A Shadowbanning Counterargument: Pagination Explanation

This is my last blog before my much needed vacation. It’s been a rather stressful week for some reasons I will not get into, since that is not the point of this blog. This blog… is about some rather obnoxious group think I’ve been seeing lately.

But first, I need to explain a concept generally known by developers as pagination.

Part 1: What is Pagination?

You can conceptualize pagination as the splitting up of a query into separate pages. Why would you do this, you may ask? Sure, Google does this with search results, but everything else seems to be that infinite scroll nowadays. Why would you need pagination?

Well, the ubiquitous infinite scroll DOES use a form of pagination. It first requests some arbitrary number of top results for whatever the content is. Then, as you scroll down, it will automatically load a new set and append it to the list. This is why you can usually scroll back up through the previously loaded sections much faster than you can down to new content; it’s been loaded one piece after another.

This is absolutely necessary when exposing large datasets to users. Having massive scrollbars is not good UI or UX design (User Interface or User Experience. Related, but distinct, design practices.), but even more important, load time would be excessive, and get worse with each new piece of content added to the list to be loaded.

Therefore, the front end(the web page you actually see) will only load a reasonable amount of data for you to see. That solves the massive scrolling problem. But to improve load time, you need to also query the database for only the data you need on the backend. Then, when more data is needed, you query to retrieve a number of new results starting from where the previous query ended.

If this sounds like it could get convoluted rather quickly, congratulations! You are correct. One possible pagination error is skipping an entire section of the pagination queries, and another is picking up at the wrong starting point to cut out slivers of data from the feed.

I believe something like this is occurring on the Blogs feed for my channel, and very likely others as well.

Part 2: A Metastasis Experiment

This is something I’ve known about for awhile. Today, in preparation for this blog, I ran some tests. First, I checked for the existence of every entry of my still running Metastasis series. I found that parts 26 through 19 where there, as well as 7 through 1. 18 through 8 seem to be missing.

Now, if I was the suspicious/cynical type, I would suspect this to be censorship of some kind, or at least a grossly prejudicial action against my account. Which… was my immediate reaction, if I’m being honest. But after thinking about it, I realized it might be something wrong with the pagination.

I created a couple test blogs, which, unfortunately, did not produce the results of changing which blogs are missing. I deleted those test blogs, and was surprisingly redirected to this link:

https://www.minds.com/blog/owner

Which I guess is an alternate version of this link when I’m logged in:

https://www.minds.com/blog/RhetoricalHypothetical

This link displayed the missing blogs I just mentioned. I’m not aware of any link to this particular page within the normal Minds UI, so this page might be deprecated at some point. But even without this page, I knew those 18 through 8 parts of Metastasis still existed, as I try to maintain a table of contents. Checking some of the links, those hidden blogs are still completely accessible.

So, this could be construed as an instance of “shadowbanning”. But there are a couple problems. One, Metastasis is just a fiction series I write for fun, it’s not even very popular on Minds. Nothing political, controversial, or even remotely edgy. I don’t even write swear words in this series, the characters use a fictional set of swear words as a part of that disgusting practice known as “wOrlDBuILdinG”. Also, even if they were still trying to shadowban my set of blogs for a still unknown reason, why parts 18 through 8? Seems like the last set you would hide, as finding just one of the latter blogs will give you a link to the full table of contents.

So, a pagination error hiding arbitrary blogs is still my theory. I don’t know the full story or what other blogs might be hidden, but I just don’t care to pour through it to find out. It’s rather clear to me that the error is technical and not targeted.

Part 3: What are the Implications?

The reason I write all of this is because some people are freaking out about perceived censorship. Now, I would like to offer this disclaimer: the existence of a software bug is not proof that censorship is not occurring. I went through that whole spiel to show how something one might construe as censorship could very easily be a bug… especially given every single newsfeed uses a form of pagination, combined with all kinds of tailored filters. But that fact, and the fact that there are other very reasonable explanations for errors, has not stopped multiple people from sounding the alarm about censorship.

https://www.minds.com/ConserveTruth/blog/that-time-minds-wandered-off-into-wealth-redistribution-of-c-897821333878575104

https://www.minds.com/justicett/blog/minds-shadowbanned-975805065251123200

https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/988581477919367168

And these are just ones I’ve seen personally. Now, for all these above claims of shadowbanning specifically, the issue seems to be that NSFW content gets filtered out of other people’s feeds, even when viewing a channel’s blog list directly. But after I just demonstrated the clear issue with the blog newsfeed, is it really so hard to believe this is just a genuine technical error, or an attempt to wrangle the feeds, presenting users with what they actually want to see?

Now, unlike some of my other blogs, this isn’t an attempt to call these people out. I don’t want any censorship, shadowbanning, or some other suppression of free speech. But you really gotta practice some trigger discipline on this issue. If every time some algorithmic funkiness happens you freak out, yell at the support, and threaten to jump ship… you will never get established anywhere, especially not newer platforms that are still very small when compared to juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter. As it is, many people have come to Minds specifically because other places have censored them, and trying to blow the whistle on a scandal that may or may not even exist might get those same people to prematurely jump to another platform, starting over yet again. This is especially stupid to do when we have a staff that, last I checked, will actually RESPOND to questions about why weird things are occurring.

All I’m trying to say is, everyone needs to calm down. If you are going to blow the whistle on censorship, you really need some solid evidence, and you need to give at least a little benefit of the doubt to the staff. I very much doubt that the people complaining about shadowbanning are truly familiar with the possible bugs in database queries and search functionality which might cause similar, but entirely different, effects. I’ve seen some of them, and even fixed some of them, personally, in other projects I’ve had throughout my professional career. Even though I very easily could be wrong about specifics, I can assure you that there is a wide variety of obscure and ridiculous things that can go wrong because someone didn’t properly terminate a string, close a tag, or use left instead of inner join.

In closing: Shadowbanning is intentional. Query errors are unintentional. Don’t assume bad intentions of an individual or group without proper evidence, because that is what SJWs do, which is why everyone hates them.