Hellban

The Dead Internet Theory might be true, sort of.

There is a certain web forum called “the orange site” that is (or, at least, when I was relevant in it, was) central to a certain industry, and one that has always been notorious for its morally compromised moderation. It may have been the first to popularize the practice of “hellbanning” users; this means that not only is there no warning or justification for the ban, but that the person is not even notified that the ban exists. The user’s contributions never appear to anyone but him, in the hope that he will perceive his posts as having all been unsuccessful, so he loses interest. A related punishment is “rankban”, whereby the targeted user’s contributions are accepted, but algorithmically penalized so severely as to be presented as unsuccessful, regardless of how many upvotes or engagements actually occur, which tends to achieve a similar effect. We can argue that it shows a lack of wisdom for people to bet their livelihoods or invest their community needs in social media platforms owned by others—I would not, at this point in my life, disagree with such an assessment—but, sadly, a number of people have no choice, especially because the artificial scarcity and competition in our society have gotten to such a point that every decent career requires a national reputation, just to get jobs our parents would have considered third-string fall-back options. At any rate, hellbans and rankbans have become standard practices on most platforms and have led to business failures, psychological collapses, and suicides.

It is always jarring to lose one’s ability to reach others and not know why, and I think this is an experience now common even to those who have never experienced a deliberate ban of any kind. I have noticed on all social media that it is harder for quality content to be found; it is usually buried under mindless, optimized junk and advertisement. There was a time when quality content easily found an audience if enough effort was put forth; this is no longer the case. You can tweet as much as you want, but you only get enough engagement to keep you using the site, unless you buy more reach. In fact, since your posts push down others of yours, you are self-competing. Or, you can whore out your entire career history on LinkedIn and receive apparent interest from bottom-of-the-barrel recruiters, but it’ll never lead to real opportunities. You can write whatever you want online, because almost nobody reads anymore and you’re going to have a hard time accessing those people, because someone else has already figured out where they go. You have freedom of speech, because the people who took away your freedom have made sure nothing you say matters (except to be used against you.)

Today we live in a hellbanned world. You can easily build a web presence of sorts that looks exactly like someone else’s, but unless you’re willing to pay more for exposure than you’re likely to make back—because you’re competing against established brand advertisers, for whom maintenance suffices as success—you won’t get much for it, except possibly a rescinded job offer when a future employer finds out that your side hustle or political involvement exists. You can send emails to anyone, anywhere in the world, but you’ll never acquire the social status it takes to get them read. You can, if you want, apply to five thousand jobs all over the country, but the best-case scenario is that you get some horrid role that can’t be filled internally—the good positions are filled through connections of a kind you probably don’t have. We were promised that the Internet would end the bad old days; instead, it brought them back with technological strength.

I don’t have a solution for this. I still use the Internet, but I can’t shake the knowledge that this whole thing was supposed to be one thing but somehow turned into the complete opposite. I wish I could be more hopeful.