We've ban people and stories on Netscape every day for doing bad stuff. Sock puppetry, group voting, scraping content, being a splog... the list goes on and on.
One thing that's worked well is that when we think we can turn someone around, we ban them for a period of time (think weeks to months). We try to explain to these folks how the system works and how they can be good members and I'm shocked to see how often it works. People stop creating multiple accounts, they stop breaking the middleman rule, and they start acting like good citizens.
In Social News Banning = Education
Recent Posts
- Facebook lifts 5,000 friend limit. (5/09/2008)
- Systems Engineer, Los Angeles (5/09/2008)
- Sheyla Hershey (5/08/2008)
- Help pick the next host of Mahalo Daily (5/08/2008)
- Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, and Marissa Mayer are back as judges for Techcrunch50 (5/07/2008)
Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 1)2. Jason, i've been thinking about this a lot lately as I work in Technology for a rather large K-12 school district in suburban chicago. One of my jobs is to run the content filters, which is more like playing whack-a-mole. I keep having to band social sites like youtube and various other sites just because of inapropriate content. So I totally see your reasons for banning. Education is a huge market that you can't ignore.
Posted at 11:47AM on Oct 13th 2006 by Jeff O'Hara
3. Nick: digg has a different way of dealing with group voting. They want folks to vote in groups (I guess to get the page views), and they are going to lesson the value of votes for people who vote in groups. That's how they deal with it.
The way we deal with it is we have systems that alert us if people are voting in groups. If they do we ask them to get more involved in the community beyond their own stories. If they are involved in other people's stories, commenting, voting, etc. then the group voting is less of an issue.
The problem is if you have 20 folks coming in and only voting for one site.
Frankly, I have the problem at Netscape with some of my Weblogs, Inc. bloggers! I have to remind them that part of being a good citizen on Netscape is being involved in the community beyond your self-interest.
At the end of the day if people put in good stories that solves the whole problem. If the story is good people don't report the group voting because they like the story.
This is all new, and no one has it figured out. We're all learning... right now I'm very happy with the results. Perfect? No. Fair? Yes.
4. Keep fighting the good fight! Let's take care of those good-for-nothings!
Posted at 8:33PM on Oct 13th 2006 by Cameron Kollwitz
5. Good work - at least you're not just blindly banning.
Posted at 9:57AM on Oct 18th 2006 by Emil Stringer
6. For one of the projects that I am currently working on, we have been posting content to Netscape. Now I am an active member of Digg as I like the technology-focused news (although the frontpage articles seem reptitive these days). I'm all for Netscape and the broader audience that is there but working with Netscape is like having big brother sitting there and getting whacked without notice.
When we began submitting content to Netscape, I and the property owner were submitting content. I would vote on stories he submitted that I personall found interesting and I believe vice versa as well. We got banned. In this instance yes reading the FAQ (yeah I was guilty of just clicking next and not reading TOS, FAQ, etc.) we realized that the actions were borderline and I can live with Netscape deciding that it was unacceptable. What was frustrating though is that we did not receive a notice prior to the ban and it was impossible to contact anyone to determine what the issue was.
Today we realize that we've been banned again. Again we have no clue why but all content has been taken down and the account no longer exists. Again I find myself trying to find out why and a way to reach Netscape. After reading this post I suspect that someone decided we had been illegally scraping content. Yes the vast majority of our content is syndicated. But all the content is legal--we pay and are licensed for all the syndicated content we use.
So yes I agree its great if someone isn't blindly banning. But the reality is that it sure feels like Netscape is blindly banning, or at least not confirming the situation. Summary judgement sucks and it would be appreciated if you could give respective parties the opportunity to confirm the issue prior to any action. And on that note is there anybody we can contact at Netscape to resolve the current issue?
Thanks
Posted at 8:48PM on Oct 19th 2006 by takedown
7. continued... As a sidenote I have to say that we try specifically not to obfuscated any of our actions to cheat the system. It is readily apparent which Netscape user IDs are associated with the content.
Maybe this was a bad idea, because this has gotten us flagged twice now. Yet there are a number of posters in similar subject areas for which we strongly suspect coordinated voting (with a larger team) and also syndicate content.
Posted at 8:53PM on Oct 19th 2006 by takedown
Add your comments
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.
1. Is there a reason you are so anti-group voting/gaming, yet you clearly did/do that exact thing on digg? Not to mention many middleman-like posts.
Posted at 8:00AM on Oct 13th 2006 by Nick