Shadowbanning: A Crack In The Armor

There is one flaw of shadowbanning: it can't be a perfect isolation chamber. There has to be people or bots interacting with the person in order for it to be real enough to hold. Once a person is deprived of the promise of instant fame and glory, which is a powerful reason to play the social media game, social media becomes a very different place. Instead of an attention casino, shadowbanned social media becomes a tiny village.

Shadowbanned people can build loyalty with those they can reach. And if you shadowban them early on, they won't ever be poisoned by exceeding Dunbar's Number and treating people as a liquid commodity. Shadowbanning builds messiahs while the mainline product builds sociopaths.

See it as two different ways the product shapes mass psychology. Mainline attention addicts use the product as their power-drunk user experience designers intend... but there is no shadowbanned user experience designer. They have no idea what social psychology they are creating. They only see graphs statistics of psychometric that fall short of the intended and marketable data collection points. Basically, Facebook does not know how to sell the shadowbanned experience as a product, so they will put zero effort in treating it as an alternative product experience.

What happens when you can convince people to behave in a manner that drives them into a product experience its owner doesn't treat seriously or can't make profitable, an experience that forces introspection as the banned exhaust all possibilities to secure attention benefits? You create people who know how to see through the very promise social media makes. You make the first layer of critics who want revenge. Casinos only work when people have complete access to them. Shrink the casino, and people see the machine.