side. It's trivial to find instances of bad behavior on both sides along this spectrum, and the only reason you wouldn't see it is if you hadn't bothered to look (but many people haven't). All the sources of the right do exactly what you complain about, any person that doesn't toe the party line is not given the opportunities to have their position heard, and you're getting a curated version of facts like everyone else.

Preventing shadowbanning, or banning, or anything else won't help this. There are natural effects of communities that do this well for most cases, those are just useful to weed out the persistent bad actors that aren't acting in good faith anyway. If you actually care about different views and getting information through to people, you need to branch out and actually engage different communities. If those communities silence even coherent and within the rules interactions than find a different one, since that one won't be receptive to that content no matter what, and forcing them to not exclude it won't help that community, it will just make it entirely dysfunctional for the things it was functional for previously.

> Whether or not you are knowingly complacent or not I'm not sure, but you're fighting for that style of government back.

I think your vision is too constrained. You seem to think forcing everyone to hear everyone else is the solution. It's not. You forcing civil rights militants (for lack of a better term) and white supremacists to interact in their own home territory is not a plan to make things better, it's just a way to radicalize them further.

The solution is not to allow anyone to say what they want and make sure it's heard regardless of the community, it's to make people want to actually understand each other, so they're willing to meet people on their own terms and following the rules of the location they're at.

> Discourse happens where discourse happens. And I doubt Joe Bob randomly spout out his opinions, usually someone would insert some slight reference in everyday communications.

Not in my private forum, not without my say, just as not in my house without my say. I reserve the right to kick out or ignore anyone. And it doesn't matter if that person hears or sees a reference. They know the rules or they shouldn't be there, and "not being able to control myself" is not a valid excuse in the real world.

> The left does this one a lot.

I'm flabbergasted that you seem able to suggest this seriously. To think the left is the only side that censors when the right has also had a long and storied history of it, is baffling. Both sides censor when it suits their purposes. Notable times the right as taken up that mantle in the past include McCartyism, censoring portions of climate change science (during both GWB and Trump)[1], and the many times religious organizations aligned with the right wanting to ban certain books.[2]

> But by all means, let's use this to censor?

There's a difference in controlling what your community you control (because you provide what makes it possible) can do and what the wider public is allowed to do. Censorship when applied to all aspects of life is definitely a problem, and why we have freedom of speech. But we also have freedom of association[3] as an important part of that, and if you look into that closely, being able to police your own community is an important part of that (if you can't express what you want in your community you don't actually have a community).

As I noted earlier, if you want to make a case specifically about Facebook and how it should be treated as a public resource (which I'll clarify doesn't just mean something publicly accessible but something people have a public stake in that the state should ensure has additional protections and requirements, like water or clear air), then go ahead and make that case. I might even agree with you on something like Facebook. But what was stated earlier by rnd0 and which we've ostensibly been discussing is shadow banning and communities in general, but public resources or even Facebook in isolation.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State... (the citation goes into the detail linking Trump)

2: https://www.au.org/blogs/christian-nationalists-censor

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association