This unpopular opinion rarely ever gets posted on the Internet because, obviously, anyone who posts this opinion is automatically presumed to be evading a ban.
I found these two:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/8drf04/reddits_ban_evasion_rule_shouldnt_exist_and_more/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/9wvmkf/ban_evasion_should_be_allowed/
These posts reference Reddit, but this applies to any online community.
These are the reasons why I believe that ban evasion rules usually do more bad than good.
If you disagree, I would happily discuss it. Maybe I can learn something new.
Here are the reasons why rules against ban evasion are counter-productive and may do more damage than good.
Easy excuse to silence criticism
I believe that, next to the new criticism-terminating buzzword “ sealioning” , ban evasioncan be used as an excuse to invalidate all criticism of a user, no matter how legitimate, polite and reasonable the criticism is. Here is an example:
Users are defenseless against moderative tyranny
On the Internet, moderative misconduct is sadly very widespread. Systems of communities (e.g. Reddit) are designed in a way to trust moderators too heavily and leaving them a lot of leeway for downright abusive behaviour (examples)(youtube.com).
The problem is that if a user gets banned because they unluckily caught an abusive, strict (ban-happy) or just bad-mooded moderator, as described here (“The Ban Quicksand”)and here (“the catch-22 of banned users”), creating a new account to reasonably criticize that misbehaving moderator can be stigmatized as ban evasion , thus invalidating the legitimate criticism, even if the original ban was not reasonable in first place.
Although moderators are made from similar human flesh as normal users, on some sites they get massive leeway for tyranny. Here(reddit.com) is how a Wikipedia administrator (you guessed it, it's Bbb23.) got away with years of tyranny against users, for example this humanoid response(archive.vn) to criticism: instantly revoking talk page access of user Aron Manning without one word addressing his reasonable criticism.
Banning innocent users
Here(reddit.com) is a case of all innocent roommates' Reddit accounts getting banned for alleged ban evasion.
This would not have happened if Reddit only suspended accounts that actually misbehaved.
Hereis how Wikipedia's flawed CheckUser system is prone to abuse.
Bad-faith users
In case bad-faith users actually create new accounts to disrupt a site, it would make no difference whether an earlier account of that person has been suspended at any earlier point. Accounts used to disrupt should be suspended regardlessly .
In addition, account creations from that IP address could be temporarily blocked (e.g. for 24 hours, until the disruptor cools down) to allow already registered users to keep using the site normally while those creating new accounts for disruption could be kept out.
Constructive ban evasions
A user who previously got banned might be legitimately interested in constructively contributing to a site, but it would be hard and mentally draining as one user to appeal a ban to a cohort of moderators who are inherently unlikely to lift a ban.
Instead, the user could just create a new account and participate normally and constructively.
If a user on an online user who helps me solve a problem is evading his ban to help me solve my problem, I could not care less that the user has been banned before!
If I have missed any points, please comment.
If you disagree on anything, I would happily have a conversation about it. Like I said, maybe I will learn something new.
Thanks for reading.
(post is archived)