I like this idea too. Also temporary bans are good for offering a cool-down period for users who generally are constructive but tend to lose their tempers from time to time.
Hand out short-term (up to 24-hour) mandatory noprocrast vacations (i.e. bans) freely, visibly, and arbitrarily. If somebody makes a stupid comment, they get asked to leave for a while, and everybody sees it. Simple and unambiguous. It also puts the onus on the user to modify their behavior in a way that lengthy meta-commentary threads about just how bad their comment was tend to not.
One problem with this is the perception that being banned (however temporarily) is a severe punishment reserved for major infractions, and that people might react strongly against that perception. To some extent that's the point: you want to drive away the people unwilling to change. On the other hand, you want to give those who are so willing the reason and opportunity to do so, and I think the occasional "time out" provides that.
It may still be an indelicate instrument for addressing the problem, but I think it's justifiable when the status quo is that known-good people are leaving voluntarily.
What about perhaps a combination of the two ways? Fragmentation and access restriction (lets face it, banning is just complete access restriction)
Those users who are noted as being excessively mean spirited should have to learn to play in a sandbox nicely with others before they're let back into more active areas of the site.
The net effect is perhaps less of a knee jerk negative reaction so that users can eventually learn to contribute again in a positive manner and it keeps the more frequented areas clean again.
Setting aside the theme park idiocy, I'm actually all for limiting bans to 60 days. Go be an asshole in public for a day, then take two months off. Come back, and if you haven't learned your lesson, you get another 60 days to cool off. And yeah, you're on a hair-trigger if you've just come back from a ban.
Reducing assholery by 60/61 seems about as good as banning it 100% to me. I'm even all for letting the Asshole in Chief come back to FB/Twitter -- though of all people he should be able to just start up a new ban-free channel (and watch it be overcome by spammers in a few seconds, because that's what happens when a channel doesn't moderate).
Could be interesting to test a "block user" feature where enough blocks within a time span results in a temp or permanent ban. An inability of new accounts to post for a couple of days, might also curb the drive-by behavior.
Not a gripe but an idea: rather than ban persons from HN for bad behavior, would it possibly be better to "emprison" them, that is, disallow them from posting for awhile and then, after a few days or weeks, permit them to resume posting?
Reason I ask this is that I recently encountered an HN situation where someone who appeared to be a productive member of the HN community was banned from posting because of (truly) poor etiquette, if not outright bad behavior. However, seeing that he had for over a year been a contributing member, I felt that a total ban was heavy-handed and that simply being punished temporarily for a transgression might have served better.
Is anyone familiar with an online forum that merely temporarily punishes transgressors w/o permanently banning them? Does anyone else think banning is sometimes a bit too much punishment?
I reflected on this a bit after seeing your and tptacek's comments. It's an interesting idea but I think it would land too personally again, because it's so specific. When moderators make a specific judgment like "you can post in other threads but not this one", people feel singled out, and that's really what stings.
Also it would leave a lot of surface area for objections, and any changes we make will need to reduce the amount of argument moderators have to get into —it's both time-consuming and psychologically difficult. I think it would probably be cleaner and simpler to say "you've been breaking the site guidelines so you're temporarily banned". The innovation would be the "temporarily" part.
I think in the situations you describe it's much more effective to have some kind of authority in place to discipline people for this kind of behaviour rather than relying on abuse. Especially since it's usually done by trolls for whom the emotional response is the objective. I think a brief "This is in breach of rule X, you have been banned for Y days" combined with locking/deleting the relevant comment, is far more effective at discouraging negative behaviour than angry tirades.
Actually, after thinking about it, I do agree with you on platform-wide permabans, they just encourage trolls to find ways to create throw away accounts.
Timed bans (with exponential increase for reoffenders) or permabans with a process to lift it are better. Then trolls who can be beaten into submission would be, those who can't will get effectively permabanned eventually and public places can be kept one step away from being toxic cesspools they would otherwise turn into.
Humans need intermediate punishments. It's how we work. (Homeostasis and all that.)
Therefore Facebook (etc) ought to provide a very automatic "time-out" system for moderators allowing them to one-click to create a temporary ban (a week, a month) for a user that reinstates that user automatically after that period without further action by the moderator. Automatic tracking of past penalties and auto-escalations (if desired) to harsher punishments up to a ban would be a good idea, too.
A quick display of relevant stats regarding that user would be helpful right then, too; giving you some rough idea of how valuable past contributions by them have been. (Sometimes what looks like a troll is just a fact that few people, even in the field, know.)
Manually managing such a system works but Lord is it a ton of fiddly (and unnecessary) work for the moderator.
One of the advantages of this is that mild penalties can usually make the point with little risk that a bad penalty decision will permanently piss-off a valuable contributor.
> Only when it's clear that they can't or won't do you ban.
I'm saying that's still not a reasonable measure even in that case. Why not an exponential backoff, where the first measure is that they only get one post a day. If they want to be heard they have to be more careful in how they word things and they have more time to think about how it might be received. If they transgress again, then it's upped to every three days, then once a week, then once every other week, and so on. A total ban is the limit of this more nuanced process.
No doubt this feature doesn't exist, so I'm suggesting something like this should be added because I'm not at all a fan of bans. Even this is a stopgap measure used to manage assholes because we don't yet understand what's at the root of asshole behaviour.
Edit: to clarify, I mean the backoff/retry strategy is still not ideal, but an easy first attempt at trying to reframe this as a problem we can maybe address using programming abstractions to inhibit rather than facilitate communication. Most software is focused on reducing barriers to communication, which is why banning is the only recourse, but in cases like this you obviously want to raise barriers to communication in controlled ways so you don't have use the ban hammer.
I was in the unfortunate position of having to ban someone from an online tech support forum of which I was the mod. This was after weeks of myself and other mods trying to resolve the issues with them. Issues like name calling, trying to stir up racial issues, making fun of new users for being noobs, trying to stir up other users against the mods, all that teenage BS (although the person was in their 20s or 30s).
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
I think the problem with what you're suggesting is that it can rapidly devolve the forum into being uncivilized. I do think silent banning is a little bit mean, but if you tell people they've been banned, they just start a new account.
Perhaps new accounts could start off dead until endorsed, and bans could be reversed. A bit like pending comments, but at an account level. It takes away "starting a new account" as a solution to being banned if both accounts have the same (100% dependent on content of posts) likelihood of coming back.
Seems like that’s only for permanent bans. I can’t see anything other than punishment/rehabilitation as the goal for a short term ban. Maybe I’m not thinking it through, but a short term ban doesn’t seem focused on just removing TOS violating material.
As I've suggested elsewhere, I think 1-month to 3-month suspensions are much better than lifetime bans. Suspensions keep followers hanging around the mainstream platform, where you can suggest centrist content to them.
A lifetime ban gets rid of all carrots and all future sticks the platform can offer.
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