Ask the Mods Important Questions (jk it's politics again)

@Mikey  

 
You made site and policy decisions without even asking everybody what they thought about it?

@Background Pony #FA71  
Not every staff member is active at all times.

@Blossomforth  

 
How many have I downvoted, because I can only think of 3. Why is this one subject being force-filtered and not others? Also it doesn’t seem like the staff can decide what downvoting is supposed to mean. It was removed, then brought back just to tell people you’re not allowed to do so.

@TheDrizzle404  
I’ve downvoted 9 or so, and about 3 of them got undownvoted for some reason. Corrected that once I went to check.
 
I’ve heard people been shadowbanned for one single downvote, others just 5.

@Mikey  
Either this whole thing was conceived and implemented on very short notice or you need to have a serious talk about them even being on staff if they’re not aware of it within a day or two.

Could i have some clarification regarding the issue of the shadowbans please.
 
@Derpy Whooves  

 
@The Frowning Pony  

 
How on earth are there people with “Tens or hundreds of thousands” of downvotes when the BLM tag only has 30 images, and it’s apparently only that tag which is earning shadowbans.  
If there are other tags which are earning such bans that would explain it, but the only other conclusion is that you’re taking into account total downvotes which doesn’t make much sense for such a targeted policy.

@Background Pony #FA71  
I imagine he meant he looked at accounts with a large number of downvotes in total; there are a good many users that really love to hit that down arrow button.
 
Currently we’ve only looked at voting patterns on a few specific tags, regardless of past activity on other tags.

@The Frowning Pony  
Is this policy going to be extended to other images or is it just the BLM tag?  
Any up/down votes on my account tend to be from fat-finger phone browsing, so I’d rather not accidentally fall foul of this without my knowledge.
 
Adding a “You have been shadowbanned due to abuse of downvote, appeal it at…” notice may also be warranted.

@Datte-Before-Dawn  

 
That seems unlikely, no way people were shadowbanned for downvoting.
 
 
@Background Pony #FA71  
This seems reasonable.

@Background Pony #FA71  
This policy is unlikely to continue for long. People have been on edge for months and triply so in the last week, with many taking it as an opportunity to cause unnecessary drama and aggravate people for the sake of it. Hopefully people calm down soon or at least lose the need to antagonize eachother as much.

@I Literally Dont Care What You Want  
Unless there have been significant changes since I left, derpi is incapable of shadow bans.

@The Frowning Pony  
…Why is it such a problem for you guys to say “This is a temporary measure” when doing stuff like this, i said as much to Derpy regarding the BLM policy.  
I assume the issued shadowbans will be removed at the same time as the policy (of issuing shadowbans) itself or are they indefinite?

@Archonix  
That’s what people are calling being banned from viewing and voting specific tags, I’m just re-using that terminology

@Archonix  
People are using the term incorrectly. A shadow ban is where a user’s interactions are faked, only visible to themselves. What has been implemented now is a hard filter on certain tags for a number of users that seem to have extreme issue with the content of those tags yet refuse to filter them and instead downvote their contents. This was our alternative to issuing out bans for violating rule #6.
 
If people feel the hard filter should not have been applied to them they should report their accounts for review.

@The Frowning Pony  
I’d suggest attempting to silence people actually makes it worse. Instead of people freaking out for a little while to get it out of their system they’re kept in limbo. Usually the best course of action is to step back and let people exhaust themselves so everyone can move on.

@The Frowning Pony  
So that finally exists? Neat.

@Background Pony #FA71  
We thought the language of “current events” was clear enough. No, none of this is indefinite, as we hope the current atmosphere of incendiary or trollish image and user activity won’t be.
 
We’ve seen that people will interpret whatever we say however they want, more often than not in the most insidious way possible, if not just outright baffling incorrectly, to create more of a fuss over something that affects a minority of people than we’d see from not making any announcements. If this policy and related feature were to affect even as much as 2% of the active users we would have said something more clearly on the site itself.

@TheDrizzle404  
They’re not exhausting themselves, they’re exhausting and antagonizing other people because they refuse to filter or ignore things they don’t like.

@The Frowning Pony  
Not after a single day, no. Is it not all sides doing the same things?

@The Frowning Pony  
Maybe next time a “We’ll do this for a week and review whether it’s still needed” type sentence on announcements would be prudent, regardless of how many people you think are going to be effected by them the chance of false positives exist.  
It also doesn’t help that this was pushed without warning, initially treated as a bug and the effected people don’t even have a notice that they’ve been punished.  
The fact “People will interpret whatever we say however they want” doesn’t mean you should stop caring about public perception on matters.

Site administration reads too much Orwell.

@Background Pony #6434  
Give it a fucking rest.

@Background Pony #6434  
Who’s doing the 2 minutes hate?

@Background Pony #6434  
We have always been at war with Ponasia.

@Itsthinking  
Offer not valid in sectors M through Q after curfew.